Title: National Evaluation of the COPS Program Title I of the 1994 Crime Act.
Series: Research Report
Authors: Jeffrey A. Roth, Joseph F. Ryan, Stephen J. Gaffigan, Christopher S.
Koper, Mark H. Moore, Janice A. Roehl, Calvin C. Johnson, Gretchen E.
Moore, Ruth M. White, Michael E. Buerger, Elizabeth A. Langston, David
Thacher
Published: National Institute of Justice, August 2000
Subject: Law Enforcement; Community policing; Problem-oriented policing;
Program Evaluation
335 pages
912,000 bytes

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National Evaluation of the COPS Program--Title I of the 1994 Crime Act

Research Report

U.S. Department of Justice
Office of Justice Programs
810 Seventh Street N.W.
Washington, DC 20531

Janet Reno
Attorney General

Daniel Marcus
Acting Associate Attorney General

Mary Lou Leary
Acting Assistant Attorney General

Julie E. Samuels
Acting Director, National Institute of Justice

Office of Justice Programs
World Wide Web Site
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov

National Institute of Justice
World Wide Web Site 
http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij

---------------------------

National Evaluation of the COPS Program--Title I of the 1994 Crime Act

by

Jeffrey A. Roth, Joseph F. Ryan, Stephen J. Gaffigan, Christopher S. Koper,
Mark H. Moore, Janice A. Roehl, Calvin C. Johnson, Gretchen E. Moore,
Ruth M. White, Michael E. Buerger, Elizabeth A. Langston, David Thacher

with

Catherine Coles, Francis X. Hartmann, Daryl Herrschaft, Edward R. Maguire, 
Peter Sheingold, and Mary K. Shelley 

Co-principal Investigators

Jeffrey A. Roth
Joseph F. Ryan

August 2000
NCJ 183643

---------------------------

National Institute of Justice

Julie E. Samuels
Acting Director

Steven M. Edwards
Program Manager

This evaluation was supported, with funds transferred from the Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services, under an award (number 95-IJ-CX-
0073) to the Urban Institute by the National Institute of Justice, Office of
Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice. Findings and conclusions of the
research reported here are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect
the official position or policies of the U.S. Department of Justice. The authors'
views should not be attributed to the Urban Institute, its trustees, or its funders.

The National Institute of Justice is a component of the Office of Justice
Programs, which also includes the Bureau of Justice Assistance, the Bureau of
Justice Statistics, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, and
the Office for Victims of Crime.

---------------------------

Foreword

Title I of the 1994 Crime Act (Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement
Act) encouraged local and State law enforcement agencies to pursue two
objectives simultaneously: increase the number of sworn officers on the street
and adopt community policing. Signed into law on September 13, 1994, the
legislation authorized nearly $9 billion over 6 years to achieve those objectives. 

Soon after the signing of the Crime Act legislation, the U.S. Department of
Justice (DOJ) created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
(COPS) to administer the new grant program and fulfill the mandated
objectives of Title I. 

The Act also authorized funds for the Attorney General to initiate a national
evaluation of what soon became known as the COPS program. The National
Institute of Justice (NIJ)--the primary research and development arm of DOJ--
issued a solicitation requesting proposals from organizations desiring to
compete for the task.

On the basis of a competitive process, NIJ awarded the grant to the Urban
Institute, which embarked on a series of national telephone surveys, site visits,
case studies, and other data collection efforts focusing on the COPS program.
The data and findings presented in this report represent the results of the
independent evaluation conducted by the Urban Institute. 

This Research Report presents evaluation findings based primarily on the first 4
years of the COPS program, but includes several projections up to 2003.
Analyses of data collected in mid-2000 are under way and may result in
refinements of some findings. 

In addition to the national evaluation, NIJ has awarded several grants to
researchers for jurisdiction-specific studies focusing on transitions to community
policing and on other related issues.

Julie E. Samuels
Acting Director
National Institute of Justice

---------------------------

Acknowledgments 

This evaluation combines the work of many people. In such a joint enterprise,
fairly recognizing the credit and responsibility that each contributor is due is no
easy task.

The list of coauthors on the title page is ordered to identify the two co-principal
investigators, followed by alphabetical lists of: four lead authors of chapters; the
leader and two members of an analysis team whose work permeates most of
the report; three coauthors of at least one chapter; and six colleagues whose
findings, insights, databases, or analyses helped make this volume what it is.

Three coauthors--Buerger, Langston, and Roehl--led programmatic assessment
teams that generated rich reports based on site visits to 30 COPS grantee
agencies. Other leaders and members of site teams were Thomas Cowper,
Mark Cunniff, Lawrence Fetters, Jack Greene, Blaine Liner, Ray Manus,
Michael Maxfield, Edmund McGarrell, Alberto Melis, Kevin Reeves, William
Rehm, Roger Rokicki, and Dennis Rosenbaum. We are grateful to all of them
and to the chief executives and staff, too numerous to mention here, of the 30
agencies that hosted our teams, answered their questions, and reviewed their
draft reports.

Three more coauthors--Coles, Sheinbaum, and Thacher--also served double
duty, by writing case studies of organizational change in 10 COPS grantee
agencies, under the direction of Mark Moore and Francis Hartmann. We are
grateful to them and to the chiefs and staff of those 10 agencies.

We owe thanks to our colleagues at the National Opinion Research Center
(NORC), who conducted three waves of national law enforcement agency
surveys. Cathy Haggerty directed Wave 1; Alma Kuby and Laurie Imhof
directed Waves 2 and 3; and Phil Panczuk did the complex programming
needed for computer-assisted telephone interviewing at all three waves. We are
grateful to the NORC interviewing teams for their persistence and accuracy,
and to the 1,724 law enforcement chief executives and designees who
answered their questions.

At the Urban Institute, John Roman and Mary Norris Spence capably managed
several data collection operations. O. Jay Arwood produced the text, tables,
and figures for three complete drafts of this report; he displayed creativity,
accuracy, and grace under pressure well beyond the call of duty. He, Diana
Dandridge, Joyce Sparrow, and Nicole Brewer provided the administrative
support needed throughout this complex project.

The COPS Office supported us in every way that an evaluator has a right to
expect: providing background information, answering our questions, providing
manual and automated files, and constructively challenging our interim findings
as needed. Directors Joseph Brann and Thomas Frazier created a cordial
climate within which others--especially Pam Cammarata, Charlotte Grzebian,
Dave Hayeslip, Gil Kerlikowske, Nina Pozgar, Ellen Scrivner, Benjamin
Tucker, and Craig Uchida--arranged or provided whatever assistance we
requested.

Joseph Koons extracted and explained the COPS Office grants management
data that we needed to study grantees. Cynthia Schwimer provided financial
data from the Office of Justice Program's Office of the Comptroller. Weldon
Kennedy and Brian Reaves provided datasets from the Federal Bureau of
Investigation and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, respectively, that we needed
to construct the sample frame for nongrantees.

We are grateful to the National Institute of Justice not only for the opportunity
to conduct this study, but also for protecting the study's independence,
providing background information, and editing the report. Providing support
throughout the entire project were Jeremy Travis, former NIJ Director; Sally
Hillsman and Tom Feucht, Director and Deputy Director, respectively, NIJ
Office of Research and Evaluation; and Steve Edwards, Program Manager.
Acting NIJ Director Julie Samuels provided helpful comments and background
information in the project's final stages. We also wish to thank four anonymous
peer reviewers, courtesy NIJ; their comments greatly improved the report and
we appreciate them.

We hope that all these contributors consider the final product worthy of their
efforts. Responsibility rests with us for any errors or omissions that remain
despite the valuable assistance received.

---------------------------

Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgments

Chapter 1. Overview
The National Evaluation
The COPS Program and Its Roots
COPS Application Decisions
Distribution of COPS Funds
Officer Hiring, Deployment, and Retention Planning
MORE Awards and Projected Productivity Gains
COPS Effects on Policing Levels
COPS and the Style of American Policing
Measures of Success

Chapter 2. Origins and Objectives of the COPS Program
The Evolution of a Presidential Initiative
From Police Reforms to Community Policing
The 1994 Crime Act
Planning and Launching the COPS Program
Pursuing Program Objectives
Evaluation Questions
Notes
References

Chapter 3. The Flow of COPS Funds
Overview of Findings
The Terms of COPS Grants
Agencies' Application and Withdrawal Decisions
The Flow of COPS Funds
Coordination of Multiple Grants for Community Policing
Grantees as Customers
From COPS Office Grant Decisions to Funds Expended
Notes

Chapter 4. Using COPS Resources
Overview of Findings
Hiring Grants: Recruiting, Training, and Deployment
Officer Retention and Redeployment
Implementing COPS MORE
Notes
References
Appendix 4-A. Implementing MORE-Funded Mobile Computing Technology

Chapter 5. Putting 100,000 Officers on the Street: Progress as of 1998 and
Preliminary Projections Through 2003
Summary of Interim Estimates
Hiring Grants
MORE Grants
Projecting the Course of the First 100,000 Officers Awarded Through COPS
Notes
References
Appendix 5-A. Variances and Confidence Intervals for Estimated Ratios and
Proportions

Chapter 6. COPS and the Nature of Policing
Data Sources and Samples
Defining Community Policing
Partnerships
Problem Solving: Background
Prevention
Organizational Changes in Support of Community Policing
COPS and Community Policing: Conclusions
Notes
References
Appendix 6-A. Policing Tactics Checklist
Appendix 6-B. Estimation Models for Assessing Tactic-Specific Differences
Between COPS-Funded and Nonfunded Agencies

Chapter 7. COPS Grants, Leadership, and Transitions to Community Policing
The Methodology of the Study
Measuring the Change Toward Community Policing
Accounting for High Levels of Achievement and Rapid Change: The Role of the
Context and Environment
Accounting for High Levels of Achievement: The Role of Leadership
Conclusions
Notes
Appendix 7-A. Empirical Methods

Methodological Appendix
Survey Objectives
The Sample Frame and the National Law Enforcement Agency List
Sample Strata and Designed Sampling Fractions
Survey Completion Rates
Weights and Sampling Errors: Accounting for Multiple Selection Probabilities
Notes

About the Authors

---------------------------

Tables

Table 1-1. Estimates of COPS Impact on Level of U.S. Policing

Table 3-1. Discounted COPS-Supported Share of Officers' Discounted Life
Cycle Costs

Table 3-2. Participation of Stakeholders in COPS Application Process by
Agency Size and Type

Table 3-3. Prevalence of "Frequent" Indicators of Community Support for
Police, by COPS Funding Status, 1996

Table 3-4. Reasons for Nonapplication, Wave 1 and Wave 3, Ranked in
Order of Mentions

Table 3-5. COPS Grant Status of Agencies, by Jurisdiction Size, Eligibility,
Program, and Application Status, 1995-97 (Cumulative)

Table 3-6. Estimated Award Distribution by Agency Type and Year
(Cumulative in Millions)

Table 3-7. Distribution of COPS Funds for All Agency Types and for
Local/County Agencies

Table 3-8. Regional Distribution of COPS Hiring and MORE Grants and
Funds Through 1997

Table 3-9. Regional Distribution of Grants to Core City and Other Grantees,
Cumulative Through 1997

Table 3-10. COPS Grantees' Use of Non-COPS Funds for Community
Policing

Table 3-11a. Accepted Grant Applications and Sum of Awards and
Officer-Equivalents (Cumulative Through 1995)

Table 3-11b. Accepted Grant Applications and Sum of Awards and
Officer-Equivalents (Cumulative Through 1996)

Table 3-11c. Accepted Grant Applications and Sum of Awards and
Officer-Equivalents (Cumulative Through 1997)

Table 3-12. Elapsed Time in Processing COPS Grant Applications, by Stage

Table 3-13. COPS Grant Obligations and Debits by Program Selection and
Year (Cumulative)

Table 4-1. 1996 Status of FAST/AHEAD Officers Funded in 1995

Table 4-2. Time From Award Obligation to Hiring for 1995 FAST and
AHEAD Grantees (Agencies That Had Hired Officers as of Fall 1996):
Cumulative Percentages Hiring Within Selected Time Frames

Table 4-3. Types of Training for COPS-Funded Officers (FAST and AHEAD
Grantees)

Table 4-4. Time From Hiring to Hitting the Street: Cumulative Percentages of
Officers Hitting the Street Within Selected Time Frames (FAST and AHEAD
Grantees)

Table 4-5. Community Policing Deployment Strategies, 1996 (FAST and
AHEAD Grantees)

Table 4-6. Community Policing Deployment Strategies, 1998 (Medium and
Large Municipal/County Hiring Grantees, n=272)

Table 4-7. Selection, Training, and Deployment Status of Redeployed Officers
(FAST and AHEAD Grantees), 1996

Table 4-8. Training for Redeployed Officers (FAST and AHEAD Grantees)

