Clinton’s Laptops = COPS Fraud
By James Bovard American Spectator
One of President Clinton’s favorite boasts is that he
put 100,000
new cops on the streets. Clinton claimed in 1994 that
putting more
cops on the street would make Americans “freer from fear”
and that
“there is simply no better crime-fighting tool to be found”
than
multiplying the number of government employees packing heat.
Vice
President Al Gore mentions the cop-hiring binge often,
declaring
earlier this year: “We’re putting 100,000 new police on our
streets!
More Americans are safer!”
The “new cops” initiative is administered by the
Department of
Justice’s Community Oriented Policing Service (COPS)
program. But,
despite $9 billion in federal spending, the COPS 100,000 new
police
claim is another Washington fraud. “Voodoo math” was how one
Florida police chief characterized the Clinton
administration’s success
claims.
Clinton’s “new cops” are often nothing more than
federally paid
purchases of laptop computers. In Little Rock, Arkansas, 40
of the 82
“new cops” are actually “equivalents in technology”–new
cops
“created” by claiming labor savings as a result of purchases
of laptop
computers and other equipment.
A 1999 Department of Justice Inspector General (IG)
report
concluded that more than 40,000 of the 100,000 “new cops”
are
actually “equivalents.” The premise being that the use of
new
technology or civilian paper-pushers, by saving time, are
equivalent to
actually hiring additional law enforcement officers. Such
grants have
their own acronym: MORE, for Making Officer Redeployment
Effective.
As usual, the acronym has no relation to how the
program actually
operates. Seventy-eight percent of police departments that
receive
MORE grants can provide no evidence that federal aid
actually led to
more cops on the street, according to the IG. Almost half of
police
departments simply substitute federal funds for local
spending.
Unfortunately, some locales wish that the program paid
for nothing
but laptops. Residents in Johnstown, Ohio, are threatening
to abolish
the local police department, as the Chicago Tribune
reported, because
the addition of COPS officers led to the “harassment of
average
citizens. Residents say that officers stop motorists on any
pretext,
including having too much snow or rust on a license plate.”
Potsdam,
Ohio, a village of 250, received federal money to hire 11
cops. After
repeated crackdowns, local aldermen voted to suspend the
entire police
department. In tiny Lavon, Texas, COPS money paid to hire a
police
lieutenant who “turned the police department into a criminal
enterprise, using his powers to commit extortion, marijuana
distribution, robbery and mail fraud,” as the Wall Street
Journal
reported. (The lieutenant received nine years in prison for
his
achievements.)
Before COPS, Olympian Village, Missouri, had no police
force;
after receiving a federal grant, the town hired five cops.
To raise
money for the local government, the police busied themselves
setting
up speed traps. The new police chief endeared himself to
townspeople
by attacking a resident whose lawn had overgrown-the
resident was
kicked in the face so hard, the Journal noted, that a bone
just below the
eye was broken. Townspeople appealed to Robert Wilkins, the
chief
prosecutor of Jefferson County, Missouri, to investigate the
wayward
cops. Wilkins concluded, “I find it positively frightening
that the
Justice Department would give money to such people.”
The Justice Department has little idea how the program
is actually
operating because 94 percent of police departments don’t
bother
submitting mandatory financial status reports or submit the
reports
late. The feds make no effort to verify claims of new hires.
Nassau
County, New York received $26 million and was credited with
hiring
327 new cops; an IG audit found that the county actually
reduced its
police force by 218 officers, in spite of the grant. As
Kristen Mahoney,
who worked in the federal program during its launch stage,
observed:
“The COPS office started off on a wing and a prayer. They
threw us
into it and said that we need to spend a billion dollars by
the end of the
year.”
Al Gore, as he reiterated at the Democratic National
Convention,
will continue the efforts of the Clinton administration by
building on
the “success” of the original COPS program. The result: a
new “21st
Century Crime Bill” that promises to spend an additional $6
billion to
hire another 50,000 cops by 2005. This is bad news for
people who
don’t enjoy being kicked in the face, but great news for
laptop
manufacturers.