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 for a frontal attack on
both. Less heralded than the LEAA, the legacy of the Eisenhower
Commission's recommendations included the Model Cities program and a
spectrum of community organizing and community-building initiatives that laid
the groundwork for many later aspects of community policing. The Ford,
Eisenhower, and Mott foundations, among many others, sponsored a panorama
of social reform projects as well as some high-profile law enforcement
initiatives. The latter included Ford's creation of the Police Foundation to
conduct policing research and Mott's sponsorship of the original Flint
(Michigan) Foot Patrol Experiment. This course paralleled the LEAA initiatives
and prefigured today's public/private partnerships. 

During the 1980s and early 1990s, the U.S. Congress passed little
comprehensive legislation that carried as much potential for changing State and
local practice as the 1968 act. The Sentencing Reform Act of 1984 abolished
parole and created a commission to develop Federal sentencing guidelines,
which some hoped would provide a national model for replication by the
States. However, the national debate on criminal matters came to be dominated
by a "get tough" approach, and criminal justice system reform took an
increasingly punitive direction. Subsequent legislation nullified one area of the
U.S. Sentencing Commission's work through a series of mandatory minimum
sentences that exceeded the guideline ranges for various drug distribution and
use offenses. Though drug distribution and use were the initial targets of
mandatory minimum sentences, other statutes extended the list of Federal
crimes and authorized Federal prosecution of other crimes that had traditionally
fallen under State purview.

Alternatives to "getting tough" became more politically unpopular as crime
continued to rise. The 1988 Democratic presidential candidate, Massachusetts
Gov. Michael Dukakis was vigorously attacked in both the primary and general
elections over the case of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer who raped a
Maryland woman and savagely beat her fiance while on furlough from a State
prison during Dukakis' gubernatorial term. Conservative Federal and State
legislators seized the Horton episode as a national symbol of the futility of
rehabilitation programs and painted the Democrats who supported them as
being "soft on crime." Republican George Bush defeated Dukakis, and
conservative legislators successfully overrode proposals to expand crime
prevention programs.

The Bush administration coincided with the rise in violence during the late
1980s and a peak in public concern over the crack cocaine trade. For the most
part the administration promoted "get tough" responses. A 1992 report
authored by Attorney General William Barr called for greater use of such
tactics as pretrial detention, mandatory minimum sentences, the death penalty,
and adjudicating juvenile offenders as adults (Barr, 1992). The administration
continued building new prisons as well, to cope with the prison crowding that
was the predictable result of longer sentences and sharply curtailed prospects
for parole.

However, within the Bush administration and, later, in Congress, the realization
emerged that pulling together the bipartisan consensus needed to "do something
about crime" would be more easily achieved if the response combined symbols
and elements of crime prevention with those of tough enforcement. The product
of this new course, launched near the end of the Bush administration's term,
was Operation Weed and Seed (OWS), which attracted supporters from
across the political spectrum. Weed and Seed represented a hybrid that
combined tough, no-nonsense enforcement efforts to bring order to
crime-plagued neighborhoods ("weeding") with a broader governmental effort
to sustain order through social services and neighborhood redevelopment
("seeding"). Through Weed and Seed, community policing became a formal
part of Federal policy for the first time and was described in the program
implementation manual as the "bridge between weeding and seeding"
(Executive Office for Weed and Seed, 1992:1-4).

OWS encountered obstacles, and some targeted neighborhoods were
suspicious and reluctant to participate. The local initiatives were housed in U.S.
Attorneys' offices, which were seen as enforcement-oriented and remote from
communities. The weeding metaphor embodied in the program name was seen
as insulting because the weeds targeted for removal were often residents--sons,
cousins, or neighbors of community members who viewed their lawbreaking
more as a result of disenfranchisement than of moral bankruptcy. Seeding
components proved difficult to mount, in part because the infrastructure needed
for service delivery was lacking in some neighborhoods and separate, often
cumbersome, grant applications were required to obtain seeding funds from
programs in the departments of Health and Human Services, Housing and
Urban Development, Education, and Labor.

Nevertheless, OWS was recognized as a break from past programs that
emphasized solely enforcement or solely services. In addition, programs in
several cities reduced crime in the Weed and Seed neighborhoods, giving
credence to the concept. By fiscal 1993, when Bill Clinton was inaugurated,
OWS was funded in 21 sites at a total of $13.5 million (Dunworth and Mills,
1999); it had expanded to 200 sites by fiscal 1999.

Another Bush administration crime control program reflected the combined
approach philosophy. The Public Housing Drug Elimination Program (PHDEP),
jointly funded by BJA and HUD, combined aggressive tactical police sweeps to
remove drugs and drug traffickers from housing projects with enhanced access
to drug treatment and prevention resources. This program resulted in the
development of comprehensive training and technical assistance resources for
use by local communities, and a small consortium of organizations was funded 
to deliver these services to local teams.

The new administration takes charge 

The 1992 presidential campaign shifted into high gear during a period of
growing public pressure on elected officials and candidates for a visible,
plausible response to crime and violence. Mindful of the role played by the
Willie Horton episode in their 1988 defeat, Democrats and presidential
candidate Bill Clinton seized the initiative on crimefighting. Arguing that
restoring order in communities was a critical precursor to other initiatives,
Clinton proposed an aggressive approach to the crime problem in which the
substantial Federal role included a massive infusion of funds to support local
jurisdictions. Recognizing from national polls that law enforcement agencies still
commanded public respect, Clinton called for the hiring of 100,000 new police
officers to be deployed by State and local law enforcement agencies on the
streets of the Nation's cities and towns.

In its early months, the Clinton administration continued the dual approach of
enforcement and prevention. Clinton's new Attorney General, Janet Reno, had
established herself as a prosecutor in south Florida; she brought with her a
strong belief that local coalitions and partnerships between law enforcement
agencies and community-based organizations were necessary to achieve any
kind of meaningful and lasting impact upon crime and violence.

Two early programs emphasized the development and coordination of such
partnerships. The unfunded Pulling America's Communities Together (PACT)
was run initially from the office of the deputy attorney general. Later, BJA
launched the funded Comprehensive Communities Program (CCP), which
incorporated several innovative features. CCP grants required preliminary
planning by all potential partners, as well as monitoring and support for the
planning process. Grant applications could access multiple programs through a
single application process, with federally preset funding allocations across the
various partners. This went a long way toward eliminating any potential
infighting over money: Potential partners knew from the start what money they
could expect, so the planning process could focus on program goals rather than
resource allocation. Emphasizing the need to build or strengthen local capacities
to participate in partnerships, BJA provided targeted training and technical
assistance to all CCP sites for that purpose (Kelling et al., 1998). While PACT
provided no funds, its technical assistance components also emphasized
partnership building.