Table 4-9. Share of COPS-Funded Officers Still With the Agency by Number
of Officers Funded

Table 4-10. Expectations About Postgrant Retention

Table 4-11. Primary Activities of COPS-Funded Officers

Table 4-12. Community Policing Activities: Reported Share of COPS Officers'
Time

Table 4-13. Community Policing Delivery Structure and Reported Share of
Officers' Time Spent on Routine Patrol

Table 4-14. Community Policing Delivery Structure and Reported Share of
Officers' Time "Squeezing in Proactive Work as Time Permits"

Table 4-15. Accumulated MORE and Hiring Grant Awards by Size (COPS
Accepted Local/County Agencies, 1996)

Table 4-16. Distribution of MORE and Hiring Grants for 1996, 1997, and
1998

Table 4-17. Technology Types Acquired by Local/County MORE Grantees,
1996 and 1998

Table 4-18. Projected FTEs, by Type of Technology, From MORE Grants
Through June 1998

Table 4-19. Projected and Anticipated FTEs

Table 4-20. Percentage of Agencies Reporting Time Savings From Operational
Technology, 1998, by Status of Time Measurement System

Table 4-21. Percentage of MORE Technology Grantees Reporting
Unexpected Cost, by Implementation Status

Table 4-22. Percentage of Grantees Creating or Expanding Civilian Positions

Table 4-23. Percentage of Agencies Reporting That Civilians Saved Sworn
Officers' Time by Whether or Not a Measurement System Is in Place

Table 5-1. Estimates of COPS Impact on Level of U.S. Policing

Table 5-2. Wave 3 Survey Estimates and 95-Percent Confidence Bounds for
COPS Officers Hired and on Assignment by June 1998 (Expressed in
Parentheses as a Proportion of Approved Officers)

Table 5-3. Agencies With Consistent UCR Reporting on Sworn Force Levels,
1989-96

Table 5-4. Actual Changes in Sworn Officers by Department Type (Agencies
With Employment Data for Every Year)

Table 5-5. Percentage Changes in Sworn Officers by Department Type
(Agencies With Employment Data for Every Year)

Table 5-6. OLS Estimates of the Impact of COPS Hiring Awards (1994-95)
on National Net Changes in Police Staffing Through 1996, Controlling for
1991-96 Trends in Police Staffing (N=61,284)

Table 5-7. Wave 3 Survey Estimates and 95-Percent Confidence Bounds for
COPS-Funded Officers Recruited From Other Agencies (Expressed in
Parentheses as a Proportion of Approved Officers)

Table 5-8. Percentage of COPS Officers Expected to Be Retained After Grant
Expiration, Based on Wave 3 Survey Results for Pre-1998 Grants (Number of
Pre-1998 Officers Expected to Be Retained in Parentheses)

Table 5-9. Wave 3 Survey Estimates and 95-Percent Confidence Bounds for
FTEs Redeployed With MORE Civilian and Technology Grants as of June
1998 (Expressed in Parentheses as the Ratio of Redeployed to Approved
FTEs)

Table 5-10. Wave 3 Survey Estimates and 95-Percent Confidence Bounds for
Eventual Productivity Increases Expected From COPS MORE Grants
Awarded Through June 1998, Expressed as a % of Awarded FTEs
(Redeployments Expected From Awards Through June 1998 in Parentheses)

Table 6-1. Law Enforcement Agencies Visited, by Type and Population of the
Jurisdiction Served

Table 6-2. Law Enforcement Agencies Visited, by Approximate Start Date of
Community Policing and Type and Population of the Jurisdiction Served

Table 6-3. Pre- and Post-1995 Implementation of Community Policing
Tactics--Reported Relationship to COPS Grants for Large Local/County
Funded Agencies Only

Table 6-4. Pre-1995 and 1998 Partnership Building Tactics Implementation,
Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-5. Partnership Building Tactics Implementation (Pre-1995, by 1998,
and Net Percentage Change), Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-6. COPS Impact on "Newly" (Post-1995) Implemented Partnership
Building Tactics, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-7. COPS Impact on "Old" (Pre-1995) Implemented Partnership
Building Tactics, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-8. Pre-1995 and 1998 Problem-Solving Tactics Implementation,
Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-9. Problem-Solving Tactics Implementation (Pre-1995, by 1998, and
Net Percentage Change), Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-10. COPS Impact on "Newly" (Post-1995) Implemented
Problem-Solving Tactics, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-11. COPS Impact on "Old" (Pre-1995) Implemented
Problem-Solving Tactics, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-12. Pre-1995 and 1998 Prevention Program Tactics Implementation,
Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-13. Prevention Program Tactics Implementation (Pre-1995, by 1998,
and Net Percentage Change), Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-14. COPS Impact on "Newly" (Post-1995) Implemented Prevention
Program Tactics, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-15. COPS Impact on "Old" (Pre-1995) Implemented Prevention
Program Tactics, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-16. Pre-1995 and 1998 Supportive Organizational Changes, Large
Local/County Agencies

Table 6-17. Supportive Organizational Change Implementation (Pre-1995, by
1998, and Net Percentage Change), Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-18. COPS Impact on "Newly" (Post-1995) Implemented Supportive
Organizational Changes, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 6-19. COPS Impact on "Old" (Pre-1995) Supportive Organizational
Changes, Large Local/County Agencies

Table 7-1. Levels of Community Policing (Circa 1997), Changes in Community
Policing (1990-97), Preliminary Assessments

Table 7-2. Initial Context of Organization (Circa 1990)

Table MA-1. Agencies in Grantee Component of Sampling Frame

Table MA-2. Distribution of Agencies in the Master List and Sampling Frame,
by Non-COPS Data Source

Table MA-3. Number of Ineligibles From Each Source

Table MA-4. Sampling Frame by Funding/Program Status and Population
Category

Table MA-5. Sampled Agencies by Funding/Program Status and Population
Category

Table MA-6. Designed Sampling Fraction by Funding/Program Status and
Population Category

Table MA-7. Wave 1 Response Rates (Percent), by Funding/Program Status
and Population Category

Table MA-8. First-Time UHP and MORE Mobile Computer Grantees, by
Population Category

Table MA-9. Wave 2 Sampled Agencies, by Program Status and Population
Category

Table MA-10. Wave 2 Response Rates (Percent), by Grant Program and
Population Category

Table MA-11. Wave 3 Sampled Municipal and County Police Agencies, by
Funding/Program Status and Population Category

Table MA-12. Wave 3 Response Rates (Percent), by Funding/Program Status
and Population Category

Figures

Figure 1-1. Logic Model

Figure 3-1. Reasons for Nonapplication for 1995 COPS Grants

Figure 3-2. Reasons for Withdrawal From 1995 COPS Grants

Figure 3-3. Agencies Accepted for COPS Programs by Jurisdiction Size
(Cumulative Totals)

Figure 3-4. Accepted Agencies by Number of Grant Applications Accepted,
Size, and Year (Cumulative)

Figure 3-5. Total COPS Grant Awards, by Programs Through 1997 ($3.47
Billion Total)

Figure 3-6. Estimated Total Award Distribution by Number of Grant
Applications Accepted, Jurisdiction Size, and Year (Cumulative)

Figure 3-7. Estimated MORE Award Distribution by Number of Grant
Applications Accepted, Jurisdiction Size, and Year (Cumulative)

Figure 3-8. Concentration of COPS Grant Awards Through 1998

Figure 3-9. Percentage of Eligible Agencies Receiving One or More COPS
Grants, by Region

Figure 3-10. Dollar Amount of COPS Awards per 10,000 Residents, by
Region

Figure 3-11. COPS Awards per 1,000 Index Crimes, by Region

Figure 3-12. Customer Satisfaction: 1998, Large Local/County Grantee
Agencies

Figure 3-13. Future Intentions of Local/County Grantees

Figure 3-14. Factors Described as "Very Important" Influences on Future
Application Decisions

Figure 4-1. Reported Hiring and Deployment Status of COPS-Funded
Officers, 1998 (Wave 3 Large Local/County Agencies)

Figure 4-2. Expected Dates All Officers Will Be on Assignment for Those
Officers Not Already on Assignment (Wave 3, Weighted, Large Local/County
Agencies, June 1998)

Figure 4-3. Reported Selection and Redeployment Status of Backfilled
Community Police Officers, 1998 (Wave 3 Large Local/County Agencies, June
1998)

Figure 4-4. Expected Dates All Redeployed Officers Will Be in Community
Policing Assignments, for Those Officers Who Have Not Begun Their Duties
(Wave 3 Local/County Agencies, June 1998)

Figure 4-5. Planned Use of Time, by Community Policing Delivery Structures

Figure 4-6a. Use of MORE Funds for Agencies Less Than 50,000

Figure 4-6b. Use of MORE Funds for Agencies With Populations Between
50,000 and 150,000

Figure 4-6c. Use of MORE Funds for Agencies Larger Than 150,000

Figure 4-7. Percentage of Agencies Reporting Technology Fully Implemented
as of June 1998, by Population Category

Figure 4-8. Expected and Actual Dates for Technology Implementation

Figure 4-9. Percentages of 1995 Grantees Achieving Four Milestones in
Mobile Computer Implementation by Autumn 1998

Figure 4-10. Expected and Actual Hire Dates for MORE-Funded Civilian
Positions Where Agency Reported All Civilians Were Assigned to That
Position (Wave 3, June 1998)

Figure 5-1. Projections of Net Officers Added and Retained From COPS
Hiring Grants Awarded Through May 1999

Figure 5-2. Projections of FTEs Added From COPS MORE Grants Awarded
Through May 1999

Figure 5-3. Projections of Officers and Officer Equivalents Added and
Retained From the First 100,000 COPS Officers and Officer Equivalents
Awarded

Figure 7-1. Analytic Framework

---------------------------

1. Overview

Jeffrey A. Roth and Joseph F. Ryan

The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (the Crime Act) was
signed into law by President Clinton on September 13, 1994. Of the $30 billion
in expenditures authorized by the Crime Act, nearly $9 billion was allocated for
Title I, which is also known as the "Public Safety Partnership and Community
Policing Act of 1994." Title I, the legislative basis for the Community Oriented
Policing Services (COPS) program, listed four specific goals intended to
change both the level and practice of policing in the United States:

1. To increase the number of officers deployed in American communities.

2. To foster problem solving and interaction with communities by police
officers.

3. To encourage innovation in policing.

4. To develop new technologies for assisting officers in reducing crime and its
consequences.

Title I authorized the expenditure of approximately $9 billion over 6 years for
use in three primary approaches to achieving the goals. The first approach was
to award 3-year grants to law enforcement agencies for hiring police officers to
engage in community policing activities. The second was to award grants for
acquiring technology, hiring civilians, and, initially, paying officer overtime--all
with the intent of increasing existing officers' productivity and redeploying their
freed-up time to community policing. The third was to award grants to agencies
for innovative programs with special purposes, such as reducing youth gun
violence and domestic violence.

The hiring grants were limited to 75 percent of each hired officer's salary and
fringe benefits, normally up to a "3-year cap" of $75,000. The grants for other
resources were not limited by the cap. Normally, grantees were required to
match the awards with at least 25 percent of the program costs, to submit
acceptable strategies for implementing community policing in their jurisdictions,
and to retain the COPS-funded officer positions using local funds after the
3-year grants expired. Funds were authorized to reimburse up to $5,000 of
training costs for former military personnel hired under the Act. Further, the Act
required simplified application procedures for jurisdictions with populations of
less than 50,000 and an equal distribution of funds between jurisdictions with
populations of more than and less than 150,000. As with most Federal grant
programs, COPS-funded resources were required to supplement local
expenditures, not supplant or replace them.

To carry out this statutory mandate, eight initiatives, described more fully in
chapter 2, were undertaken:

1. Within a month after the Crime Act was signed into law, COPS Phase I
grants for hiring officers were awarded to agencies that had previously applied
unsuccessfully for grants under the Police Hiring Supplement (PHS) program;
together, COPS Phase I and PHS funded nearly 4,700 officers.

2. Also within that month, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) created a new
agency--the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (the COPS
Office)--to administer the new grant program.

3. In November, the COPS Office established two grant programs for hiring
officers: Funding Accelerated for Small Towns (COPS FAST), with simplified
application procedures for small agencies; and Accelerated Hiring, Education,
And Deployment (COPS AHEAD), with more stringent application procedures
for large agencies. Later, these two programs were succeeded by the Universal
Hiring Program (UHP) for all jurisdictions regardless of size.

4. Within a few months, the COPS Office created the Making Officer
Redeployment Effective (COPS MORE) program to fund technology, civilians,
and overtime (the overtime option was eliminated after fiscal 1995).

5. To process training grants for hired military personnel, the COPS Office
established the Troops to COPS program.

6. To address local law enforcement needs other than new officers and other
resources, the COPS Office received authorization to administer the existing
Comprehensive Communities Program and created other grant programs to
launch the Police Corps and help grantees address such specific problems as
domestic violence, youth firearms violence, gangs, methamphetamines, and
school crime.

