Office of Justice Programs National Institute of Justice

1 Department of JusticeOffice of Justice ProgramsNational Institute of JusticeR e s e a r c h i n B r i e fNational Institute of JusticeJulie E. Samuels, Acting COPS Program After 4 Years National Evaluationby Jeffrey A. Roth and Joseph F. RyanAugust 2000productivity and redeploying their savedtime to community policing. The thirdapproach was to award grants to agenciesfor innovative Programs with special pur-poses, such as reducing youth gun vio-lence and domestic hiring grants were limited to 75 per-cent of each hired officer s salary andfringe benefits, normally up to a 3-yearcap of $75,000. The grants for otherresources were not limited by the , grantees were required tomatch the grants with at least 25 percentof program costs, to submit acceptablestrategies for implementing communitypolicing in their jurisdictions, and toretain the COPS-funded officer positionsusing local funds after the 3-year grantsexpired.

2 Funds were authorized to reim-burse up to $5,000 of training costs forformer military personnel hired underthe , the Act required simplifiedapplication procedures for jurisdictionswith populations of less than 50,000 andmandated an equal distribution of fundsbetween jurisdictions with populationsof more than and less than 150, with most Federal grant Programs ,COPS-funded resources were requiredto supplement local expenditures, notsupplant or replace $9 billion of the $30 billion ofexpenditures authorized by the ViolentCrime Control and Law Enforcement Actof 1994 (Crime Act) was allocated to thelaw s Title I, the legislative basis of whatsoon became known as the CommunityOriented Policing Services (COPS) pro-gram. Title I listed four specific goalsintended to change both the level andpractice of policing in the United States:1.

3 To increase the number of officersdeployed in American To foster problem solving and inter-action with communities by To encourage innovation in To develop new technologies for assist-ing officers in reducing crime and a 6-year period, the approximately$9 billion was to fund three primary ap-proaches to achieving the foregoing first approach involved the award of3-year grants to law enforcement agenciesfor hiring police officers to engage incommunity policing activities. The sec-ond was to award grants for acquiringtechnology, hiring civilians, and, initially,paying officer overtime all with theintent of increasing existing officers Issues and FindingsDiscussed in this Brief: An inde-pendent process evaluation of theCommunity Oriented Policing Ser-vices (COPS) program, whose leg-islative basis is Title I of the ViolentCrime Control and Law Enforce-ment Act of 1994.

4 Covering pri-marily the first 4 years of the COPS program but including some pro-jections up to 2003, the evalua-tion, sponsored by NIJ andconducted by the Urban Institute ,is based on a series of nationwidetelephone surveys, site visits, andcase studies. The evaluation fo-cuses primarily on COPS grantsenabling law enforcement agen-cies (1) to hire police officers toengage in community policing ac-tivities, and (2) to redeploy existingofficers to community policing byincreasing officer productivitythrough the acquisition of technol-ogy or by freeing up officers forcommunity policing by filling someofficer-held positions with issues: To what extent didthe COPS program succeed inputting more officers on the streetand, through its promotion ofcommunity policing, change thepractice of policing in the UnitedStates?

5 Did the distribution ofCOPS mirror the disparity in crimelevels among jurisdictions? Howsatisfied were grantees with theCOPS application and administra-tion processes? Have granteesengaged in community policing2R e s e a r c h i n B r i e fby building partnerships, solving prob-lems, and doing crime prevention?Key findings: Among the principal find-ings of the evaluation are the following:lBy May 1999, 100,500 officers andequivalents had been funded. Of them,preliminary estimates indicate that be-tween 84,700 and 89,400 will have beendeployed by 2003. Because some officerswill have departed before others beginservice, the federally funded increase(based on awards through May 1999) inpolicing levels will peak in 2001 between69,000 and 84,600 before falling to62,700 83,900 in 2003.