The new administration recognized that such partnership building, while
potentially important, would be seen neither as a sufficient response to the
Nation's crime problem, nor as redemption of the campaign promise of
100,000 police officers. Two basic obstacles remained, however: how to pay
for the officers in the midst of an outcry over Federal budget deficits, and how
to deploy them in ways that would reinforce emerging police-community
partnerships without visibly compromising the image of "toughness." 

Solving the fiscal problem required two decisions to be negotiated with
Congress. Costs of the officers would be shared with localities, and the Federal
share would be paid for out of a Violent Crime Reduction Act Trust Fund
financed by savings from downsizing the Federal Government.[1]

For a deployment strategy that showed promise of reinforcing
police-community partnerships, the administration drew on community policing,
a concept that had evolved for some time and had gained adherents among law
enforcement executives, yet remained ambiguous. 

From Police Reforms to Community Policing

Though community oriented policing was spoken of as a dominant or at least
emerging model of policing in the early 1990s, its popularity was tinged with
ambiguity. The Trojanowicz (1994) survey indicated community policing in
some form was being adopted by almost half the agencies serving more than
50,000 people; Moore (1994) reported at about the same time that 
"in practice, no department has yet fully implemented community policing as an
overall philosophy." Several years earlier, in an attempt to clarify the community
policing concept, Goldstein (1986:8) noted in passing that the term served a
useful purpose as a rhetorical device. He speculated that the term was useful for
calling attention to values that should underlie policing in a free society: more
community involvement, greater accountability to the community, and improved
service to the community.

Controversy over what community policing really is or really means has
attended the discussions of its implementation down to the present day. For
Trojanowicz and his colleagues it was a philosophy for guiding every aspect of
a police agency's operations. In some cases, it is indeed merely a rhetorical
device used not in Goldstein's terms but in Klockars': a progressive-sounding
verbal smoke screen to protect traditional methods and values quite different
from the philosophy articulated by Trojanowicz. To many scholars and
observers of the police, community policing is primarily a collection of programs
or tactics employed in good faith within agencies that still cling to traditional
deployments and attitudes. 

In a small number of departments, community policing represents a long-term
strategy that uses the smaller programs and tactics as a means to bring about a
slow but permanent change in the overall way the agency does business.

Arguably, the concept has played all four roles at various times and in various
endeavors, including the development of Title I and the operation of its
programs. During congressional debate over the 1994 Crime Act, the
simultaneous popularity and ambiguity of community-oriented policing enhanced
its rhetorical value as a device for attracting the legislative majority needed to
pass the Act. As had been true of Weed and Seed, advocates of get-tough
crime control (weeding) could hear "policing" while community enhancement
(seeding) adherents could focus on "community oriented."

Later, the new COPS Office created to carry out Title I took a step toward
defining community policing by asking Congress to judge its success (and
applicants to describe their intended uses of grants) in terms of three objectives:
building partnerships with their communities, adopting problem-solving tactics,
and refining organizational structures and functions to support the programmatic
objectives (Brann, 1995). Crime prevention had been added to the
programmatic objectives by the time more than 11,000 law enforcement
agencies submitted their required community policing strategies with their first
grant applications.

In turn, those strategies outlined the programs and tactics they planned in
pursuit of those objectives. Given the practical difficulties of obtaining valid
measures of progress toward those objectives on such a large scale, the COPS
Office monitored strategy implementation in terms of the programs and tactics.
Similarly, for the present study, the Urban Institute based its comparison of
community policing implementation by grantee and nongrantee agencies on a
national survey of law enforcement agencies' adoption of tactics used more or
less commonly to pursue the four COPS Office objectives. Although 
measuring tactics implementation was the only practical way to develop a
national picture of progress toward the stated objectives, other components of
this study found examples of grantee agencies changing their mission, vision, or
values statements or taking other steps to incorporate community policing
explicitly into their agencies' philosophies.

Not only has the term "community policing" played multiple roles with respect
to the COPS program, but also, as chapter 6 makes clear, police agencies
employ the term to cover a wide variety of practices. The term offers such a
wide umbrella for at least two reasons. First, to the extent that community
policing means addressing the needs and using the resources of local
neighborhoods, diversity of neighborhoods calls for diversity in community
policing strategies and tactics. Second, the term seems to have acquired a
variety of meanings because over the past several decades it has been applied
to a rather wide variety of policing reforms, innovations, and programs.

A review of the history of community policing is beyond the scope of this
evaluation. Nevertheless, to give readers some appreciation of the wide range
of meanings that well-informed and well-meaning legislators, program
administrators, grantees, and observers assigned to the term "community
policing," this section offers an overview of some strategies and tactics to which
the term has been applied. 

The reference point: Professional law enforcement 

Community policing is perhaps best understood in relation to what it is not.
Such a benchmark is especially useful in light of frequent objections that
community policing is "what we've always done." Following Moore (1992), we
use "professional policing" as the reference point.

The professional policing vision was fairly clearly described in chapter 4 of the
1967 report of the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and
Administration of Justice (U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967). The Crime
Commission viewed crime as a broad social problem, with root causes that lay
well beyond the domain of policing. For the commission, the mission of the
police was "not to remove the causes of crime, but to deter crime, and to deal
with specific criminals whoever they are, and with specific crimes whenever,
wherever, and however they occur." The commission reminded readers that the
police are "only one part of the criminal justice system," and the criminal justice
process is "limited to case by case operations, one criminal or one crime at a
time" (1967:93).

To carry out this mission, the commission described the "heart of the police law
enforcement effort [as] patrol, on foot or by vehicle, of uniformed policemen
. . . If they are motorized, they spend much of their time responding to citizen
complaints and the reports of crime that are relayed to them over their radios
. . . A principal purpose of patrol is 'deterrence,' [and] [w]hen patrol fails to
prevent a crime or apprehend the criminal while he is committing it, the police
must rely on investigation" (1967:95-96). The commission went on to note that
"[p]reventive patrol . . . by visible and mobile policemen . . . is universally
thought of as the best method of controlling crime that is available to the police"
(1967:116). Moreover, ". . . in view of the limited area that foot patrolmen can
cover, . . . [t]he extreme mobility and coverage provided by motor patrol
compels its use, despite losses in neighborhood contact" (1967:117).[2]

Beyond the loss of neighborhood contact, the commission anticipated other
issues that would later resurface in discussions of community policing.
Recognizing that public and private services tended to be poor in the high-crime
neighborhoods to which patrol officers should be assigned for the sake of
efficiency, the commission recommended creating "community service officers"
who would report badly maintained parks and other conditions that should be
corrected (1967:98). Lamenting how differently whites and nonwhites perceive
the police and recognizing that "professionalization of the police has meant . . .
improving efficiency by various methods [that lessen] informal contact between
policemen and citizens," the commission called for community relations
programs and for making community relations "the business of an entire
department" through frequent meetings with precinct-level citizens' advisory
committees (1967:100-101). Recognizing that lengthy procedures manuals
usually fail to give officers on the street adequate guidance on the use of
discretion that is called for every day, the commission called on agencies to
develop policies guiding use of discretion in such matters as "the issuance of
orders to citizens regarding their movements or activities, the handling of minor
disputes, the safeguarding of the rights of free speech and free assembly, the
selection and use of investigative methods, and the decision whether or not to
arrest in specific situations involving specific crimes" (1967:104). 