7. To encourage and assist the policing field in its transition to community
policing, the COPS Office funded four additional activities: the Community
Policing Consortium to provide training and technical assistance in community
policing; its own Program, Policy Support, and Evaluation Division to assess
and evaluate community policing activities; part of the policing research
program of the National Institute of Justice (NIJ); and a network of regional
community policing institutes (RCPIs), in which educators, law enforcement
agencies, and community organizations collaborated in community policing
research, demonstration programs, training, and technical assistance.

8. To foster compliance with the programmatic requirement to implement
community policing and with all administrative requirements, the COPS Office
undertook an extensive program of information dissemination, training and
technical assistance, telephone contact with grantees, legal reviews and opinion
letters regarding grantees' plans, and onsite monitoring by the COPS Office,
working in conjunction with the Office of the Comptroller.

The National Evaluation

Under its policing research program, NIJ was asked to administer an
independent evaluation of the COPS program; NIJ selected the Urban Institute
(UI) to conduct it. In addition, NIJ awarded grants to various organizations to
evaluate several components of the COPS program other than the hiring and
COPS MORE programs. With NIJ's concurrence, the UI team excluded the
innovative programs from its scope to avoid duplicating other evaluators'
efforts. The PHS and COPS Phase I grants were awarded before all the
COPS Office grant-making innovations were adopted, and the award
processes were fully completed before this evaluation began. Therefore,
although UI counted those program resources in its analyses, it did not single
out those programs for separate program evaluation purposes. Finally, because
the RCPIs emerged well after the evaluation was under way and project
resources were committed, our observations of their activities are limited to
incidental findings on site rather than a systematic evaluation.

This report presents UI's national evaluation findings covering roughly the first 4
years of COPS, with primary focus on the COPS FAST, AHEAD, UHP, and
MORE programs. Our work was guided by the logic model shown in figure 1-
1, which describes the COPS program and its intended effects.

The model reflects the fact that COPS program outcomes depend on local
decisions and actions to a greater degree than Federal block grant programs (in
which formulas determine funding allocations) or discretionary programs (in
which Federal officials select grantees based on detailed plans for using the
funds). Starting from the upper left of figure 1-1, the distribution of COPS
resources depended on eligible agencies' responses to a proposed exchange of
Federal resources in return for local financial and programmatic commitments.
Grantees were financially committed to share the costs of the resources during
the life of the grant and to retain the COPS-funded officer positions thereafter.
Programmatically, grantees were committed to police their jurisdictions
following principles of community policing.

As the COPS program was launched, neither the retention nor the community
policing commitment was fully spelled out at the Federal level. The retention
requirement was not precisely defined until 1998. Consistent with community 
policing principles, grant applicants were required to define the concept locally
by submitting their own strategies specifying how they would meet four broad
objectives--partnership building, problem solving, prevention, and
organizational support of those objectives--using a plan tailored to local needs,
resources, and context. Awards to applicants with inadequate community
policing strategies were accompanied by a special condition requiring training
and technical assistance by the Community Policing Consortium.

As shown in figure 1-1, successful applicants were to implement three kinds of
organizational transitions. First, recipients of hiring grants had to recruit, hire,
train, and deploy an influx of new police officers. Second, COPS MORE
grantees were obligated to acquire and implement technology, hire civilians, or
(under 1995 grants only) manage officers' overtime to enable redeployment of
officers or full-time equivalents (FTEs) to community policing. Third, to
accommodate the demands of community policing, most agencies needed to
change their organizations in various ways--an explicit objective of the COPS
program.

As shown in the center of figure 1-1, successful local implementation was to
include advancement of three programmatic community policing objectives
specified by the COPS Office: problem solving, building partnerships with the
community, and participating in prevention programs. In turn, grantees'
expanded pursuit of those objectives affect local criminal justice agencies and
other units of local government.

The processes described above are the subject of this report. As a process
evaluation, this study sets aside questions of community impact, represented in
the shaded sector of figure 1-1: how police and community actions stimulated
by the COPS program affected levels of community satisfaction with police,
fear of crime, social and physical quality of life, and levels of serious crime, etc.

More specifically, this report addresses the following questions:

1. How did local agencies respond to the exchange offered by the COPS
program? We addressed this question primarily through three waves of national
telephone surveys. Wave 1 interviewed a representative sample of law
enforcement agencies of all types and sizes, selected in May 1996 and stratified
to overrepresent COPS hiring grantees, MORE grantees, and the nongrantees
serving jurisdictions of more than 50,000. Wave 2 interviewed a new sample of
agencies whose first COPS award was a 1996 UHP grant and reinterviewed
members of the Wave 1 MORE subsample with grants for mobile computing
technology. Wave 3 reinterviewed the municipal and county police agencies
interviewed in Wave 1 and either: a) belonged to the Wave 1 nongrantee or
hiring grantee subsamples and served jurisdictions of more than 50,000; or b)
belonged to the Wave 1 MORE subsample, regardless of jurisdiction size.
Under subcontract, the National Opinion Research Corporation collected the
Wave 1 data in October-November 1996, Wave 2 in September-October
1997, and Wave 3 in June-July 1998 (see methodological appendix for details
of sample design). During June-July 2000, Wave 4 reinterviewed all agencies
interviewed at Wave 1.

Additional information came to light during site visits to 30 grantee agencies,
conducted between early 1996 and 1998 by teams of researchers and police
practitioners. 

2. What distribution of COPS funds resulted from localities' application
decisions through the end of 1997? We addressed this question through
analyses of COPS Office grant management databases, which were updated
several times between February 1996 and March 1998.

3. How did COPS hiring grantees accomplish their hiring and deployment
objectives through mid-1998, and how did they expect to retain the
COPS-funded officers? We addressed the hiring question primarily through the
Wave 1 survey, the retention question primarily in the Wave 3 surveys, and
gathered supplemental information on both matters on site visits. The Wave 4
survey updated information on both issues.

4. How did COPS MORE grantees succeed in acquiring and implementing
technology, hiring civilians, and achieving the projected redeployment targets
through mid-1998? To ascertain what types of technology were awarded in the
first year of the program, we analyzed a representative sample of 438 grant files
for 1995 MORE awards. Implementation progress was the primary focus of
the Wave 2 survey of all 183 1995 MORE grantees that received
MORE-funded mobile computers, the most commonly awarded type of
technology. For all types of technology, we updated this information in the
Wave 3 survey by asking all respondents about all their MORE grants,
regardless of how the agency was selected at Wave 1 or when their MORE
grants were awarded.

5. What increases in policing levels were projected and achieved by local
agencies using COPS resources? To estimate increases through 1998 based on
grants awarded through 1997, we applied survey-based estimates of hiring
progress, technology implementation, and retention expectations to the
projections in COPS Office data. As a benchmark, we performed time-series
analyses of 1989-96 data on sworn force size reported in annual Uniform
Crime Reports (UCR).

For a preliminary estimate of long-term increases in policing levels due to
COPS hiring and MORE programs, we applied factors estimated from the
Wave 3 survey to COPS Office grant award counts as of May 12, 1999, when
the White House announced achievement of the goal of funding 100,000 police
officers. We plan to update this estimate based on the Wave 4 survey.

6. To what extent had the COPS program succeeded by mid-1998 in
encouraging grantees to build partnerships with communities, adopt
problem-solving strategies, and participate in prevention programs? To trace
this evolution on a national basis, all three survey waves contained a checklist of
tactics in support of these objectives. We compared grantee and nongrantee
agencies' official statements on the extent to which these tactics were in place
before 1995, were begun or expanded later, and were supported by COPS
funds through mid-1998. Observing the "ground truth" behind the survey
responses was a primary purpose of our programmatic site assessments in 30
grantee agencies. 

7. To what extent did grantees' organizations change through 1998 to support
and sustain community policing? We obtained national profiles of organizational
change using the survey methodology we adopted for programmatic change,
and we observed "ground truth" during our site visits. In addition, the question
was addressed through 10 case studies conducted under subcontract by the
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management of the Kennedy School of
Government.

The following sections summarize the findings of this research.

The COPS Program and Its Roots 

The answers to the seven preceding questions were shaped by the history of
the COPS program and its roots in presidential politics, academia, policing
practice, and Federal assistance programs to local law enforcement and
criminal justice agencies. Therefore, before addressing those evaluation
questions, we will review salient aspects of that history. 

The COPS program can be viewed as the confluence of two forces. First, the
1992 presidential campaign occurred at a time when public confidence in the
ability of government to control crime was low, fear of crime was high, and
resistance to Federal budget increases was even higher. In such a climate, a
program to "put 100,000 officers on the street" made sense, especially if it
could be done with a display of Federal efficiency at minimal cost.

Second, over the preceding two decades, some students and practitioners of
policing had developed ideas that collectively became known as "community
policing." The meaning of the term was fuzzy--as many believe it should be
because its essence involves tailoring program specifics to local needs and
resources. Nevertheless, a consensus emerged that community policing had five
main ingredients: solving underlying problems that linked seemingly unrelated
incidents of crime and disorder instead of responding to them one by one,
deemphasizing routine patrol and rapid response as primary crimefighting tools,
involving the communities being policed as partners in identifying problems and
planning or even executing responses, preventing crime through strategies for
socializing children and youths and making high-crime places safer, and
changing organizations to support the other goals.

From the standpoint of many police executives, a program that combined
community policing with additional officers had both positive and negative
aspects. Community policing encouraged police to share crime reduction
responsibilities with other segments of their jurisdictions. Additional resources
are generally seen as useful, but involving other partners in deciding how to use
them can raise sensitive issues. Similarly, while at the time "more technology
and more civilian employees" was hardly a politically viable Federal response to
the Nation's fear and outrage over crime, several prominent police chiefs and
mayors argued that those resources would be more useful than additional
officers. 

For several years, beginning in the Bush administration, DOJ and other Federal
departments were rethinking the mechanisms for distributing Federal financial
assistance. Grant programs inched toward bypassing States to deal directly
with local governments, reducing administrative burdens, and lowering
categorical boundaries on how funds could be used. The difficult question was
how to support local priorities in less constraining ways without giving up all
Federal leverage for shaping those priorities. Early programmatic steps in this
direction included the Bush administration's Operation Weed and Seed and the
Clinton administration's early Project PACT and Comprehensive Communities
Program.

These factors challenged the COPS program with the extremely ambitious goal
of encouraging law enforcement agencies across the Nation to hire 100,000
officers and adopt community policing as a guiding philosophy--without raising
the Federal budget deficit. These objectives compete because burdensome
measures taken to monitor compliance with the community policing requirement
could diminish the attractiveness of the grants. Yet failure to monitor compliance
raises the danger that a program intended to increase the number of agencies
doing community policing may reduce the quality of the community policing they
do.

At the urging of several influential police chiefs who placed higher priority on
acquiring technology and hiring civilians than on hiring new officers, the COPS
MORE program was created to support these alternative resources. However,
the statute obligated the COPS Office to require applicants to demonstrate that
the productivity gains associated with these resources would permit the
redeployment of existing officers to the street at least as cost effectively as hiring
grants. Other civilian or technology benefits were irrelevant under the statute.
Lacking an experience base for estimating the productivity gains, most
applicants succeeded in projecting that redeployment would occur cost
effectively. However, achieving the projected redeployment became contingent
on grantees' ability to implement technologies that were sometimes unfamiliar
and, in the case of one key technology--wireless transmission of field reports--
essentially unavailable at the start of the COPS program.

Senior DOJ officials concluded that demonstrating effectiveness of the Federal
government in this complex mission required a new organization doing business
in new ways. Therefore, a new Office of Community Oriented Policing Services
was created within weeks after passage of the Crime Act and quickly became
known as the COPS Office. The new agency undertook the heroic task of
staffing up, announcing the COPS program to all eligible grantee agencies,
assuring that applications complied with programmatic requirements, and
making award decisions, all within a few months. 

The COPS Office successfully processed more than 10,000 grant awards in its
first 4 months. While the early rounds of that work were completed before our
study began, we relied heavily on COPS Office manual and automated records
to design and carry out our own study. During that work, we found that grant
files typically showed evidence of fairly thorough eligibility and programmatic
review. The high accuracy levels of COPS Office records greatly facilitated our
work. 

COPS grants were not exempt from standard DOJ budget review and
administrative requirements, which are administered by the Office of the
Comptroller (OC). For the relatively simple hiring grants, the combined COPS
Office/OC process required about 7 months on average from application
submission to signed acceptance of those awards. During startup the COPS
Office attempted to reduce this delay with an "accelerated" procedure that
permitted agencies to hire officers after receiving an announcement letter but
before formal obligation of grant awards; 50 percent of AHEAD grantees and
35 percent of FAST grantees reported using this procedure. In some
jurisdictions, local rules prevented agencies from hiring new officers before the
official award. 

