June 3, 2015
Courtesy of Stuart F. Delery, Acting Associate Attorney
General
The Department of Justice’s Office of Community Oriented
Policing Services provides essential support to state, local, and tribal police
departments. Led by a former police
chief who served for over 28 years in the Oakland and East Palo Alto Police
Departments, the COPS Office is one of the nation’s foremost resources on
building trust and mutual respect between law enforcement officers and the
communities they serve. It has worked
with hundreds of police departments to provide training, lead collaborative
efforts to improve policies and practices, and coordinate emergency assistance
in response to a crisis. It also
administers grants that have allowed state, local, and tribal police
departments to hire and retain an additional 126,000 officers, focused on top
national priorities like preventing terrorism and violent crime.
Law enforcement organizations and civil rights leaders have
praised the COPS Office’s work. And its
work is all the more critical given the tensions that recent incidents in
Baltimore, Ferguson, North Charleston, and elsewhere have laid bare.
But instead of maintaining or expanding the COPS Office’s
programs, the budget that the House of Representatives is about to consider
would effectively eliminate them. The
White House Office of Management and Budget recently released a letter to the
Hill expressing serious concerns about the House budget proposal. It would cut all funding for the COPS
Office’s training and critical response efforts, as well as funding for
advancing community policing innovation in the field. It would eliminate the COPS hiring
grants. Almost all of the existing functions
of the COPS Office would lose their entire budget at the start of the next
fiscal year.
The proposed budget relocates the funding for peripherally
related programs currently run out of other offices to the COPS Office. But none of that money would fund the
government’s core efforts to support community policing. The COPS program is just one of many examples
of the troubling, short-sighted cuts that result from Congressional
Republicans’ insistence on maintaining sequestration funding levels in their FY
2016 budget. Sequestration was never intended to take effect: rather, it was
supposed to threaten such drastic cuts to both defense and non-defense funding
that policymakers would be motivated to come to the table and reduce the
deficit through smart, balanced reforms.
Gutting the COPS Office would result in an estimated 1,300
fewer officers in cities and towns all across the country and diminish the
capacity of the nation’s first responders.
Its full impact, however, would go beyond the loss of law enforcement
personnel safeguarding communities. That
impact is best understood by looking at the kinds of remarkable support for
police departments that also would be lost.
For example, after a dramatic increase in officer-involved
shootings in 2011, the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department Sheriff
recognized a problem and called the COPS Office for help. As part of a multi-year, voluntary
collaborative review process, the COPS Office identified 75 findings and made
recommendations that the department could implement to reduce the number of
officer-involved shootings.
Three years after the initial report was issued, the Las
Vegas department has implemented almost every recommendation. Officer-involved shootings involving unarmed
suspects have been significantly reduced.
The use of tasers, pepper spray, and batons has declined. And the number of arrests has gone down,
while public safety and community relations have improved considerably.
Las Vegas is just one of the jurisdictions that have benefited
from the COPS Office’s expertise. Large
cities like Philadelphia, regional centers like Spokane and Fayetteville, and
smaller cities like Calexico and Salinas in California all are currently
working with the COPS Office to address issues ranging from use of force to
racial profiling, training, accountability systems, and community
engagement. Agencies across the nation
are using COPS Office reports as self-assessment tools.
Just as importantly, when communities like Baltimore and
Ferguson have faced crises, the COPS Office has helped law enforcement agencies
respond swiftly, drawing on a nationwide network of experts and successfully
connecting them with the people responsible for coordinating the law
enforcement response on the ground.
Within days of recent outbreaks of violence, for example, the COPS
Office has assembled a group of experience police chiefs to provide advice on
best practices for crowd control that respected First Amendment rights while
also protecting officers. The COPS
Office also provided critical response resources to police departments in
Detroit, San Diego, New Orleans, and numerous other cities and towns facing a
variety of challenges.
The payoff from an investment in the COPS programs has been
more effective policing and safer communities. As we continue an emerging
national dialogue about improving police-community relationships, the
remarkable expertise and resources that the COPS Office brings to the table –
including its ability to serve as a liaison between community and law
enforcement leaders – are more important than ever. Eliminating such a resource would be
disastrous. I urge Congress to restore
funding for the COPS programs.
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