Organizationally, the commission was firmly committed to the "guiding
organizational principle of central control." The vision was that, with the advice
of trained specialists and an internal board cutting across functions and ranks,
the chief and his staff should be "developing, enunciating, and enforcing
departmental policies and guidelines for the day-to-day activities of line
personnel" (1967:114-115). The commission noted that large police
departments were nearly always characterized by organizational fragmentation,
with separate and poorly coordinated units responsible for patrol, investigation
of specific crime types, and community relations. To improve efficiency, it
called for experimentation with "team policing," a structure that would put all
such functions under unified command at the district level (1967:117-118).

Despite the commission's acknowledgment of limitations and calls for
innovation, most of its recommendations presumed a hierarchical organization
and sought to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of what Moore
(1992:108) called the principal tactics on which professional policing relied:
patrol, rapid response to calls for service, and investigation of crimes. Shaped
by the commission's thinking, testing and refinements of these functions formed
the centerpiece of professional policing in the following years. For the general
public at the time, the essence of professional policing was captured by Jack
Webb's character in the radio and television series Dragnet: Detective Joe
Friday, whose signature phrase "Just the facts, ma'am," became a national
cultural symbol of police practice at the time.

Over time, research prompted by the commission's work generated additional
questions about the professional model. Moore (1992) summarized these
challenges to the four fundamental assumptions underlying the professional
model: that patrol deters crime (Kelling et al., 1974), that detectives can often
solve crimes using crime scene evidence (Greenwood et al., 1977), that rapid
response often leads to apprehension of perpetrators (Kansas City Police
Department, 1980), and that arrest, even if followed by conviction and
incarceration, deters crime (Blumstein et al., 1978).

It overreaches the evidence to suggest the findings of those four studies show
police can do nothing about crime. They nevertheless seriously called into
question the claims of some politicians, police officials, and academics at the
time that crime could be controlled simply by having more police doing more of
these activities. The research challenge to the efficacy of policing as then
practiced stimulated two kinds of responses: efforts to improve the professional
model and efforts to replace or augment the professional model with promising
alternative approaches.

Most efforts to improve the professional model involved thinking of crime and
crime fighting efforts in more systemic ways. For example, Differential Police
Response (DPR) to calls for service introduced formal call screening protocols
to free patrol units from mundane tasks so they would be available for more
serious matters, reduce response time, and provide better service. Managing
Patrol Operations (MPO) formalized directed patrol activities to target specific
crime problems in communities. Managing Criminal Investigations introduced
formal case screening protocols to optimize the use of criminal investigators on
more serious cases and allocate other investigative work to patrol officers. The
Integrated Criminal Apprehension Program (ICAP) introduced crime analysis
to allocate patrol resources to target specific crime types and attempted to
formalize the roles of patrol officers, investigators, and other specialists in
criminal investigations. "Career criminal" or "repeat offender" programs targeted
the relatively small number of chronic and violent offenders for more intense
police scrutiny and higher priority prosecution.

Between the early 1970s and early 1990s, other police executives and scholars
developed alternatives to the professional model. Although many locally
conceived projects received Federal support, the energy of this period was
essentially a grassroots attempt to improve policing. No master plan of
systematic design, pilot testing, experimental testing, and replication governed
the process, although instances of each occurred. New ideas were tried in their
home settings, sometimes accompanied by fairly robust evaluations, and then
introduced (with Federal help) on the national stage for replication and
modification. At one level, LEAA's research arm, the National Institute of Law
Enforcement and Criminal Justice and its successor the National Institute of
Justice, promoted evaluation of the programs and disseminated the findings
through the Exemplary Projects series, "Best Practices/Model Programs"
publications, and national conferences, among other channels. At another level,
law enforcement professionals kept one another informed of promising ideas
and innovations through articles in practitioner magazines, such as The Police
Chief and FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin, and in presentations at their 
national conferences.

Among the most prominent alternatives cited by Moore (1992) were team
policing, community relations units, community crime prevention programs,
problem-oriented policing, and fear reduction projects. Though each had its
limitations and some visible failures, collectively they broadened the police
perspective and mission. Perhaps more importantly, they changed the 
nature of police executives' conversations. 

Nationally published evaluation findings, rigorous local experiments, and
conversations with police executives from other jurisdictions all legitimated the
cross-fertilization of ideas throughout the police community. Progressive
policing came to be defined in part by police executives' willingness to test and
evaluate new ideas, often through the research programs of the Police
Foundation, the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF), the International
Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), and other organizations.

At the center of this evolutionary process were the five alternatives listed above,
each of which was an important precursor to the broad reconceptualization of
the police mission we now call community policing. Some were tested or
implemented under grants from LEAA, BJA, or NIJ. Compared to the
professional policing model, all of them had the potential to align police
concerns more closely with those of the community, bring officers in closer
contact with community residents, or both. To help understand the origins of the
ambiguity of community policing in the context of COPS, we briefly describe
the five alternative approaches in the following sections.[3]

Alternative 1: Team policing

Police departments in New York City, Cincinnati, and Los Angeles were
among the first to act on the commission's recommendation to test the team
policing concept as a means of establishing neighborhood-level control over all
police resources. The concept was still in operation in Los Angeles at the time
of our first site visit. As practiced there, the patrol force was divided into "X
cars" that could be dispatched throughout the city and "basic cars" that
remained in their assigned neighborhoods. A senior lead officer was assigned to
each basic car and given higher pay for establishing and maintaining liaison with
the community. The city was divided into 70 patrol areas, each policed by 3 to
5 basic cars and commanded by a lieutenant, who directed not only patrol but
all the specialist units and had 24-hour accountability for conditions in the area.
Because of this neighborhood-level focus, Moore (1992:133) described team
policing as "the first modern model of what [was] becoming community
policing" at that time. 