Formal review and approval of the more complex COPS MORE grants
required an average of 11 months, even under normal circumstances. For many
grantees, this delay was prolonged between October 1995 and April 1996,
while a Federal budget dispute shut down OC grant reviews and left the COPS
budget in doubt. Consequently, an average of 16 months elapsed for 1995
MORE applicants between application submission and signed acceptance of
the awards.

During debates over the 1994 Crime Act, a Local Law Enforcement Block
Grant (LLEBG) program was proposed unsuccessfully by Republicans as an
alternative to the COPS program. After the 1994 elections, the LLEBG
initiative resurfaced and COPS program authorizations were reduced by about
$500 million in the fiscal 1996 and subsequent budgets, with the $500 million
reprogrammed to LLEBG. This reprogramming raised concerns that LLEBG,
with its lower match requirement of only 10 percent and fewer restrictions on
how funds could be spent, would reduce localities' interest in COPS grants.

Despite these difficulties, the COPS Office "customer satisfaction" orientation
succeeded at the outset with small agencies (i.e., those serving jurisdictions of
less than 50,000). Among small-agency Wave 1 survey respondents with prior
Federal grant experience, nearly 80 percent described COPS applications and
administration as simpler than others, as of 1996. This compared to 40 to 50
percent among large agencies, which faced more elaborate application
requirements, especially among MORE grantees, who had suffered the most
during the Federal budget confrontation and whose applications required more
elaborate review.

As startup difficulties were surmounted, the COPS Office shifted its focus to
program operations, which were intended to encourage implementation of
community policing and new technology and to foster compliance with
administrative regulations. It expanded the Community Policing Consortium,
which the Bureau of Justice Assistance had created in 1993 to advance
community policing. It created Innovative Community Oriented Policing
programs. Some of these were intended to develop innovative approaches to
such problems as gangs, domestic violence, and methamphetamine. Others
were intended to advance community policing in special environments such as
schools and distressed neighborhoods, to advance problem-solving skills, and
to advance community policing through supportive organizational innovations.
Finally, the COPS-funded RCPIs brought academic, practitioner, and
community perspectives to bear on training and local innovation for community
policing.

To foster compliance with administrative regulations, five units were involved.
The COPS Office Legal Division defined compliance by interpreting Title I,
writing regulations, and applying them to specific local circumstances. The
Grants Division informed the field about requirements, reviewed applications for
compliance, and assigned grant advisors to maintain regular telephone contact.
The Monitoring Division monitored compliance through site visits to 432
grantees in 1998, with a planned expansion to 900 in 1999. The Office of
Justice Programs Office of the Comptroller established a separate branch to
monitor compliance with financial and administrative requirements and the
adequacy of grantees' accounting and administrative controls. The Office of the
Inspector General audited COPS grantees onsite for possible violations of the
Title I statute.

Between 1996 and 1998, as the COPS Office process of awarding grants
yielded some of the center stage to compliance activities, the satisfaction of
large local/county agencies with COPS Office operations declined somewhat.
The percentage of hiring grantees describing COPS grants as easier than others
to administer declined from 63 to 47 between 1996 and 1998. While nearly 90
percent continued to describe their grant advisors as helpful, the percentage
who found them "easy to reach" dropped from 81 to 74 percent.

With this description as background, the following sections report findings on
the questions raised above.

COPS Application Decisions 

In this section we describe who participated in local decisions to apply, what
considerations weighed in their decisions, and what their future application plans
were as of 1998.

Who participated in agencies' application decisions?

Law enforcement agencies' decisions to apply for Federal grants typically are a
fairly closed process involving the chief law enforcement executive, elected
officials or their staffs, and, in larger agencies, the unit that will administer the
grant and the agency grant manager, if one exists. Yet many believe community
policing initiatives are more likely to succeed with broad and deep participation
in planning throughout the agency. 

For COPS applications, agencies' chief executives were reportedly involved in
virtually all decisions and elected officials in more than 80 percent. According to
the Wave 1 survey, about half the agencies brought sergeants into the
application decisions, nearly 40 percent involved patrol officers, and various
segments of the community were brought into 20 to 45 percent of decisions.
Less than 25 percent involved union representatives. Despite COPS Office
success in simplifying application procedures, some 40 percent of applicants
nevertheless involved consultants in the application process.

Which agencies became grantees, and why?

We estimate that 19,175 law enforcement agencies were eligible for COPS
grants. This estimate was obtained by merging law enforcement agency lists
maintained by the Bureau of Justice Statistics, the FBI's National Crime
Information Center (NCIC), the UCR Section, and the COPS Office.
Duplicate records were removed and agencies that appeared to be ineligible
deleted. Of these agencies, 10,537 (55 percent) requested and received at
least one COPS grant by the end of 1997. Of grant recipients, 761, or about 7
percent, had withdrawn by March 1998.

After the COPS startup period, when short application deadlines and related
local logistical problems discouraged some agencies from applying immediately,
financial considerations became the primary influence on agencies' decisions not
to apply. Financial concerns during the grant period--the explicit 25-percent
match requirement and the implicit match needed to cover annual salary and
fringe benefits exceeding $33,333 and collateral costs of an officer such as
training and equipment--were the most commonly mentioned reasons given in
1996 by agencies for their decisions not to apply in 1995. By mid-1998,
concern over the cost of retaining the officers after grant expiration was the
primary influence on their decisions not to apply, and this concern also led to an
estimated 40 percent of the agency withdrawals. At that time, the nature of the
retention requirement was unclear: The Justice Department had not announced
the length of the required retention period (one complete budget cycle after
grant expiration), and we believe the prevailing assumption was a much longer
and more costly period. 

Resistance to community policing was not a significant deterrent to applying for
COPS grants. Objections to community policing or to Federal grants in general
were mentioned by only 8 percent of respondents. Moreover, 88 percent of the
largest agencies in our sample that had received LLEBG funds reported they
used them to support community policing, even though there was no
requirement to do so. It appears that by covering collateral costs not covered
by COPS grants, the advent of LLEBG may have encouraged participation in
the COPS program.

What are agencies' future application plans?

In June-July 1998, the program remained popular among grantees; 74 percent
of local/county grantees stated they planned to apply for at least one additional
COPS grant in 1998 or 1999: 66 percent of small agencies (jurisdictions of less
than 50,000), 78 percent of medium-size agencies (50,001-150,000), and 89
percent of large agencies (150,001 or more). Among the prospective
applicants, MORE technology grants were resoundingly popular; 20 percent
planned to apply for that type only, and an additional 41 percent planned to
request MORE-funded technology in combination with officer hiring, civilians,
or both. The most popular combination was technology plus sworn officers (25
percent of prospective applicants). Only 6 percent planned to apply for hiring
grants only, and 3 percent for civilians only.

As with prior application decisions, financial considerations strongly influence
future intentions. Of the large local/county agencies surveyed in Wave 3, the
local match requirement was described as "very important" by 55 percent of the
agencies, restrictions on allowable purposes for which grant funds could be
spent by 48 percent, restrictions on allowable types of resources by 43
percent, and uncovered collateral costs by 40 percent.

Distribution of COPS Funds 

In this section, we summarize the amounts of COPS grants awarded and
highlights of the distribution pattern.

What is the total value of COPS grants for increasing the level of policing?

By the end of 1997, according to COPS Office records, awards had been
announced of 18,138 grants worth $3.47 billion. Of those, 754 were for
innovative programs. The remaining 17,384 grants were intended to increase
the level of policing. They carried a total of $3.388 billion in awards: about 16
percent under COPS MORE and 84 percent under hiring grant programs
including PHS and COPS Phase I. These programs, plus FAST, AHEAD, and
UHP supported the hiring of approximately 41,000 officers. COPS MORE
supported the acquisition of other resources (primarily technology and civilians)
whose productivity was projected to yield the FTE of approximately 22,400
additional officers for at least 3 years, for a total of 63,400 officers and
equivalents.

By May 12, 1999, according to COPS Office press releases, another $1.9
billion had been awarded, about 74 percent under hiring grants and the
remainder under MORE. At a ceremony that day, the White House announced
that the goal of funding 100,000 police officers had been reached. We estimate
that by then, the COPS Office and its predecessors had awarded $4.27 billion
in hiring grants and another $1.017 billion in MORE grants, for a total of
$5.387 billion, exclusive of innovative program support. These funds supported
the hiring of 60,900 officers and the acquisition of other resources projected to
yield 39,600 FTEs of officer time through productivity gains.

How were COPS funds distributed?

Eligible agencies' application decisions led to significant variation by region, but
regional patterns differed depending on how they were measured. The Pacific
region ranked first in terms of the percentage of eligible agencies receiving
grants but third in terms of COPS dollars awarded per capita and sixth in terms
of COPS dollars per crime. The Mid-Atlantic region ranked eighth in terms of
agency participation, but first on both the per capita and per crime measures.

Of all agencies selected for awards by the end of 1997, only 4 percent served
core city jurisdictions (i.e., central cities of Census Bureau Metropolitan
Statistical Areas), which are home to 27 percent of the U.S. population. They
received 40 percent of COPS dollar awards for all programs combined, and
62 percent of all COPS MORE funds. On average for the United States as a
whole, core cities received substantially larger awards per 10,000 residents
($151,631) than did the rest of the country ($86,504). However, their average
award per 1,000 index crimes ($184,980) was less than two-thirds the average
for the rest of the country ($299,963).

Which types of agencies received the most COPS grants? 

Some 75 percent of hiring and MORE funds went to municipal or county police
agencies, 15 percent to sheriff's and State police agencies, and the remainder to
a variety of special jurisdictions. As required by Title I, dollars awarded were
approximately evenly split between jurisdictions with populations of more than
150,000 and smaller jurisdictions. 

The growth in awards during 1996 and 1997 was driven largely by repeat
awards to existing grantees rather than by first awards to new grantees. By the
end of 1997, $1.42 billion, or 47 percent of all funds designated for award, had
been allocated to agencies with four or more grants. As a result, the distribution
of COPS funds became skewed, so that through 1998 the 1 percent of grantee
agencies with the largest grants had received 41 percent of grant funds. 

Did COPS funds go where the crime is?

Awards to repeat grantees helped focus cumulative COPS awards on
jurisdictions that suffer disproportionately from serious crime. Of the 8,062
UCR contributors that had received at least one hiring grant by December
1997 or one MORE grant by June 1998, the 1 percent with the largest 1997
murder counts received 31 percent of all funds awarded through the end of
1997. They reported 54 percent of all U.S. murders. The 10 percent with the
highest murder counts received 50 percent of total COPS awards. A nearly
identical pattern occurred with respect to robbery. 

Officer Hiring, Deployment, and Retention Planning

After the COPS Office announced the awards, the OC reviewed and approved
the budget and obligated the Federal funds. Following OC approval and
obligation of the funds, the COPS Office mailed a formal award package
informing grantees of all conditions. Grantees were allowed to draw down
funds only after they had returned a signed acceptance of the award and
conditions to the COPS Office. For the hiring grants, in which conditions were
fairly standard and most OC review issues involved merely calculation of salary
and fringe benefits, these processes moved fairly smoothly, even through the
Federal budget dispute and government shutdown in 1995-96. During those
years the mean elapsed time between COPS Office receipt of the application
and mailing the award package to the grantee was 149-154 days for hiring 
programs, and grantees who had returned their signed acceptances by
mid-1997 did so in an average of 70-75 days, for a total elapsed time of 224
days.

How did officer hiring and deployment proceed?

Once funds became obligated and available to spend, hiring of COPS-funded
officers proceeded smoothly throughout the entire 1996-98 observation period.
In 1996, more than 95 percent of agencies reported hiring their officers within
10-12 months of award obligation. As of June 1998, 83 percent of medium
and large local/county grantees reported they had hired all their officers funded
through the end of 1997. Nearly 70 percent of them reported all of their
officers had finished training and begun working in their first regular
assignments. All the agencies reported expecting to have 100 percent of their
officers awarded through 1997 on the street by June 2000. 

As of our 1996 Wave 1 survey, half of all small-agency (COPS FAST)
grantees reported deploying their new officers directly into community policing,
and 38 percent assigned them to "backfill" in routine patrol assignments for
more experienced officers redeployed to community policing. About 68 percent
of medium and large-agency (COPS AHEAD) grantees reported using the
backfill strategy, which the COPS Office recommended.

How do COPS-funded officers spend their time?

