Fifty-seven of the 58 cities received COPS grants during the duration of this study. The Inspector General audited 35 of the 57 COPS-funded cities.[54] Twenty-nine of the 35 audits found grantee deficiencies in complying with grant conditions.[55]
Sixteen of the 35 audits indicated that the grantees did not comply with the hiring grant conditions.[56] The problems ranged from supplanting to spending the hiring grants on activities not allowed under the grant conditions. Nine of the police departments supplanted hiring grants for local funds. Dallas, Louisville, and Newark actually reduced their force sizes after receiving grants to hire additional officers. For example, instead of hiring 249 new officers, Newark reduced its police force by 142 officers from fiscal years 1996 to 1997.
Instead of downsizing, other audits indicate that six police departments supplanted by failing to hire the required number of additional officers.[57] For example, Atlanta, El Paso, and Sacramento appear to have supplanted the most. Atlanta supplanted over $5.1 million in hiring grants. After receiving grants to hire 231 additional police officers, El Paso failed to hire the additional number of officers required by the grant. Sacramento used over $3.9 million in hiring grants to retain officers previously funded through earlier grants.
The Inspector General also found problems with the implementation of MORE grants. Nineteen of the 35 audits indicated that grantees failed to comply with the conditions of the MORE grants.[58] According to congressional testimony by Inspector General Glenn Fine, MORE grants have the highest risk for abuse of the COPS grants, and grantees rarely redeployed the required number of officers from administrative tasks to community policing.[59]
Sixteen of the audits found that MORE grantees either did not redeploy officers to community policing or could not provide documentation demonstrating redeployment.[60] In Washington, D.C., the police department was awarded almost $11 million in MORE grants to hire 56 civilians and redeploy 521.4 officers through technology purchases. However, when the Office of Inspector General asked for a list of officers redeployed, the list included only 53 officers—one officer was deceased, 10 officers were retired, and 13 no longer worked for the police department.
COPS appears to have done little to resolve the misuse of the grants. According to Inspector General Fine, "in many cases, the response to our findings was a paper exercise and?the COPS program did not take sufficient action to either bring the grantee in compliance, to offset the funds, to recoup the funds or to waive the funds."[61] Fine testified that COPS did not pay enough attention to ensure adherence to the grant requirements, including the hiring of officers, retaining officers, and tracking the redeployment of officers.[62] According to the Office of Inspector General audits and congressional testimony, the lack of oversight practiced by COPS created inadequate incentives for local-level compliance with grant conditions.
There appears to be ample evidence that the grantees frequently failed to follow the conditions of the hiring and MORE grants. The acceptance of COPS grants by police departments does not necessarily mean that community policing was implemented successfully.[63] The misuse of the hiring grants may explain why the grants produced negative returns when the deterrence effects were monetized. Improving the implementation of the hiring and MORE grants through increased monitoring by COPS may enhance the effectiveness of the program.
Other studies have found that supplanting may have occurred with the hiring grants. Based on an analysis of approximately 12,000 police departments, one study found that every COPS-funded officer position awarded through the hiring grants in a particular year resulted in an increase of 0.73 officers in the following year.[64] This finding indicates that supplanting may have occurred. Nationally, the University of Maryland study found that for every COPS-funded position, grantees increased their officer levels by 0.69 officers. For cities with populations over 250,000, police departments increased their officer levels by 0.95 officers for every COPS-funded position.[65] Nationally, the GAO estimates that every $25,000 in hiring grant spending resulted in 0.57 additional officers. However, the hiring grants did not have a statistically significant relationship with officer levels in cities with populations over 150,000.[66]
Effectiveness of Deploying Experienced Officers. Compared to the hiring grant findings, the MORE grant findings suggest that the number of officers deployed may be less important than the quality of the officers deployed. While the efficiency gains resulting from the MORE grants are uncertain, the grants may have allowed for more experienced officers to spend less time performing administrative tasks and more time engaged in crime-fighting activities. In addition, paying experienced officers to work overtime may be more effective than hiring new officers. Thus, putting more seasoned officers on the beat will likely have a larger impact than putting newly hired, inexperienced officers on the street.
Ineffectiveness of Local Police Expenditures. Countering the hypotheses, police expenditures appear to produce little, if any, deterrent effect. Police expenditures deterred only auto thefts. Two explanations have been proposed for why increasing police resources will not necessarily deter crime.
The first theory, which was originally offered by Professor Lawrence Sherman of the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that increasing police resources without regard to focusing on risk factors may not be successful in reducing crime.[67] After reviewing evaluations of various police strategies to reduce crime, Professor Lawrence Sherman and Professor John E. Eck of the University of Cincinnati concluded that the more focused the police are on risk factors, the more likely it is that crime will be prevented.[68] Activities such as proactive arrests and problem solving in high-crime hot spots are more likely to reduce crime than is hiring additional police officers without regard to how they are deployed.[69] The number of police deployed and the level of expenditures may be less important in reducing crime than the specific tasks assigned to police officers. Deterring crime is likely to depend more on deploying officers where serious crime is concentrated and at times when the probability of occurrence is high.[70]
Second, the use of aggregate local police expenditures may not be the best variable to measure the deterrent effect of the police. The deterrent effect of police expenditures may be clouded when the variable includes administrative and other expenditures not directly associated with crime control activities that cannot plausibly be considered to reduce crime (e.g., office supplies).
Recent Changes in the COPS Grants. This evaluation analyzed the effect of COPS grants during the 1990s. Since then, the COPS program has gone through substantial changes. During the last few years of the Clinton Administration, many of the innovative grant programs were discontinued. Several of these grant programs were considered demonstration or pilot projects, so they were never viewed as long-term projects. While the innovative grants produced the greatest benefits when the impacts are monetized, these grants did not generate enough political support to become permanent.
During the current Bush Administration, the COPS program has gone through further changes. Most notable are three changes.
First, after several years of steadily declining appropriations from highs of over $1 billion during the Clinton Administration, no new funds were appropriated for the hiring grants in fiscal year 2006.
Second, the MORE grants, renamed technology grants, no longer require grantees to use the funding to redeploy officers from administrative tasks to community policing.
Third, instead of the original competitive application process, the technology grants are now awarded through congressional earmarks. Limiting the MORE grants to earmarks may negate the deterrent effect found in this evaluation.
Conclusion
A possible source of bias in estimating the effect of police on crime is the potential endogenous or simultaneous relationship between police force size and crime rates. Regression analyses of the effects of criminal justice policies are often plagued by simultaneity.
Under regression modeling for this evaluation, police expenditures did not have an endogenous relationship with crime rates. However, when 2SLS modeling was estimated, fire department expenditures fulfilled the identification restriction requirements of an instrumental variable. The identification of fire department expenditures as a valid instrumental variable is an important contribution to the literature estimating the relationship between police and crime because instruments that are correlated with both crime and police force size can cause 2SLS estimates to be seriously in error.
The results of this study indicate that COPS grants awarded to large cities did not stimulate local spending and that the cities may have used the grants to supplant local police expenditures. This finding is supported by U.S. Department of Justice Office of Inspector General audits of COPS grants.
Whether or not community policing is an effective crime reduction strategy, this evaluation found that federal funding for community policing was associated with small reductions in crime in large cities. However, the monetary impacts produced by the three grants are not equal. The innovative and MORE grants produced positive net benefits, while the hiring grants produced negative returns. A stronger emphasis on oversight by COPS may improve on the effectiveness of the grants.
David B. Muhlhausen, Ph.D., is Senior Policy Analyst in the Center for Data Analysis at The Heritage Foundation.
Appendix
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