Moore reports that evaluations of team policing in several locations found the
model was popular with the public and sometimes improved neighborhood
conditions, including crime rates. However, even successful examples fell by the
wayside, perhaps because of resource constraints, opposition by higher-ups in
the chain of command, or incompatibility with an organizational culture
committed to the professional model. Even the Los Angeles team policing
model was discontinued between our first and second site visits. Despite the
virtual demise of full-blown team policing in most jurisdictions, several of its
vestiges--dispatch rules that keep beat officers in their beats, a team approach
to decisions in the field rather than chain of command, and pushing
decisionmaking responsibility down to the beat level--are prominent in
descriptions of community policing today.

Alternative 2: Community relations units

As described by Moore (1992:134), community relations units dated back at
least to the 1950s, when "Officer Friendly" visited schools, made speeches, and
spoke to citizens in other forums as a means of gaining support from community
residents. In the wake of urban riots in the 1960s, these units' activities in some
agencies evolved into what we now know as community meetings, often with
community activists playing visible roles. Because the community relations
officers kept senior command staffs abreast of tensions and plans, Goldstein, in
a 1990 conversation with Moore (1992:134), described the units as among the
first innovations to alert chiefs to the potential value of community policing.

In some departments, regular community meetings evolved into permanent
citizen action or advisory councils, which, then as now, offer potential
"megaphones for the department [and] . . . antennae tuned into neighborhood
concerns (Moore, 1992:135)." The balance between those two functions varies
across jurisdictions, but the meetings offer a structure through which a
motivated department can make community relations "the business of an entire
department from the chief down," as the Crime Commission (1967:100) had
recommended. In some jurisdictions, community meetings raised the issue of
external accountability, which sometimes led to new policies, procedures, and
practices. One such practice, the civilian review board, offered a formal
mechanism for community input and monitoring of police misconduct.

Regular meetings and councils offered the necessary communications channels,
and the emergence of review boards may have helped to create a congenial
climate, for building police-community partnerships. However, they did not
necessarily lead the new partners to action agendas. Those were more likely to
arise from two strategies with different orientations: community crime prevention
and problem-oriented policing.

Alternative 3: Community crime prevention

Experiences of the fledgling partnerships demonstrated that communities have
legitimate and important roles to play in crime prevention--roles that go well
beyond being the "eyes and ears of the police." As noted by Dennis
Rosenbaum in a 1986 evaluation report on community crime prevention:

The sentiments underlying community crime prevention arose partly out of a
growing realization that the institutions represented by the police and the court
system were failing in their mission to reduce the crime problem and to restore
and maintain the existing social order (Silberman, 1978). This extended
conception of citizen involvement through community crime prevention
programs acknowledged that the success of law enforcement was highly
dependent upon the participation and cooperation of the populace in anticrime
efforts, and that some crime prevention activities were better conducted by
residents themselves. (Rosenbaum, 1986:21.)

Around the same time, evaluations produced evidence suggesting that effective
crime control involving communities need not be restricted to a passive role of
the community in support of the police. Potentially useful active roles for
residents included marking property to deter burglars, Neighborhood Watch,
resident patrols, "hardening" business premises against shoplifting and
robberies, cleaning up crime-prone spaces open to the public, and reducing the
loitering and public drinking that bred simple assaults and petty crimes. In
implementing these tactics, some community residents possessed expertise not
available to the police, and many communities also possessed resources that
could be directed toward these problems.

In reviewing rigorous impact evaluations of four well-executed community
crime prevention programs, Rosenbaum (1986) concluded that, under
favorable conditions, they could reduce burglary and robbery while increasing
residents' feelings of security. However, he and others concurred that the
necessary favorable conditions are hard to generate and even harder to sustain
(Lurigio and Rosenbaum, 1986; Rosenbaum, 1988). In Skogan's (1988:42,
45, cited in Buerger, 1994) words, "Anticrime organizations are often most
successful in communities that need them least . . . [and] least common where
they appear to be most needed--in low-income, heterogeneous, deteriorated,
renting, high-turnover, high-crime areas." Nonetheless, for some, the occasional
successes of community crime prevention tactics warranted their inclusion
among the potential tools for implementing community policing strategies.

Alternative 4: Problem-oriented policing

In a seminal article, Goldstein (1979) proposed an alternative to the "one crime
at a time" approach that characterized professional policing. While the Crime
Commission had already recognized that some 70 percent of calls for police
service concerned nonemergency matters, Goldstein focused on the theory that
clusters of calls frequently reflected some underlying problematic cause. He
reasoned that if police came to understand the problem well enough, then they,
working with others, could reduce future call volumes by solving it.

As an example of problem-oriented policing, scanning of dispatch records
might reveal that an agency devoted disproportionate resources in responses to
frequent late night complaints of noise, muggings, and larcenies from autos from
a residential area near an entertainment district. Further analysis might discover
the underlying problem: revelers parked illegally in the residential neighborhood
to avoid high parking fees in the entertainment district. As they returned to their
cars, they were likely to make noise, they were easy targets for muggers, and
they were likely to find valuables had been stolen from their cars during the
evening. The illegal parking might be prevented with such responses as parking
enforcement units doing directed ticketing, officers and community residents
erecting permanent physical barriers to illegal parking, or nightclub managers
validating parking garage ticket stubs for free parking.[4] The success of 
any of these responses could be assessed by a reanalysis of dispatch records,
by community surveys, or both.

The problem-solving approach was popularized by the Police Executive
Research Forum (Eck and Spelman, 1987), using an acronym SARA
(Scanning, Analysis, Response, Assessment). 

As a logical process, SARA need not enhance police-community contact;
common problem-solving responses such as enforcement of housing or alcohol
codes, truancy reduction initiatives, and graffiti eradication can take place
without community involvement. However, one goal of analysis is to identify
property managers, organizations that supervise potential offenders, or others in
the neighborhood who may be in a position to help solve the problem and have
a stake in doing so. Therefore, at a minimum, bringing community and agency
partners into the problem-solving process almost certainly broadens the range
of plausible alternative responses and may augment the resources available for
the response. Beyond that, seeking and using residents' input in identifying
problems, priority setting, and analysis increases the likelihood that
problem-oriented policing projects address problems of concern to the
community, develops responses consistent with neighborhood values, and
avoids unnecessary confrontations because residents understand the rationale
for the response. For these reasons, Moore and Trojanowicz (1988) described
problem-oriented policing and community policing as overlapping, though each
has a distinctive thrust.