Two of the three prime components of community policing articulated by the
COPS Office--partnership building and problem solving--were the most
commonly expected uses of COPS-funded officers' time; each was mentioned
by about 40 percent of the medium and large local/county agencies in our
Wave 3 sample. About 26 percent of those agencies reported their
COPS-funded officers would spend substantial amounts of time on "quality of
life" policing, a style which some believe requires strong control by the
community if it is not to undermine community partnership building. Routine
patrol and "squeezing in proactive work" were both mentioned by around 30
percent of the agencies. The COPS-funded officers were expected to spend
substantial time on routine patrol by 40 percent of the agencies with
agencywide community policing and in 24 percent of the agencies with
specialized community policing units. Some 23 percent of the agencies reported
their COPS-funded officers would spend at least some of their time on
undercover and tactical assignments, and 35 percent expected them to spend at
least some time on administrative or technical assignments.

As an indirect measure of COPS-funded officers' activities, we asked how
those activities affected other agencies. Among the large local/county grantees,
83 percent reported greater demands on code enforcement and sanitation
agencies; 83 percent reported greater demands on community organizations
and businesses; and 66 percent reported greater demands on agencies that deal
with violence in the home. These impacts are consistent with direct reports of
strong emphasis on problem solving and partnership building, along with
referrals of domestic violence cases. 

How were agencies planning to retain the COPS-funded officers as of 1998?

Through the 3-year hiring grant periods, 98 percent of our respondents
reported they had either kept their COPS-funded officers on staff or replaced
departed officers expeditiously. At the time of our Wave 3 survey in 1998, our
sample contained few agencies with expired grants. Therefore, our findings are
limited to plans and expectations regarding retention, not actual retention
experience. 

The Wave 3 survey was conducted before the COPS Office announced the
length of grantees' retention commitment: compliance with the retention
requirement requires keeping grant-funded officer positions filled using local
funds for at least one budget cycle beyond grant expiration. Despite the
uncertainty, approximately 66 percent of Wave 3 respondents reported they
were "certain" their agencies would retain the COPS-funded officers when their
grants expired. Another 24 percent indicated they were "almost positive" they
would retain the officers, 6 percent were "pretty sure," and only 4 percent
stated they were "not sure at all."

Next, respondents were asked whether they agreed or disagreed with a series
of statements intended to describe in more detail their expectations about how
their agencies would retain the COPS-funded officers. About 95 percent
reported that the COPS-funded officers either were or would be part of the
agency's base budget by the time the grant expired. About 52 percent stated
they were uncertain about long-term retention plans. Only 10 percent of the
respondents reported that despite the "good faith effort" required as a grant
condition, unforeseen conditions were likely to keep their agencies from
retaining all of the positions.

Other common responses are difficult to interpret and suggest that despite
extensive COPS Office efforts to educate agencies about the retention
requirement, the persons authorized to speak to our interviewers on behalf of
the agencies may have been uncertain about what the requirement entailed.
About 37 percent reported expecting the COPS-funded officers would be
retained by "using positions that open up" (i.e., through attrition, indicating an
intention to retain the COPS-funded officers but not the positions). About 20
percent reported expecting the COPS-funded officers would be retained by
cutting back positions elsewhere, a plan that would constitute supplanting under
many common conditions; and 5 percent agreed that the COPS-funded officers
were likely to be retained both through attrition and cutbacks. Now that the
retention requirement has been spelled out in more detail, we are re-examining
long-term retention plans in the Wave 4 survey.

MORE Awards and Projected Productivity Gains

COPS MORE was a pivotal component of the COPS program. From the
administration's perspective, MORE was key because it accounted for 39
percent of the 100,000 officer total using only 19 percent of the COPS budget.
From the grantees' perspective, MORE-funded resources, especially
technology, were extremely attractive because they promised a variety of local
benefits without the burden of postgrant retention costs that new officers
carried. This section describes what is being acquired with COPS MORE
awards, how implementation of MORE-funded technology and achievement of
productivity gains is proceeding, and how MORE-funded civilians are being
integrated into grantee agencies.

How are COPS MORE funds being allocated and used?

COPS MORE has been especially popular with large jurisdictions, and awards
have been more heavily concentrated than hiring grant awards in relatively few
agencies. Of the 17 agencies serving populations of more than 1 million, 53
percent had received at least one COPS MORE grant by the end of 1998,
compared to just 5 percent of agencies serving populations of less than 25,000.
By the end of 1997, the 1 percent of grantees with the largest MORE grants
had received 48 percent of the $528 million awarded to that point, compared
to 37 percent for the largest hiring grantees. The concentration of large MORE
grants was even greater among local/county police agencies, and it increased
slightly during 1998.

In 1996, the General Accounting Office reported that technology absorbed a
little more than half of 1995 COPS MORE resources, civilians somewhat less,
and overtime less than 10 percent. Overtime was not supported by COPS
MORE after that year. By 1998, 38 percent of MORE grantees had obtained
exclusively technology, another 44 percent were funded for both technology
and civilians, and 5 percent were funded for technology, civilians, and overtime.

What is the relationship between COPS MORE grants and counts of officers?

To receive a MORE grant, an applicant had to produce a credible projection
that the funded resources would yield at least four FTEs in increased
productivity per $100,000 of grant funds--the rate at which Federal COPS
funds supported officer hiring. On average, in a random sample of 1995
MORE grant applications, civilians were projected to yield 4.54 FTEs per
$100,000, largely through replacements of officers on a one-for-one basis.
Technology projections averaged 6.12 FTEs per $100,000.

Starting in 1996, the COPS Office converted dollars from MORE technology
grants to projected FTEs at the four-per-$100,000 minimum needed to
demonstrate cost-effectiveness--a more conservative assumption than
applicants' projections. The conservative projections were used in COPS
Office estimates of total FTEs funded and were the standard of accountability
imposed on grantees. Even under the conservative assumption, technology
accounts for 64 percent of total productivity gains projected for COPS
MORE.

Implementation of MORE-funded technology

Starting with the budget review and funding obligation process, COPS MORE
technology implementation was problematic. Because of the additional
complexity of COPS MORE plans and budgets, Federal processing of
applications required at least 4 months longer than hiring grants. For 1996
applicants, the average time between receiving a MORE application at the
COPS Office and mailing the award package to the grantee was 269 days,
compared to 149 days for hiring programs.

Between October 1995 and April 1996, the MORE award process was
stretched out even further by a Federal budget confrontation. A government
shutdown halted OC review of 1995 applications in the pipeline. Also,
uncertainty over the fiscal 1996 COPS Office budget delayed award decisions
on applications received just before the September 30 end of fiscal 1995,
which had pushed the total requests for fiscal 1995 beyond available MORE
resources. As a result, successful 1995 MORE applicants waited an average of
16 months between submitting their applications and receiving authority to draw
down funds.

The balance of this section first describes the types of technology purchased
with MORE funds. It then describes the status of implementation, productivity
gains, and other costs and benefits MORE grantees accrue from their
technology. 

What types of technology were acquired and what redeployment was
projected? At the time of our Wave 1 survey in 1996, few agencies had
received more than one MORE grant, and so most local/county MORE
technology grantees pursued only one type of technology. By far the most
common was mobile computers, being implemented by an estimated 60 percent
of these agencies, followed by management/administrative computers (23
percent) and booking/arraignment technology (10 percent). Some agencies
pursued telephone reporting systems (2 percent), Computer Aided Dispatch
(CAD) systems (1 percent), and other technologies, such as geo-mapping and
reverse 911 systems.

By 1998, many MORE grantees were implementing more than one type of
technology. Therefore, the fractions implementing each technology type had
grown to 79 percent for mobile computers, 45 percent for
management/administrative computers, 12 percent for CAD systems and
booking/arraignment technology, and 6 percent for telephone reporting
systems. The 1996-98 changes make clear that most CAD and telephone
reporting system projects were begun more recently than most mobile and
management/administrative computer projects.

Although automated COPS Office records do not allow one to attribute
projected FTEs to specific technologies, it was possible to compute the number
of FTEs for categories of MORE technology grantees, based on their
combinations of funded technologies. These computations suggest the mobile
computers were projected to play an important role in increasing productivity.
Of 16,870 projected FTEs funded through June 1998, 34 percent were
generated by agencies with mobile computers only, and 29 percent by agencies
with a combination of mobile computers, management/administrative
computers, and other technologies. Only 24 percent were projected to come
from agencies without mobile computers.

The knowledge base from which MORE applicants could develop their
projections of FTEs saved through productivity gains was sparse. For most of
the technologies, projections clustered around 2.4 hours per officer per shift,
slightly more than the 2 hours used by the COPS Office as an example in the
MORE application kit.

How rapidly is implementation proceeding? Technology implementation was far
from complete as of summer 1998, even by agencies whose first COPS
MORE grant was awarded under the 1995 program. Among those agencies,
the fractions reporting that each technology type was fully operational was 61
percent for management/administrative computers, 47 percent for telephone
reporting systems, 45 percent for booking/arraignment systems, 44 percent for
mobile computers, 39 percent for CAD systems, and 65 percent for other
technologies. For computing technologies, implementation has proceeded most
rapidly among small agencies: 50 percent of agencies serving jurisdictions of
less than 50,000 have all mobile computers operational, compared to 23
percent of agencies with jurisdictions of more than 150,000. For
management/administrative computers, the comparable percentages are 78
percent and 53 percent.

Some management/administrative and mobile computers were not operational
simply because they were purchased not long before our Wave 3 survey.
Nevertheless, for two reasons these figures probably understate the adverse
effect of delays in mobile computer implementation on achievement of
projected productivity increases. First, CAD and telephone system projects
began, on average, under more recent grants than computer implementation.
Second, the one available time study indicates any projected mobile computer
productivity increases will be due to wireless field reporting, which eliminates
trips to stations to write reports--not from wireless inquiry functions to driver's
license, vehicle registration, and other files. The inquiry capability produces
benefits such as improved officer safety, elimination of waits for clear
voice-radio channels, and protection from scanners but is unlikely to save
measurable officer time that can be redeployed to community policing. Yet, to
our knowledge, as of June 1999, no major police department has achieved
departmentwide implementation of wireless field reporting, although three are
reportedly in the final phases of testing. Therefore, all the agencies that reported
they had operational mobile computers were referring to inquiry capability, not
wireless field reporting.

What productivity gains are being achieved and reallocated to community
policing? Because of the delays in technology implementation, our 1998 Wave
3 survey offers only a fragmentary basis for comparing actual productivity gains
with those projected in MORE grant applications. As of June 1998, MORE
grantees from 1995 expected to achieve only about 49 percent of the projected
FTEs, but our Wave 3 sample was not designed to produce a definitive national
estimate. Our estimate of productivity gains will be updated in a future report
based on our Wave 4 survey, fielded in June 2000, when more grantees are
expected to have experience with fully operational technology.

What other benefits and costs of technology are local agencies experiencing?
While prospects for achieving 100 percent of the projected productivity gains
are not encouraging at this time, agencies report expecting or achieving a
variety of other benefits from their mobile computers, even without wireless
transmission capability. These include:

1. Automated field reporting: More complete, accurate, and recent real-time
information and permanent records; improved crime/data analysis capability;
more accurate/complete/timely records; improved spelling/grammar/legibility;
more report writing; easier retrieval of information; shorter review process; and
reduced time for records staff.

2. Wireless query and response functions: Improved officer safety due to faster,
more secure responses to queries regarding license plates, vehicle registrations,
and persons; secure car-to-car communication; and fewer demands on
dispatchers.

3. Increased effectiveness: Higher clearance and conviction rates due to
improved reports; better recovery of stolen property; positive response from
the community (though some agencies report adverse reactions from victims
and witnesses); more information sharing across shifts; better communications
with neighboring agencies; better tracking of community events; easier provision
of information to the public; and better preparation for court.

4. Agency benefits: Opportunity for staff to learn computers; officer morale
booster (sometimes after a break-in period); and expected financial savings in
the long run.

Agencies also experienced extra costs due to the new technology. The most
common were computer staff time, system installation time, and time to train
officers in use of the new technologies. The time of computer staff and/or
vendors was an especially common expense in agencies that had ongoing
technology projects that the MORE-funded technology had to fit. Some
agencies that anticipated the costs included them in their initial grant budgets
without sacrificing the cost-effectiveness of their MORE programs.

Others found that the local costs of the MORE grant increased by 10 percent
or more over their initially planned local match. Depending on technology type,
23 to 27 percent of MORE technology grantees implementing the five most
common technology categories reported that unexpected implementation costs
increased the local cost of their MORE grants by at least 10 percent over the
match they had originally planned.

Not surprisingly, the likelihood that an agency would experience unexpected
costs increased as implementation progressed. The percentage reporting
unexpected costs rose from 21 percent of agencies with mobile computers
NOT fully implemented to 31 percent of agencies that had completed
implementation. The percentage reporting unexpected costs rose from 22
percent to 29 percent for agencies implementing desktop computers, from 26
percent to 43 percent for CAD systems, from 3 percent to 60 percent for
automated booking systems, and from 12 percent to 32 percent for
telephone-reporting systems.