6 These estimateswill be revised as data collected in mid-2000 are analyzed. The COPS Office hascontinued to award grants since program accelerated transitionsto locally defined versions of communitypolicing. COPS funds seem more likely tohave fueled movements toward adoptionTo meet the requirements of Title I,eight initiatives were undertaken:1. Within a month after the Crime Actwas signed into law, COPS Phase Igrants for hiring officers wereawarded to agencies that had previ-ously applied unsuccessfully forgrants under the previous PoliceHiring Supplement (PHS) program;together, COPS Phase I and PHSfunded nearly 4,700 Also within that month, theDepartment of Justice created anew agency, the COPS Office , toadminister the new grant In November, the COPS Officeestablished two grant Programs forhiring officers: Funding Acceler-Issues and community policing that were alreadyaccelerating than to have caused analysis found that the 1 percent ofCOPS grantees with the largest 1997 mur-der counts received 31 percent of all COPS funds awarded through 1997.

7 The 10 per-cent of grantees with the highest murdercounts received 50 percent of total application procedures andcustomer service orientation resulted inmany smaller police agencies reportinghigh levels of satisfaction with theprogram s application and administrativeprocesses. Larger agencies tended tofind administrative requirements no lessburdensome than those of other partnerships with communitiesby COPS grantees was commonplace inmany of the agencies visited but, all toooften, partnerships were in name onlyor simply standard, temporary workingarrangements. Most visited agencies didsome form of problem solving, but formand visibility varied widely from agency toagency. In observed sites, crime preventionefforts abounded, primarily manifested astraditional Programs now subsumed underthe community policing COPS program facilitated theefforts of agency chief executives whowere inclined toward innovation and rep-resented perhaps the largest effort tobolster development of law enforcementtechnology since the 1967 President sCommission on Law Enforcement andAdministration of Justice .

8 COPS-fundedtechnology is benefiting localities but notyet meeting productivity audience: State and local lawenforcement agencies, State and local gov-ernment administrators, Federal agenciesand congressional committees involved incriminal Justice issues, and for Small Towns (COPS FAST),with simplified application proce-dures for small agencies; and Ac-celerated Hiring, Education, andDeployment (COPS AHEAD), withmore stringent application proce-dures, for large agencies. Later,these two Programs were succeededby the Universal Hiring Program(UHP) for all jurisdictions regard-less of Within a few months, the COPSO ffice created the Making OfficerRedeployment Effective (COPSMORE) program to fund technol-ogy, civilians, and overtime (theovertime option was eliminatedafter fiscal 1995).

9 5. To process training grants for hiredmilitary personnel, the COPS Officeestablished the Troops to To address local law enforcementneeds other than new officers andother resources, the COPS Officereceived authorization to administerthe existing Comprehensive Com-munities Program and created othergrant Programs to launch the PoliceCorps and to help grantees addresssuch specific problems as domesticviolence, youth firearms violence,gangs, methamphetamine, andschool To encourage and assist the polic-ing field in its transition to commu-nity policing, the COPS Office3R e s e a r c h i n B r i e fevaluators efforts. The PHS and COPSP hase I grants were awarded beforeall grantmaking innovations wereadopted, and the award processes werefully completed before this evaluationbegan.

10 Therefore, although UI countedthose program resources in its analy-ses, it did not single out those pro-grams for separate program evaluationpurposes. Finally, because the RCPI semerged well after the evaluation wasunder way and project resources com-mitted, observations of their activitieswere limited to incidental findingsonsite rather than a Research in Brief presents UI snational evaluation findings coveringroughly the first 4 years of COPS,with primary focus on the COPSFAST, AHEAD, UHP, and MORE Programs . Our work was guided by thelogic model shown in exhibit 1, whichoutlines the COPS program and itsintended model indicates that COPS pro-gram outcomes depend on local deci-sions and actions to a greater degreethan Federal block grant Programs (in which formulas determine fundingallocations) or discretionary Programs (in which Federal officials selectgrantees based on detailed plans forusing the funds).