Alternative 5: Fear reduction

Reducing communities' fear of crime emerged during the 1980s as a policing
problem in its own right, for several reasons. First, observers recognized fear of
retaliation as one of several barriers to citizen participation in community crime
prevention and problem-solving activities (Grinc, 1994; Rosenbaum and
Lurigio, 1994). Second, the finding that fear of crime was not highly correlated
with the actual level of crime (Skogan, 1987) implied that reducing fear would
require something different from techniques that successfully reduced crime.

Third, police practitioners and researchers developed two promising strategies
for reducing fear: expanding police presence and policing disorder. As
recounted by Moore (1992), the initial spark for fear reduction initiatives came
from successful experiments with foot patrols in Flint, Michigan, and Newark,
New Jersey. While the foot patrols did not reduce property or violent crime,
they did reduce citizens' fears; the Flint experiment was so popular that voters
passed a tax to continue the program, and calls for service declined (Police
Foundation, 1981; Trojanowicz, 1982). Later, two federally sponsored
experiments in Newark and Houston, Texas, demonstrated that police could
reduce fear using such techniques as opening neighborhood substations,
contacting citizens about neighborhood problems, and stimulating citizens to
form new neighborhood organizations (Pate et al., 1986; Wilson, 1989). 

The second fear reduction strategy, policing disorder, is a response to what is
sometimes known as the "Broken Windows" theory, after the title of an Atlantic
Monthly article by Wilson and Kelling (1982). The authors argued that, left 
uncorrected, signs of physical decay (the metaphorical broken window) and
social disorder (e.g., public drinking, groups of loiterers) communicated a
message that "anything goes." In turn, frightened law-abiding people would
avoid the area, leaving it to the disorderly and criminals. Skogan (1990) later
discovered strong supporting statistical correlations. The metaphor became the
rationale for a variety of joint police-community efforts to repair signs of
physical decay: examples include neighborhood cleanups, graffiti removal, and
building code enforcement.

The strategy became more controversial when applied to social disorder.
Kelling and Coles (1996) describe Kelling's experience with two examples
from New York City, both involving proactive arrest and jailing. One target
was "fare beaters," who avoided subway fares by jumping turnstiles instead of
inserting tokens. The other was "squeegee men" who, unasked, "washed" the
windows of cars stuck in traffic and then intimidated drivers into giving them
money.

As carried out, these proactive order maintenance efforts had community
policing objectives: arresting squeegee men was intended to reduce fear, and
the fare-beater crackdown originated in a problem-oriented policing exercise
(Kelling, 1999). In recent years, much to Kelling's (1999) regret, opponents
now describe the New York Police Department's proactive order maintenance
strategy as "turning police loose" in ways that led to the well-known Louima
and Diallo tragedies; Kelling (1999) himself remarks that some NYPD
adherents to "tough" policing have misconstrued successful assertive policing as 
license for combative or military policing. To prevent such misinterpretations
and tragedies, while advancing police-community partnerships, Kelling (1999)
advocates explicitly structuring discretion in order maintenance policing with
guidelines, developed jointly with citizens whenever possible. 

What is community policing? 

The brief overview above should demonstrate that as debate began over the
1994 Crime Act, anyone advocating community policing as a break with the
dominant professional policing model could point to a variety of objectives,
strategies, and tactics as examples of differences. But beyond that, little was
settled. Reasonable people could (and still do) argue whether the strategic
objective of community policing was to improve community relations,
encourage community crime prevention, expand the use of problem-oriented
policing, reduce fear, or accomplish some combination of the above. As
Congress debated the 1994 crime bill, advocates and opponents of community
policing could plausibly describe it in terms of tactics that ranged from
appearances by Officer Friendly or McGruff the Crime Dog to sophisticated
analyses of calls for police service, regular meetings in high crime communities,
citizen advisory boards, and assertive order maintenance policing.

BJA had already recognized that the widespread confusion posed a threat to
the diffusion of community policing to police agencies across the country. To
help build and disseminate a consensus on the meaning of community policing,
BJA established and funded the Community Policing Consortium (CPC) in
1993. CPC began operations under the aegis of four of the major national law
enforcement organizations: the International Association of Chiefs of Police
(IACP); the National Sheriffs Association (NSA); the Police Executive
Research Forum (PERF); and the Police Foundation. Beginning in Phase III of
the CPC's work, the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement
Executives (NOBLE) was added as the fifth CPC organization.

In Phases I and II of the CPC Richard Ward, then director of BJA's
Discretionary Grant Program, guided CPC's development as BJA's pivotal
provider of community policing training and technical assistance on behalf of
DOJ. One important rationale for CPC was the previously described lack of
definition and consensus in the law enforcement profession as to the meaning 
of community policing. As Ward described it: 

By the early 1990s, law enforcement realized many problems with community
policing were definitional. Nobody knew exactly what it meant. To some it
implied social work. Others thought it moved away from professionalism and
wouldn't work. When I asked chiefs what they meant by community policing,
I'd get a different answer each time. 'I've got a foot patrol officer in one of my
high crime districts.' 'We're doing some crime prevention work.' Until we got
beyond the hurdle of defining community policing, we couldn't convince
practitioners that's what they needed to do.

BJA believed that if the largest professional organizations could get together,
everybody might eventually start reading off the same sheet of music. The idea
behind the Community Policing Consortium was to establish some fundamental
definitions. We started with a theoretical model that scared everybody, went to
a prototype, and finally developed a framework that effectively describes the
umbrella concept. Now we can plug in the technical assistance and training that
support the conceptual framework (Community Policing Consortium, 1995). 

Under the direction of BJA and the heads of the four organizations, CPC
developed "Understanding Community Policing: A Framework for Action."
Based upon that publication, a core set of training modules was developed and
training commenced in 1993. CPC was to become the coordinator of all
community policing training and technical assistance supported by BJA funds
and to dedicate very intense training and technical assistance support to
selected demonstration sites. CPC was tasked in this manner to develop
multiple community policing "models" from all of these sites and to further
develop prescriptive training and technical assistance curricula and publications
that could assist other jurisdictions in the implementation of community policing.

The consortium was still new as the 1994 Crime Act was being formulated, and
concern was expressed at the time that such a massive infusion of funds into an
evolving reform might weaken this ambiguous concept before it was fully
defined. Would the importance of a coherent local community policing strategy,
developed with input from diverse perspectives, be lost in a mad scramble for
Federal dollars to hire new police officers and acquire technology? Would
agencies merely graft community relations or prevention programs from the past
onto ongoing professional policing practices? Would agencies simply adopt a
few signature tactics (Moore, 1992) as a facade of some version of community
policing without making the organizational changes needed to make them work?
In short, would this huge effort to promote community policing water the
concept down still further, or change it in undesirable ways? These questions
remained as the Crime Act was debated and passed.