Three categories of cost have been especially problematic for agencies funded
for mobile computers, especially those pursuing wireless field reporting. These
are upgraded telecommunications capacity, integration of field reporting with
existing (or developing) records management systems, and vehicle mounts,
which were frequently designed from scratch.

Use of MORE-funded civilians

In this section, we describe the functions being performed by MORE-funded
civilians, civilian hiring and retention, and deployment of the officers replaced by
the new civilians.

How did hiring, deployment, and retention of civilians proceed? During 1995,
the first year of COPS MORE, the program awarded $145 million to fund
civilians to create 6,506 FTEs of sworn officer time. By June 1998, this amount
had risen to $287.2 million, to support 12,975 FTEs. At that time, more than
80 percent of the grantee agencies reported having completed their civilian
hiring, and all expected to complete their civilian hiring by the end of 1999.
Sixty-four percent of the grantees reported all their civilian hires were still on
staff, and 80 percent of the remainder reported they had replaced all who had
left. An estimated 96 percent reported the civilians saved officer time, and, for
the four most common civilian positions, 73 to 80 percent of agencies reported
their new civilians had been used either to create a new position or to increase
the total number of people in each position.

The MORE civilian program appears to have provided modest encouragement
to an ongoing trend toward "civilianization." Approximately 45 percent of
MORE civilian grant recipients claimed to be already in the civilianization
process when they received their grants. The annual average increase in
civilians between 1993 and 1997 (which span the early COPS years) was 4
percent, up from 3 percent annually over the preceding 3 years.

What functions are the MORE-funded civilians performing? MORE-funded
civilians were hired to increase resources for community policing in four ways:

1. Shedding routine tasks from sworn officers to civilians, such as
clerical/administrative positions (e.g., typing, filing, scheduling duty rosters,
taking phone messages) and record maintenance.

2. Replacing sworn personnel in existing specialist positions, such as desk/duty
officers, dispatchers, telephone reporting unit staff, and evidence technicians.

3. Filling new or existing specialist positions that are expected to improve
officer productivity, such as computer technicians.

4. Staffing new community policing positions such as community
coordinators/organizers, domestic violence specialists, or CPTED (Crime
Prevention Through Environmental Design) planners.

The most common assignments of MORE-funded civilians were to
clerical/administrative positions (43 percent of agencies assigned at least some
civilians to such positions), dispatchers (34 percent), and telephone response
unit members (26 percent).

COPS Effects on Policing Levels

The effect of the COPS program on policing levels is the total of the two
components discussed in the preceding sections. The first is sworn officers
hired because of COPS grants and retained after the grants expire. The second
is productivity gains measured in officer FTEs yielded by MORE-funded
resources. This report contains preliminary estimates of both effects.

For several reasons, the estimates in this report should be treated with caution.
First, anticipating the Wave 4 survey, we did not design Wave 3 to survey a
representative sample of small local/county agencies or, indeed, any samples of
other types of agencies. Second, Wave 3 data were collected at a time when
grantees had little actual experience on which to base estimates of two key
factors in the projections: the fraction of hired officers that will be retained
following the required period and the actual number of FTEs generated from
resources acquired with COPS MORE grants. The Wave 4 survey and other
data will be used to produce updated, more valid estimates.

With these cautions in mind, we report estimates of COPS program impacts as
of two points in time: the impact, through the end of 1998, of grants awarded
through 1997; and the long-term impact of grants awarded through May 12,
1999, the date the White House announced that the goal of funding 100,000
officers had been met.

How will COPS hiring grants affect the number of law enforcement officers in
the United States?

We first used the Wave 3 survey data to estimate the number of COPS-funded
officers hired as of June 1998. Through 1997, the COPS Office had awarded
hiring grants for 41,000 officers; survey results indicate about 39,000 of them
had been hired. The difference reflects grantee delays in accepting awards,
recruiting candidates, and hiring officers.

This gross increase is partially offset by delays in filling vacancies for
non-COPS positions and cross-hiring between agencies. Allowing for these
factors, we estimate the 41,000 officers awarded by the COPS Office as of the
end of 1997 resulted in a national net increase of between 36,300 and 37,500
officers by the end of 1998.

In the longer term, offsetting factors include certain federally approved cuts in
sworn force size and less-than-complete retention of COPS-funded positions
beyond the 3-year grant period. Recognizing the uncertainty surrounding these
factors, we constructed a "best case" scenario, in which grantees would retain
91 percent of their new hires indefinitely, and a "worst case" scenario of 64
percent.

By May 1999, the COPS Office had awarded agencies approximately 60,900
officers through hiring grants. Under the best case scenario, we project that
these awards will produce a peak effect of 57,200 officers by the year 2001,
and that after postgrant attrition, the permanent effect of the grants will stabilize
at 55,400 officers by 2003. The minimum retention scenario, in contrast,
suggests the net impact of these awards will peak at 48,900 officers in 2000
but then decline to a permanent level of 39,000 officers by 2003. 

How will COPS MORE grants affect the number of FTE officers redeployed
through increased productivity?

All of our estimates of time savings from MORE grants were based on the
Wave 3 survey, which contained a representative sample of 1995 municipal
and county MORE grantees. To develop preliminary national estimates, we
extrapolated the results of these agencies to other types of agencies and later
cohorts of MORE grantees.

By the summer of 1998, the COPS Office had awarded agencies 22,400 FTEs
through MORE grants for civilians and technology, and survey results indicate
grantees had redeployed 6,400 FTEs with these grants. At that time, however,
only 23 to 78 percent of MORE technology grantees (depending on agency
population category and type of technology) described some or all components
of their technology as fully operational. Therefore, grantees were also asked to
estimate future productivity increases they expected to achieve once all grants
were fully implemented.

Agencies that had progressed the furthest in making their technology
operational projected productivity gains that were smaller (60 percent of the
original projections) than those expected by MORE grantees as a whole (72
percent of the original projections), suggesting that agencies adjust their
expected productivity gains downward as they gain more experience with
operational technology.

We used those figures to compute "best case" and "worst case" interim
estimates, though we recognize that the worst case estimates are based on only
a partial subsample that has substantial implementation experience. This
subsample is growing and becoming more representative over time, and so we
plan to revise the estimates of MORE-supported productivity increases later
this year using our Wave 4 survey data.

Using these assumptions and an estimated 3-year timeframe for full
implementation by grantees, we estimate that by the end of 1998, between
9,100 and 10,900 officers were redeployed from resources funded by MORE
grants awarded by the end of 1997. We project that if these implementation
patterns hold for post-1998 MORE grants, the 39,600 FTEs awarded as of
May 1999 will result in the redeployment of between 23,800 and 28,500 FTEs
by 2002. 

What will be the combined effect of hiring and MORE grants awarded by May
1999 on the level of policing in the United States?

By May 1999, the COPS Office had awarded approximately 100,500 officers
and officer equivalents through hiring grants and MORE grants. Our estimates
for the two types of grants are combined in table 1-1. Upper-bound
projections based on June 1998 survey estimates of maximum officer retention
and maximum officer redeployment suggest that these awards will result in a
peak national net increase of 84,600 officers and equivalents by 2001, before
declining somewhat and stabilizing at a permanent level of 83,900 by 2003.
Lower bound projections based on estimates of minimum officer retention and
minimum officer redeployment suggest the COPS-supported increase in the
number of officers and FTEs deployed at any point in time will peak at 69,000
officers in the year 2001 and decline to a permanent level of 62,700 by 2003.

Total COPS-funded FTEs added to police agencies throughout this period will
be greater than the number available during any particular year, especially if our
lower-bound projections prove more accurate. In this regard, the COPS
program might be compared to an "open house" event, in which the total
number of visitors to the event is larger than the number present at any given
point in time. Using this open house concept, we estimate that COPS awards
made through May 1999 will result in the temporary or permanent hiring of
60,900 officers and the deployment of between 23,800 and 28,500 FTEs,
thereby adding between 84,700 and 89,400 FTEs to the Nation's police
agencies at some point between 1994 and 2003, though not all these FTEs will
be simultaneously in service at any single point in time.

Whether the program will ever increase the number of officers and equivalents
on the street at a single point in time to 100,000 is not clear. The COPS Office
has continued to award COPS grants since May 1999. If the agency continues
to award hiring and MORE grants in the same proportions and our upper
bound projections are correct, roughly 19,000 additional officers and
equivalents awarded could be enough to eventually produce an indefinite
increase of 100,000 officers on the street. If the lower bound assumptions are
more accurate, the program may require an additional 59,000 officers and
equivalents awarded to create a lasting increase of 100,000 officers. More
definitive answers to these questions will be available following completion of
our Wave 4 survey.

COPS and the Style of American Policing

The COPS Office listed four principal goals of community policing: building
police-community partnerships, problem solving, crime prevention, and
organizational support for these programmatic objectives. We used three
approaches to observe how the COPS program affected law enforcement
agencies' pursuit of these goals. First, at three points in time, our national survey
of agencies measured agency representatives' official statements about the
implementation status in COPS grantee and nongrantee agencies of 47 tactics
for pursuing these objectives, as well as the role of COPS funds in grantees'
implementation of those tactics. Second, teams of police practitioners and
researchers visited 30 sites, many twice, for programmatic site assessments of
the ground truth underlying agencies' statements about the tactics in use. Third,
to explore the roles of local leadership and COPS resources in facilitating
community policing innovations, 10 case studies were conducted by a Kennedy
School of Government team.

Has the COPS program advanced the adoption of community policing in the
United States?

The answer is "yes," but it must be quickly qualified. "Adoption of community
policing" has very different meanings in different jurisdictions, and COPS funds
seem more likely to have fueled movements that were already accelerating than
to have caused the acceleration.

Between 1995 and 1998, the use of a number of tactics commonly labeled as
community policing swept the country among grantees and nongrantees. Among
those that reportedly spread the fastest were citizen-police academies;
cooperative truancy programs with schools; structured problem solving along
the lines of SARA (Scanning, Analysis, Response, Assessment); and patrolling
on foot, bike, or other transportation modes that offered more potential than
patrol cars for interacting with citizens. Grantees and nongrantees alike reported
revising their employee evaluation measures and their mission, vision, and
values statements to codify their versions of community policing. Packaged
prevention programs, such as neighborhood watch and drug resistance
education in schools, which in 1995 were already among the most widespread
tactics commonly described as community policing, became almost universal by
1998.

We have no measure of the extent to which the COPS program played various
roles that may have indirectly encouraged nongrantees to adopt these tactics.
Possible mechanisms included training and technical assistance programs and
materials, publicizing grantees' community policing successes, and acting as a
catalyst that encouraged grantees to demand more community policing training
from regional and State academies. However, the advancement of community
policing among nongrantees offers some weak evidence that the COPS
program provided fuel but not the launch pad for the nationwide proliferation of
community policing tactics between 1995 and 1998.

With a few exceptions, COPS grantees' reported use of community policing
tactics grew more rapidly than did nongrantees'. However, the difference in
reported adoption rates was statistically significant for relatively few. They
include joint crime prevention projects with businesses, citizen surveys,
techniques for bringing the community more fully into problem solving, and
bringing probation officers into problem-solving initiatives. Grantees were
significantly more likely than nongrantees to report adopting late-night
recreation programs and victim assistance programs. Finally, grantees were
significantly more likely than nongrantees to report instituting three
organizational changes in support of community policing: new dispatch rules to
increase officers' time in their beats, new rules to increase beat officers'
discretion, and revised employee evaluation measures. 

In this information age the community policing vocabulary is well known.
Federal funding rewards departments that profess the successful implementation
of community policing principles. In that context, survey findings that agencies'
use of community policing tactics grew between 1995 and 1998 could merely
reflect socially desirable responses, at least for COPS grantees. Our site visits
were intended to learn the ground truth behind the survey reports and to shed
light on the different meanings that law enforcement agencies assign to strategies
and tactics commonly labeled as community policing. In our limited time on site,
one might expect it to be difficult to separate the rhetoric of community policing
from the reality of what law enforcement agencies actually do. Indeed, it often
was. Therefore, the enormous variation we detected across sites in the
operational meanings of key community policing concepts is especially telling.
This variation is described next.

How are COPS grantees building partnerships with communities?

Problem-solving partnerships for coordinating the appropriate application of a
variety of resources are commonplace in many of the agencies visited. Yet, all
too often, partnerships are in name only, or simply standard, temporary
working arrangements. Partnerships with other law enforcement units and
agencies merely to launch short-term crackdowns are not in the spirit of
problem solving or partnerships, nor are partnerships in which citizens and
business representatives are merely "involved," serving primarily as extra "eyes
and ears" as before. True community partnerships, involving sharing power and
decisionmaking, are rare at this time, found in only a few of the flagship
departments. Other jurisdictions have begun to lay foundations for true
partnerships, however, and as problem-solving partnerships mature and evolve,
the trust needed for power sharing and joint decisionmaking may emerge.

How are COPS grantees implementing problem solving?

