By Jocelyn Bogen
August 8, 2005

The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services within the Department of Justice was created in 1994 with the passage that year of the Public Safety Partnership and Community Policing Act of 1994, Title 1 of the violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA). It has supported the addition of 100,000 community policing officers, it has provided funds for new technology and equipment, and it has promoted innovative approaches to fighting crime. In the years since the COPS Office was created, The U.S. Conference of Mayors has actively encouraged the adoption and refinement of community policing strategies and the integration of community policing with other local government activities.

A new General Accountability Office (GAO) Interim Report on the Effects of COPS Funds on the Decline in Crime in the 1990s concludes that COPS hiring grants help reduce crime.

Some of the highlights of the GAO report were:

• Using COPS hiring grants as a statistical link between the change in the number of sworn officers and the change in crime, researchers estimated that COPS-funded increases in sworn officers per capita were associated with declines in the rates of total index crimes, violent crimes and property crimes in the sample of agencies serving populations of 10,000 or more persons;

• The analysis of the total effect of COPS grant expenditures on crime rates depended on the level of all COPS grant expenditures in a given year; and

• In 1998 through 2000 – the three highest years of COPS expenditures – researchers estimated that COPS expenditures were responsible for an increase in the number of sworn officers per capita of about three percent above the levels that would have been expected without the funds.

The COPS report was conducted by researchers at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, COPS and Southwest Texas State University. Researchers created and analyzed data from 13,133 local law enforcement agencies that had reported crime data for at least one year during the years from 1990 through 2001.

Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr. (DE) recently issued a letter in support of the report. “I don’t recall a GAO report that is so positive regarding the effectiveness of any government program,” wrote Biden. “Rather than eliminating this program which is the path this administration is pushing us to go, we should listen to our state and local law enforcement officials and the evidence and enthusiastically support it,” he added.