The 1994 Crime Act

By any standard the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
was a massive piece of Federal anticrime legislation. This legislation authorized
the spending of a staggering $30 billion to help State and local law enforcement
agencies fight crime over the 6-year life of the bill's coverage. Of this total, Title
I--The Public Safety Partnership and Community Policing Act of 1994--
authorized the largest expenditure, $8.8 billion over 6 years, to increase the
number of police officers on the Nation's streets. Although Title I nowhere
mentioned a specific number of officers, the Clinton campaign pledge of
100,000 officers was still fresh, and the statutory cost-sharing formula would
fund that number of officers from the $8.8 billion. Because Federal assistance
to the entire local criminal justice function, including law enforcement, had never
substantially exceeded $1 billion on a sustained basis, and Title I represented an 
unprecedented Federal intervention into local law enforcement.

Understandably, legislation of this magnitude required careful negotiations and
compromises. Concerns were expressed about Title I and other parts of the bill
"federalizing" a traditionally State and local function, and it was deemed 
critical to design its programs to ensure that the Federal assistance role did not
preempt local autonomy and control. There were also divided opinions,
principally along Democratic and Republican party lines, about crime fighting
ideology and the designation of "soft" community policing as the desired core
crime fighting strategy. These contending forces shaped the programs
authorized by the bill when it was eventually signed into law.

The administration proposal

On January 25, 1994, President Clinton reiterated his campaign pledge to put
100,000 new police officers on the streets of America. Later that year, on
August 21, the House of Representatives approved the Violent Crime Control
and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 on a bipartisan vote of 235 to 195. Four
days later, the Senate voted to approve the act on a vote of 61 to 38. On
September 13, 1994, Clinton signed the act into law in a ceremony on the
South Lawn of the White House. This swift legislative victory reflected planning
that had begun shortly after Clinton's inauguration.

An internal DOJ working group had met in the spring of 1993 to draft elements
of the "COPS on the Beat" program. This group consisted primarily of staff
from OJP and DOJ who basically tried to establish eligibility and funding
standards for the planned program. Although final and serious discussions of the
final crime bill did not start in earnest until a year later, in the spring of 1994,
these earlier discussions led to Police Hiring Supplement grants, which BJA
awarded in late 1993. The application kit contained an introductory letter in
which the Attorney General described PHS as "the first stage" of efforts to fulfill
the President's pledge of 100,000 community policing officers. PHS contained
several features that later appeared in the COPS program: the 3-year grant
period, an explicit 25-percent local match requirement, and a 3-year grant
maximum of $75,000 per officer. PHS also contained a provision that was
intended to ensure that jurisdictions of all sizes would have equal access to
funding. Half the funds were awarded to agencies serving jurisdictions with
populations of 150,000 or more, and half were awarded to smaller
jurisdictions. 

In the spring of 1994, serious negotiations took place among the White House,
DOJ staff, and Congress over the emerging crime bill. Compromises were
made to develop bipartisan support. One such concession was to permit
grantees to spend grant funds for officer overtime, which PHS had prohibited.
(The overtime prohibition was restored after the first full year of the new
program.) Another was to retain the PHS population demarcation of 150,000,
so that Title I would target equal aggregate amounts for agencies over and
under that benchmark. Beyond that, advocates for rural and tribal jurisdictions
demanded and received a statutory requirement for a simplified grant
application process for jurisdictions of less than 50,000. These provisions were
politically attractive because they ensured some level of funding support for all 
jurisdictions, regardless of size. This feature was obviously important to garner
necessary congressional support, and it was consistent with the White House
priority, which was first and foremost to deploy the 100,000 new police
officers.

Another change made late in the process led to COPS MORE (Making Officer
Redeployment Effective) grants. Several prominent police executives and
mayors urged that funds be available for resources other than sworn officers--
specifically, civilians and information technologies. The administration desired
these advocates' support for the legislation, but civilians and technology lacked
the appeal of "cops on the street" to tough-on-crime constituencies and would
not necessarily help redeem the 100,000-officer campaign pledge.

The COPS MORE resolution required applicants to estimate officer
productivity gains from the new technology or civilians, measured as full-time
equivalents (FTEs) of officers, and to demonstrate that COPS MORE grants
would yield FTEs at least as cost effectively as grants to hire actual officers.[5]
The FTEs generated by the productivity gains would then be counted toward
the target of 100,000. No sound empirical basis existed for such estimates, and
so these calculations and machinations would prove to be troublesome later. At
the time, however, sponsors found it appealing that the COPS MORE device
could apply a given amount of resources toward two goals, simultaneously
advancing the program toward the 100,000-officer mark and providing the
localities the additional benefits they sought from technology and civilianization. 

At the senior levels of DOJ, however, there were other critical interests
expressed in terms of the scope and intent of this massive Federal initiative. The
Deputy Attorney General and other senior staff at DOJ strongly advocated two
priorities for the emerging anticrime legislation. First, they felt this large Federal
investment would build on the "professional policing" model across the United
States. Community policing was emerging as an alternative, and priority should
be given, according to these advocates, to a strong Federal role in helping to
facilitate the implementation and expansion of this new policing strategy.

The second desired priority within DOJ was more controversial, given the need
to fashion a legislative majority. Some senior DOJ executives supported
targeting Crime Act resources particularly at the highest crime jurisdictions in
the country, rather than the "shotgun" dissemination implied in the equal
allocation based upon population size. Outside government, such renowned
experts as James Q. Wilson and Lawrence Sherman also advocated this
position. They argued that while $8.8 billion and 100,000 new police officers
were formidable numbers, dispersing the funds and new officers too broadly
would greatly dilute any potential for meaningful impact upon crime and
violence in the areas having the most need. It is clear from the distribution
formula in the final legislation that the advocates of a targeted funding formula
did not prevail. Because any grantee could apply for a second or subsequent
grant in future years, however, the extent to which COPS funds were targeted
on high-crime areas remained an empirical question.

The congressional debate

A substantial part of the explanation for the final shape of the Crime Act was
purely political. Although the politics of crime and this historic crime act are not
the subject of this evaluation report, the political climate helped to shape not
only the act itself, but ultimately how the newly created COPS Office would
execute its mandates.