Certainly, it appeared on site that the majority of agencies visited are engaged in
problem solving, although its form and visibility vary widely from agency to
agency. Some of the strongest features of problem solving that we observed
included the evolution of problem solving from "special operations" to more
complex activities that attack disorder and fear and that require police to search
for interventions other than arrest; administrative systems that recognize
problem solving at multiple scales and multiple levels within the organizations;
broadly distributed authority to initiate problem-solving projects; systems to
assess the impact of particular projects and to learn from them; and the ability
of the law enforcement agency to engage other government agencies in defining
and solving community problems.

In some jurisdictions, traditional enforcement and investigative activities are
called problem solving under the community policing umbrella when these
activities are directed toward problems the community has identified as
concerns. Problem-solving projects dominated by enforcement actions,
however, rarely advance the objectives of community policing because they are
unlikely to either fix underlying causes or attract the community support needed
to maintain solutions. Therefore, enforcement-based solutions to stubborn
problems are likely to be short term, although when successful, they sometimes
encourage residents to re-enter public spaces and develop more permanent
solutions.

A visible sign of enforcement-based problem solving is the recent and growing
trend toward "zero tolerance" policing, a term also lacking consensual definition.
In the sites visited, zero tolerance policies take different forms. Some are
manifested as zero tolerance efforts of short duration (e.g., operated for a few
days each quarter or once a year) with a narrow focus (e.g., street drug dealing
or public drinking on July 4) and within a circumscribed area (e.g., high
trafficking area or downtown). In other jurisdictions, zero tolerance is less
focused. What might have been called a crackdown 5 years ago is now
implemented under zero tolerance or order maintenance policies and classified
as part of community policing.

Zero tolerance policies have been included by some agencies under community
policing, since they often focus on quality-of-life crimes and incivilities and
primarily because "the community wants it." Zero tolerance policies may help
achieve some community policing goals within a framework that uses
community input to set priorities and delegates discretion to officers working
under mission statements that value the dignity of citizens, even suspected
offenders. However, there are dangers that without adequate mechanisms for
the diverse communities within most jurisdictions to register their demand for or
opposition to zero tolerance tactics, those tactics may directly undercut the
objective of partnership building by alienating potential community partners.

How are COPS grantees implementing crime prevention?

Prevention efforts abounded in the sites we observed, primarily manifested as
traditional prevention programs now subsumed under the community policing
label. Neighborhood Watch, DARE, and a wide variety of youth programs
remain the mainstays of prevention efforts. Beyond the standardized programs,
examples were rare of systemic prevention efforts based on the resolution of
the underlying causes of crime.

What legacy will remain from community policing initiatives stimulated or
facilitated with COPS funds? 

There are shining stars among the COPS grantees, which provide examples of
what most observers would classify as "the best of community policing." There
are far more agencies striving to change their organizations to pursue community
policing objectives, and are somewhere along the long and tortuous road. A
few agencies want nothing to do with it.

Our national survey and site visit results indicate that COPS funding has helped
to accelerate the adoption and broaden the definition of community policing.
The effects of this massive support for community policing have both positive
and negative aspects. Certainly COPS funding has enabled a great number of
law enforcement agencies to move ahead in their implementation of community
policing as locally defined. Funding conditioned expressly on community
policing implementation, coupled with peer pressure to embrace this model of
policing, has also led a substantial number of law enforcement agencies to
stretch the definition of community policing to include under its semantic
umbrella traditional quick-fix enforcement actions, draconian varieties of zero
tolerance, long established prevention programs, and citizen advisory councils
that are only advisory.

Our supplemental study of multiple funding streams in large grantee agencies
hinted at the power of local decisions to determine the course of the community
policing movement. Of the 100 largest grantee agencies in our national sample,
88 reported using their LLEBG funds to augment COPS and local funding of
community policing, despite the absence of any requirement to do so.
However, 82 of the 100 agreed or strongly agreed that their "agency has a
clear vision and is able to interpret grant requirements to support that view." 

Given the power of local decisionmakers, the COPS program will almost
certainly wind up affecting the nature of policing in three ways. In some
jurisdictions the forces fueled by COPS grants will achieve the community
policing objectives articulated by the COPS Office. In others, local forces will
transform the objectives into something unrecognizable by forebears and
creators of the program. In still others the forces will fizzle out for reasons that
have to do with leadership, implementation strategies, turnover at top levels,
organizational processes within grantee agencies, and communities' capacities
and willingness to join the enterprise.

Precisely where each of these outcomes occurs will not be known for some
years. However, change seems most likely to be institutionalized and sustained
when planning for change is broad based; the commitment to change is rooted
throughout the senior leadership of the agency and the political leadership of the
jurisdiction; changes are organizationwide rather than limited to a special unit;
organizational changes become embodied in a new physical plant or
technology; the new programmatic objectives are reflected in administrative
systems (e.g., for personnel administration or performance measurement); and
the change redefines the culture of a department, or at least of an entire age or
rank cohort within the department.

Measures of Success

Readers of an evaluation report are entitled to the clearest possible answer to
the question "Did the program succeed?" In the case of COPS, the clarity of
the answer depends on the criterion for success. At least the following success
criteria warrant attention:

--Client satisfaction.

--Effect on the quantity or level of policing in the United States.

--Effect on agencies' transitions to community policing.

--Effectiveness in stimulating technological and organizational innovation.

--Effect on crime.

Client satisfaction

If one considers grantees the clients of a Federal grant program, the COPS
Office "1-page" application and customer service orientation largely succeeded
with law enforcement agencies serving small jurisdictions (i.e., those serving
populations of less than 50,000). For many of those agencies, COPS was their
first Federal grant experience, and they reported high levels of satisfaction with
the application and administration processes; small agencies with prior Federal
grant experience found COPS grants easier than others to request and
administer. Larger agencies tended to find administrative burdens no less
burdensome than other grant programs, but a number of innovative departments
combined COPS funds with other funding streams to support their community
policing initiatives.

Simplification had one unfortunate consequence. By avoiding tedious
explanations, the grant application kits failed to resolve ambiguity in two key
administrative requirements: retention of COPS-funded officer positions and
non-supplanting of local fiscal effort. At least a few jurisdictions failed to apply
because of their overly conservative interpretations. Other jurisdictions adopted
more aggressive interpretations. Determining the compliance status of some of
those required several years for Office of Inspector General (OIG) audits,
COPS Office appeals of audit findings, and independent mediation to resolve
disagreements between OIG and the COPS Office regarding compliance
status.

Effect on level of policing

Our best estimate at this time is that by 2003, the COPS program will have
raised the level of policing "on the street" by the equivalent of 62,700 to 83,900
full-time officers. This estimate contains two elements: 39,000-55,400 hired
officers (net of attrition and cross-hiring between agencies), and 23,800-
28,500 full-time equivalents (FTEs) of officer time created by productivity gains
due to technology and civilians acquired with COPS MORE funds. To those
who considered the level of policing in 1994 inadequate, this constitutes
success, even though it falls well short of the announced target of "100,000 new
cops on the beat."

Even though we plan to update and refine these estimates after our Wave 4
survey, the actual increase is unlikely ever to be known precisely for several
reasons. First, if the optimal number of police officers in a jurisdiction is related
to local conditions, such as crime rates or tax receipts, then the benchmark
against which the COPS-funded increase is counted should shift when
conditions change. Second, only about half the COPS MORE grantees have
systems in place to measure productivity gains, and because the measurement
requires before-and-after comparisons, it is already too late to put
measurement systems in place. Third, even where measurement systems are in
place, they are likely to understate the productivity gains because some of it
occurs in very small increments of time, which officers may well forget to
record.

Effect on transitions to community policing

It seems clear that the COPS program accelerated transitions to locally defined
versions of community policing in at least three ways. First, by stimulating a
national conversation about community policing and providing training and
technical assistance, the COPS program made it difficult for a chief executive
seeking professional recognition to avoid considering adopting some approach
that could plausibly be labeled "community policing." Second, the COPS hiring
funds and innovative policing grants allowed chief executives who were so
inclined to add new community policing programs without immediately cutting
back other programs, increasing response time, or suffering other adverse
consequences. Third, the COPS funds created an incentive for agency
executives to adopt community policing. 

Whether, in accelerating transitions to community policing, the COPS program
distorted or "watered down" the concept is difficult to say. Tautologically, more
replications of any strategy that encourages tailoring to local conditions will
stimulate deviations from one specific definition of that strategy. In addition, two
policing strategies burst onto the national scene during the life of COPS but
apparently independently of it: zero tolerance and COMPSTAT (computer
comparison statistics), the New York City Police Department's system for
increasing commanders' accountability. While the obligation of COPS grantees
to pursue community policing may have encouraged some police executives to
describe those strategies as "community policing because the community wants
it," it seems at least plausible that use of those techniques would have
proliferated even if there had been no COPS program.

Effects on organizational and technological innovation

In agencies whose chief executives were inclined toward innovation, the COPS
program facilitated their efforts in several ways. First, the broad semantic
umbrella offered by the term "community policing" creates latitude for
experimentation with new policing tactics and organizational structures. Second,
the application required specification of a community policing strategy, thereby
offering an occasion for engaging broad segments of the agency and community
in planning that strategy. Third, COPS resources allowed departments the
opportunity to add new modes of policing without drawing resources away
from existing priorities. Fourth, although achieving the projected productivity
increases from MORE-funded mobile computers required telecommunications
and other technology that was unavailable at the outset of COPS, the MORE
funds fueled a large enough market to attract vendors' interest and to stimulate
their efforts to satisfy the new demand. This represented perhaps the largest
effort to bolster development of law enforcement technology since the
recommendations of the 1967 President's Commission on Law Enforcement
and Administration of Justice.

Effects on crime

As a process evaluation, this study did not address the question of whether the
COPS program had an effect on crime. Indeed, that question could not have
been seriously addressed in the early years of COPS because "the COPS
program" meant something different in each jurisdiction.

However, the adoption of new policing tactics by so many agencies as they
expanded their sworn forces presents an opportunity to investigate which
tactics (or clusters of tactics) had beneficial effects on crime rates. By
statistically relating local crime trends to the adoption of new tactics, it should
be possible to identify promising strategies that were more likely than not to
reduce crime more rapidly than the national average. Once promising strategies
or tactics are identified statistically, semistructured site observations should help
to identify the qualitative aspects of implementation that distinguish effective
from ineffective uses of these promising strategies.

-----------------------------

2. Origins and Objectives of the COPS Program

Stephen J. Gaffigan, Jeffrey A. Roth, and Michael E. Buerger 

Title I of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
(hereinafter referred to as the Crime Act) was a landmark piece of legislation
that altered the Federal role in State and local law enforcement. Never before
in U.S. history had Federal legislation so aggressively encouraged local and
State law enforcement agencies to pursue two objectives simultaneously:
increasing the number of sworn officers on the street and adopting a specific
policing approach, namely community-oriented policing (i.e., community
policing). At a time when virtually no one was calling for an expansion of the
Federal Government, a new Office of Community Oriented Policing Services--
the COPS Office--was created to carry out that mandate.

The COPS story begins at the confluence of two significant forces--one
grounded in presidential politics and the other with roots in policing practice and
research. First, perceptions of increased levels and viciousness of violent crime
during the late 1980s had driven public fear and anger over crime to high levels
and had created questions about the ability of government at any level to
achieve its constitutional mandate to insure domestic tranquility. Responding to
those concerns, presidential candidate Bill Clinton pledged to put 100,000 new
police officers on the streets of the Nation, as part of his campaign.

Second, policing reforms over the previous two decades provided both the
need for and seeds of new approaches to policing, which had become known
as community policing and problem-oriented policing. Community policing
stressed greater police responsiveness to the community at several levels,
including more personal service; greater citizen input into police priorities;
increased police attention to previously ignored "quality of life" issues--
behaviors, actions, and conditions that were low-level nuisances to the police
but major problems to residents and business people; and an expanded
commitment to crime prevention without sacrificing the quality of crime
suppression. Community policing emphasized community organizing and
interagency cooperation to a greater degree than ever before.

Herman Goldstein first articulated problem-oriented policing in 1979 as a
critique of past police practices. Goldstein (1979) argued for disaggregating the
traditional police crime categories such as the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)
index, looking for common patterns within the disaggregated categories and in
other demands for police service, and identifying the common causes that linked
seemingly unrelated events that came to police attention. Like community
policing, problem-oriented policing placed a premium on identifying resources
and partnerships external to the police agency and bringing a coordinated
response from all levels of government and all segments of the community to
bear on common problems. However, problem-oriented policing did not
necessarily require the fundamental change in the relationship to the community
that COPS represented. Problem solving could be, and often was, conducted
as a police-only exercise with modest and police-controlled community
participation where needed.