The actual negotiations in Congress over a large Federal crime act dated back
to early 1993. These negotiations, and the various versions of different bills that
emerged, reflected the sometimes deep ideological differences between the
Democratic and Republican parties. Even though the Democrats at that time
maintained numerical control of both chambers in Congress, the presence of
conservative Democrats guaranteed that any "final" crime act would somehow
have to mediate these ideological differences.

The Democrats, and particularly candidate (and later President) Clinton, were
determined to reclaim the crime issue they had "lost" to the Republicans as far
back as the late 1960s. The memory was fresh in their minds of the successful
use of the crime issue in the 1988 presidential campaign, as epitomized by
Willie Horton. The 100,000-officer campaign pledge was intended, in part, to
preempt a repeat in 1992.

The Republicans supported responses to crime that were very popular in the
country, particularly the death penalty and other "get tough" measures on
criminals. The public, given the spiraling crime rates almost everywhere, had
lost its patience for the old Democratic party line of the past 30 years, which
was seen as too liberal and too supportive of the rights and needs of criminals.

Given this climate, Joseph Biden and Charles Schumer, then chairs of the
Senate and House Judiciary Committees, respectively, adopted the following
three-part legislative strategy for passing the 1994 Crime Act:

First, Biden and Schumer recognized that Democrats' basic weakness on the
crime issue was their perceived opposition to the death penalty, since capital
punishment is the most powerful litmus test used by voters to determine whether
a politician is "tough on crime". . .

Second, Biden and Schumer went on the offensive, mounting a strong attack
against the Bush administration's crime plan, which was designed to honor his
1988 campaign promises to "reform" presumptively liberal and permissive crime
policies. . . .

Third, Biden and Schumer proposed their own innovative crime plan, which in
comparison to Bush's approach, was "real, not rhetorical." The Democrat
approach can be summarized in a few brief words: more police, fewer guns.
(Chernoff et al., 1996.)

As a "new" and desired policing strategy, the abstract and ambiguous term
"community policing" offered the flexibility needed to gain the necessary political
support for the Crime Act. The term also allowed wide latitude to State and
local police agencies in the application of this concept within their agencies.
Avoiding even the perception of a "one size fits all" approach was seen as
critical to the success of the Crime Act, and necessary also to ameliorate some
concerns being expressed that one of the bill's outcomes could be to create a
national police force. The bill incorporated such key elements of community
policing as partnerships and problem solving and described these principles
loosely in terms of their application within a police organization and in
communities. In fact, these core principles were consistent with much of the
language of the police profession itself as expressed in various publications,
reports, and other community policing documents both at the national and local
levels.

Beyond the civilians and technology to be funded under COPS MORE, other
funds were set aside to support local initiatives and programs thought to show
particular promise in dealing with crime and violence issues (domestic violence,
gangs, youth firearm violence, and so forth). In the final version of the bill, these
kinds of programs became part of the Innovative Community Oriented Policing
(ICOP) section, which could be funded with up to 15 percent of the
appropriation each year. Similarly, in recognition of the need to provide State
and local agencies some level of training and technical assistance support, up to
3 percent of the annual appropriation could be utilized to provide these
services. Both of these categories of programs and services are described in a
later section of this chapter.

A broad range of constituencies influenced the bill's content and helped ensure
its passage. Supporters included national police management and labor
organizations and other political organizations, such as the U.S. Conference of
Mayors, the International City Managers Association, the National Governor's
Association and the National League of Cities. This diverse group of supporters
became critical in ameliorating the philosophical tension in Congress between
forces favoring the creation and funding of a large Federal crime program that
would award grants directly to local jurisdictions, in contrast to the longstanding
practice of disseminating these funds through State-level planning agencies
controlled by gubernatorial appointees.

Planning and Launching the Cops Program

As the Crime Act was being crafted during the spring and summer of 1994,
DOJ high-level organizational planning continued. The goal of the planners, who
completed their work under the new Associate Attorney General, was to
award grants for new officers within days after passage of the bill--an
unprecedented goal for a new grant program.

A critical organizational question was how to integrate the grant program for
new officers with other Crime Act grant programs and with other local
assistance programs, some dating back to the 1968 Safe Streets Act. For the
most part, these were administered by the Office of Justice Programs and its
component bureaus. Normally, programmatic aspects of Federal assistance to
law enforcement and criminal justice agencies were managed by BJA, and the
Office of the Comptroller (OC) conducted financial administration. The
Attorney General assigned then-Associate Attorney General John Schmidt to 
coordinate implementation of the Crime Act within DOJ. To strengthen
coordination, oversight responsibility for OJP was moved from the Deputy
Attorney General to the Associate Attorney General. Because the new program
was in some sense an expansion of the OJP mission, and, in fact, BJA and OC
had already begun funding new officers through Police Hiring Supplement
Grants in 1993 and 1994, it was recognized that future coordination with OJP 
entities would be critical if the COPS Program were to be smoothly
implemented and ultimately successful.

Organization of the COPS Program

A top priority of the Attorney General and Associate Attorney General (ASG)
was the need to expedite the receipt and processing of COPS Program grant
applications, which drove both startup decisions and all subsequent oversight
activity. The core and most critical mission of this new program would be to
fund the hiring of 100,000 new police officers throughout the United States.
Given features of the bill that encouraged small agencies to apply, the ASG and
his staff estimated that within weeks the new agency could be confronted with
applications from as many as 17,000 agencies, some applying to more than one
program and some planning to apply for additional grants in future years. Any
chance of funding 100,000 officers in the 6-year COPS Program authorization
period would require a highly efficient and responsive organization. 

The ASG had two options at the time: Integrate the program within the existing
OJP entities or create a separate new organization. The 1994 planning
meetings, which continued up to early fall and involved, among others, the
leadership and staff of OJP, ultimately led to the decision that there was a
rationale and need to create a new office outside OJP because of the unique
statutory mandate, magnitude, and short lifespan of the COPS Program. This
decision was approved by the Attorney General, and the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) was created in the fall of 1994.

It seems that the ASG and other staff ultimately felt that creating a new COPS
Office would facilitate the development of an organization with a new culture
that would focus on the mandates and goals of the 1994 Crime Act. To fulfill
one critical goal--expeditious processing and awarding of a very large number
of grants--a single-minded organization seemed like the logical step to take.
Over the years OJP, faced with broad and complex mandates, had developed
voluminous regulations intended to prevent various administrative problems.
The State planning agencies were accustomed to playing a central role in
distributing Byrne grants, BJA's largest assistance program. The tension
inherent in seeking to coordinate OJP and its six components, each headed by
a presidential appointee, had occasionally hindered interagency cooperation. In
that context, trying to alter the structure and culture of OJP to ensure success of
the highly political and ambitious COPS program was probably thought to be
too risky. The decision to create a new agency was balanced by giving OJP
components visible responsibilities connected to the COPS program. NIJ, for
example, would have important research and evaluation program
responsibilities funded under COPS.