Since problem-oriented policing was a relatively well-defined strategy that often
produced visible successes, it rapidly gained adherents in the police community
(Goldstein, 1979; Eck and Spelman, 1987; Sherman, Buerger, and Gartin,
1989). By contrast, community policing was originally promulgated as a
philosophy, lacking specific strategic or tactical applications. Its definition varied
from one jurisdiction to another during its developmental phase, often taking 
the form of small, self-contained programs staffed by volunteers.
Community-oriented policing (COP) acquired an image as inherently "soft" 
policing, giving rise to a common locker room joke that COP means "Call the
Other Police." It was rejected by some as "not real police work"; derided by
others as "just what we've always done, only now they've figured out what to
call it"; and even when recognized as a laudable goal, dismissed on the grounds
of being too labor intensive for existing staffing levels to accommodate.

Some academic observers also found little that was substantively new in
community policing; Klockars (1991), for example, described it as merely "the
latest in a fairly long tradition of circumlocutions whose purpose is to conceal,
mystify, and legitimate police distribution of nonnegotiably coercive force." In
contrast, other academics considered community policing not only a viable
strategy but the "only form of policing available for anyone who seeks to
improve police operations, management, or relations with the public" (Eck and
Rosenbaum, 1994:4).

Despite the divergent viewpoints, some prominent police administrators
recognized community policing as an important development by the early
1990s. Though recognizing the need for more police resources in the wake of
the rising crime rate and level of public concern, local governments also
understood that more officers pursuing crime suppression solely by arrest
would not stem the crime problem. A new approach was needed to make
communities less vulnerable to crime and disorder, and community policing
seemed to hold promise. In a survey by Trojanowicz (1994), 42 percent of all
police departments serving jurisdictions of more than 50,000 reported having
adopted some form of community policing. Perhaps more importantly, city
administrators recognized the importance of community policing: Several major
cities (including Philadelphia, Milwaukee, and Los Angeles) instituted
community policing as a reform in the wake of high-profile incidents that
exacerbated the tensions between their police departments and their minority
communities.

New Federal resources seemed a plausible incentive for a local agency to
launch or accelerate a transition to community policing, especially in view of its
reputation as labor intensive. Nevertheless, simultaneous Federal pursuit of both 
objectives--putting more officers on the street quickly while encouraging
agencies to change their ways of doing business--created a fundamental
dilemma. Too much Federal coercion to change might discourage local
agencies from participating in the program, thereby jeopardizing the goal of
augmenting overall police staffing levels. At the other extreme, simply increasing
officer counts without a fundamental change of mission would effectively dilute
any benefits that problem-oriented policing and community policing offered to
communities and agencies.

Other inherent conflicts also influenced the shape of the program. Although the
Crime Act nowhere mentioned a target number of new officers, presidential
campaign promises had made 100,000 the benchmark for success. Expanding
the Federal share of the cost could aggravate public concern over the Federal
budget deficit, yet requiring localities to pay too great a share of the cost could
discourage their participation. The formidable volume of administrative
regulations and procedures that had grown up around Federal assistance to law
enforcement since the 1968 Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act
caused additional difficulties. Most Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) funds
intended for localities had to pass through State criminal justice planning
agencies dominated by guber-natorial appointees, a longstanding procedure.
Lengthy advance Federal and State reviews of grant applications and
cumbersome monitoring procedures had been imposed to ensure grantees'
compliance and prevent diversion of grant funds to unintended purposes. The
advance reviews necessarily slowed the distribution of funds, and local concern
over ongoing administrative requirements (the "Federal strings attached" 
to the money) potentially discouraged program participation. An additional
obstacle was created when some visible leaders among mayors and law
enforcement chief executives explicitly questioned whether new officers were
the most useful form of Federal assistance (see, e.g., Committee on Law and
Justice, 1994:17). The stage was set for a difficult balancing act.

The remainder of this chapter describes in more detail how these forces shaped
the multiple objectives of the COPS program. In turn, the multiple program
objectives shaped the objectives of this evaluation.

The Evolution of a Presidential Initiative

Fear of crime and violence

Americans' fear of crime and violence has ebbed and flowed in public opinion
polls over the decades. In the early 1990s, it registered quite high on the
"political barometer." In February 1992, during the presidential primary election
season, a Gallup Poll reported record high expressions of public concern about
crime. Fifty-four percent of the poll respondents, the highest since 1981, felt
that crime in their area was "more" than the year before, while 89 percent, the
highest in the 20-year history of the poll, felt that crime throughout the United
States was higher than the previous year.

Without attempting to present a definitive explanation of the peak in concern
over crime at that time, it is worth mentioning some possible causes.
Statistically, lethal violence had increased substantially since the mid-1980s,
particularly among male African-American youths and young adults, so that by
1992 many cities throughout the United States reported record numbers of
homicides. The seemingly random and indiscriminate nature of many of these
killings left an indelible mark on the public psyche. "Drive-by shootings," often
committed with semiautomatic pistols that killed bystanders and other
unintended targets who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time,
were especially unsettling. Such killings broke the traditional profile of
homicides, which involved people who knew each other and intimate situations
in which the parties lost their self-control. The news media reported brutal
attacks frequently, even those in faraway cities, focusing on crimes in which the
killers were strangers to their victims.

Some evidence suggests this increase in lethal violence resulted from the rapid
expansion of the crack cocaine trade (Reiss and Roth, eds., 1993; Blumstein
and Rosenfeld, 1998). Cash and drugs flowed in volume through rapidly
expanding and unstable drug markets that lacked mechanisms for nonviolent
resolution of disputes. Rival drug dealers' competition over turf (i.e., sales
territory), personal affronts, and challenges to authority frequently led to violent
outbursts and retaliatory attacks. The almost daily experience of hearing shots
fired and seeing the consequences created a sense of hopelessness among the
residents in the most heavily affected inner city neighborhoods. Attitudes in the
larger community were influenced by media reports that, not surprisingly,
tended to focus on the most spectacular incidents. Daily news broadcasts and
newspaper articles in some large cities occasionally resembled war time
reporting of the latest "body counts," often accompanied by graphic footage
and pictures of the carnage. This saturation of violence took a painful toll on the
American psyche:

In cities, suburban areas, and even small towns, Americans are fearful and
concerned that violence has permeated the fabric of their communities, and
degraded the quality of their lives. This anxiety is not unfounded. In recent
years, murders have killed about 23,000 people annually, while upward of
3,000,000 nonfatal but serious violent victimizations have occurred each year.
These incidents are sources of chronic fear and public concern over the
seeming inability of public authorities to prevent them. (Reiss and Roth, eds.,
1993:vii.)

As if this real violence were not destructive enough, fictional television dramas
and "action" movies further amplified its effect on the public mind set. Graphic
and gratuitous violence was becoming a mainstay in television programming and
movie production. Beyond passive forms of entertainment, arcade and video
games appeared that encouraged players to "seek out and destroy" countless
human targets, and toy stores stocked simulated guns and other means of
pretend destruction. According to an article commissioned by the U.S.
Department of Justice (DOJ):

The public's concerns about crime seem to be somewhat independent of the
actual crime rate, a phenomenon that may discourage law enforcement
professionals but underscores just how frightening this issue is for most people.
Deeply held public fears developed over decades may be slow to dissipate
even in the best of circumstances. Many observers have suggested that public
fears about crime are driven by media coverage rather than by any real
knowledge of crime rates in their area. (Johnson, 1994:10.)

Public opinion regarding public institutions

Perhaps even more troubling to policymakers than the public's rising fear of
crime was the growing crisis in confidence expressed in similar polls concerning
the ability of the government, especially the criminal justice system, to do
anything constructive about it. In a democracy, such erosion of confidence in so
vital an area could be catastrophic. Indeed, a small but growing band of
commentators contrasted presumed advantages of private deterrence achieved
by private citizens carrying concealed firearms with presumed disadvantages of
public deterrence achieved by police and the criminal justice system (See, e.g.,
Benson, 1990).

In a 1995 Gallup poll, respondents were asked to rank 14 institutions in
American society according to the levels of respect and confidence they held
for each. In the final ranking in this poll, Congress placed number 12 and the
criminal justice system was last at number 14. 

Opinion research strongly suggests that, for the public, the concept of justice
includes both protecting the rights of the accused and redressing wrongs done
to victims and society. The vast majority of Americans appears to believe that
the balance between these two goals has tipped too far in favor of the accused.

Eighty-six percent of Americans say the court system does too much to protect
the rights of the accused and not enough to protect the rights of victims (ABC
News, February 1994). Only 3 percent of Americans say the courts deal too
harshly with criminals; 85 percent say they are not harsh enough (National
Opinion Research Center, May 1994). (See Johnson, 1999.)

In contrast, respondents to another poll taken at about the same time ranked
the police number two in respect and confidence, behind only the military.

Importantly for the development of the COPS program, other polls reflected
not only general respect but a belief that police might be able to solve the
problem that other public institutions failed to address. According to a review
commissioned by DOJ: 

Putting more police officers on the streets as an effective way to fight crime is
broadly supported. Nine in ten Americans say that increasing the number of
police is a very (46 percent) or somewhat (44 percent) effective way to reduce
crime (ABC News, November 1994). And, given the general skepticism
people feel about many institutions and most of government, Americans voice
substantial confidence in law enforcement. Fifty-eight percent say they have a
"great deal" or "quite a lot" of confidence in the police; another 30 percent say
they have "some" confidence in the police; only a handful (11 percent) express
very little or no confidence. (The Gallup Organization for CNN/USA Today,
April 1995.)

The review went on to discuss critical links between proper police behavior and
the maintenance of such high levels of confidence in police ability to control
crime and violence. But the high public confidence in police offered the
possibility that the public might accept deploying additional police officers as a
plausible governmental response to this visible concern.

Past Federal responses to crime

The early 1990s were not the first time that violence had seized public attention
and bipartisan Federal concern. The decade of the 1960s gave rise to multiple
Federal initiatives to address the precipitous rise in public violence related to 
antiwar and civil rights protests.

In July 1965, as part of the Federal response to the "long, hot summers" of
racial protest and rioting in the Nation's inner cities, President Lyndon Johnson
created the Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice
(hereinafter, the Crime Commission), chaired by former U.S. Attorney General
Nicholas Katzenbach. Its report, The Challenge of Crime in a Free Society,
was released in February 1967 (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967) and 
became the most influential of all the 1960s commissions over the next two
decades. Its 200 recommendations spanned all of law enforcement and criminal
justice, urged the Nation toward a fundamental rethinking of crime and the
national response, and urged pursuit of seven objectives. Three of the
objectives were intended to reorient the societal response to crime toward
prevention; the remaining four dealt with upgrading the capacity and operations
of the criminal justice agencies.

The three components of the intended reorientation were to focus on preventing
crime before it occurred; to eliminate injustices within the criminal justice
system; and to create shared responsibility for criminal justice with the citizenry,
social institutions, and agencies at all levels in government. Upgrading criminal
justice system operations included developing new ways of dealing with
offenders; attracting people with greater expertise, initiative, and integrity into
the criminal justice professions; increasing the knowledge base by conducting
more basic and applied research on crime and criminal justice administration;
and giving the agencies more money.

Shortly after release of the Crime Commission's report, the Omnibus Crime and
Safe Streets Act of 1968 (Pub. L. 90-351) was enacted by Congress and
signed by President Johnson. To support the Crime Commission's objectives to 
improve criminal justice system capacities, the 1968 Act created the Law
Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA). LEAA contained separate
units to disburse Federal grants to State and local criminal justice agencies,
sponsor and disseminate research intended to improve criminal justice practice,
and encourage States and localities to expand their use of criminal justice
information systems and the statistics they can generate. Initially, LEAA
operated through an elaborate structure of regional offices, which, in turn,
distributed block grants to States on a formula basis, along with some Federal
discretionary funds. State criminal justice planning agencies, in turn, allocated
funds to local jurisdictions. Although the structure has been streamlined since
1968, the LEAA mission and functions were retained, and they are still active
within DOJ's Office of Justice Programs (OJP). BJA awards formula and
discretionary action grants to law enforcement and criminal justice agencies,
and State planning agencies still allocate much of the Federal funding to
localities--a structure that continues to rankle mayors and city managers
(Committee on Law and Justice, 1994). The National Institute of Justice (NIJ)
sponsors and conducts criminal justice research and program evaluations. The
Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) manages a variety of criminal justice statistics
and information systems programs. Until 1994 these agencies served as the sole
mechanisms of Federal support to State and local law enforcement agencies for
noninvestigative functions.

The prevention agenda espoused by the Crime Commission received less
attention than did the enhancement of the criminal justice system, but it was far
from ignored. In 1968, after another wave of riots engulfed the Nation in the
wake of the assassinations of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., and Sen. Robert
Kennedy, President Johnson selected Republican Milton Eisenhower to chair
the National Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. The
Eisenhower Commission's 1969 report identified poverty and inequality as root
causes of much of the violence of the decade and called