A key organizational decision was made to have the COPS Office rely on
OJP's existing Office of the Comptroller for financial administration instead of
creating its own comptroller operation. This decision, along with OC's decision
to create a branch specializing in COPS grants, was certainly critical to quick
COPS Office startup. However, because of separate "chains of command,"
some time elapsed while the COPS Office and its OC branch developed
shared visions of organizational mission and goals, customer service, and
appropriate timetables for responding to the needs of prospective and existing
grantees.

Launching the COPS Office

The selection of a COPS Office director became a priority task for the ASG.
The first candidate seriously considered for this position withdrew his name
from consideration. As a result, Kent Markus, from the Associate Attorney
General's staff, assumed the position of Acting Director from October to
December 1994. At that time, Chief Joseph Brann of Hayward, California, 
was selected and appointed by the Attorney General. He took the helm as the
permanent director in early 1995 and remained as director until mid-1999.

To expedite the hiring process, the Office of Personnel Management granted
the COPS Office Schedule A hiring authority for a limited period of time since it
was a new Federal agency. Under this authority, the agency could bypass the
normal process of posting positions and screening civil service lists before
making hiring decisions. Without Schedule A authority, this process could have
taken at least 3 to 4 months, which would have been far too long.

The COPS Office recruited staff even before the crime bill was passed and
hired staff immediately after the Act was signed. The ASG hired all of the senior
management team members during this period, except the assistant director of
training and technical assistance, who was not selected until early 1996. The
obvious hiring priority was the Grants Division staff. With a first-year budget of
$1.3 billion and White House pressure to achieve results quickly, there was
tremendous urgency to hire this staff quickly and accelerate the grant solicitation
and awarding processes.

During its first year of operation, the COPS Office was established as a "full
service" organization under the supervision of the ASG. Staff were hired and
assigned to multiple functions within the office: grant administration and
monitoring, training and technical assistance, congressional liaison,
intergovernmental liaison (working with national and other political
organizations), and communications (for coordination with media and the
handling of all critical office communications of other types). Other support staff
were hired for the personnel, computer support, and administrative areas within
the office. Thus, the office would conduct all aspects of its business in the
awarding and monitoring of grants and the liaison with key external oversight
and constituency groups without having to rely on any other DOJ office. These
organizational decisions, again, were in support of the office's most visible
mission--funding the 100,000 new police officers within the 6-year Crime Act
authorization. 

Given its highly political and visible role and the direct connection of its program
to the President of the United States, the COPS Office, by necessity, had to
coordinate certain announcements and other activities through the ASG with the
Attorney General, the White House, and members of Congress. At one level,
the new office perfected the process of coordinating these kinds of high-level
announcements. Key staff from all internal divisions were involved in a highly
coordinated effort to process and announce all significant grant awards. At
another level, however, COPS Office critics saw the coordinated
announcements and attendant publicity as signs of a politically driven
organization rather than one driven by substantive policing issues and needs.

During 1995 that same visibility and connection to President Clinton also made
COPS a target of Republicans, who won control of both Houses of Congress
just 2 months after the President signed the 1994 Crime Act. Not only were the
Republicans bent on reducing total Federal expenditures, but the COPS
program, which was seen as one of the President's and Democrats' most visible
legislative accomplishments, was an immediate and frequent target of many who
wanted to abolish it. These issues dramatically affected the program starting in
October 1995, when negotiations between the White House and Congress
over the fiscal 1996 budget reached an impasse and the Federal Government
"shut down" until April 1996.

COPS Office staff were exempt from the shutdown and continued to process
grant applications with a skeleton staff. Nevertheless, the agency was hobbled
during the fall of 1995 and into the spring of 1996 in terms of its ability to
obligate fiscal year 1996 funds, given the uncertainty of its future existence and
appropriated funding level. House Republicans favored a budget that would
have eliminated the COPS Office and shifted all grant funds to a new Local
Law Enforcement Block Grant (LLEBG) program. LLEBG was developed as
a Republican alternative to COPS that would distribute funds to jurisdictions
proportionately based on their violent crime levels, permit grantees to use funds
for virtually any type of resources, and free jurisdictions from any commitment
to community policing. In the end, the fiscal 96 budget reduced COPS Office
funding from $1.9 billion to $1.4 billion, with the $500 million difference being
added to BJA's budget for disbursement under the LLEBG program.

COPS and LLEBG coexisted at roughly those appropriations levels for the
next several years, but the flow of grant funds had already been interrupted for
the 7 months between October 1995 and April 1996. Because of the
possibility of being "zeroed out," the COPS Office did not award many grants,
either continuations from the previous year or new, until the final budget
compromises made its future clear.

This forced delay particularly affected pending MORE applications. Because
fiscal 95 applications for COPS MORE grants had exceeded available MORE
funds, COPS Office staff told a number of MORE applicants informally during
September 1995 that their applications would be accepted but that formal
award and obligation of the funds would be delayed into the first few weeks of
fiscal 96. Because OC staff were not exempt from the shutdown, however,
those weeks stretched into months, and the applicant agencies were kept in
suspense until May 1996. COPS Office budgetary uncertainty also delayed
until May 1996 grant awards for the hiring of police officers under Universal
Hiring Program grants.

The COPS Office culture

From its inception, the new COPS Office consciously sought to differentiate
itself from other Federal grant making agencies by creating what some have
called a "corporate" operating culture that, internally, emphasized an informal
team management style. Externally, the COPS Office adopted procedural
simplification and customer service as guiding principles for its relations with
grantees.

Management style. In the early days, the ASG personally participated in and
coordinated the management of critical COPS program decisions, along with
the acting and permanent COPS Office directors. The Office was committed to
a team management approach with emphasis on a flat and streamlined
organization with ample opportunity for all key staff to participate in
decisionmaking. During his entire tenure, the ASG met weekly with the COPS 
Office senior management team, which consisted of the director, deputy
directors, and all assistant directors. This weekly forum provided regular
opportunities for all key players from the COPS Office and the ASG's staff to
candidly discuss and decide key program issues.

Under Director Brann's leadership, the COPS Office developed a mission
statement that committed the agency to this open management style that
fostered innovation, to developing and maintaining customer relationships with
law enforcement agencies, and to advancing the practice of community policing:

We, the staff of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, dedicate
ourselves, through partnerships with communities, policing agencies, and other
public and private organizations, to significantly improve public safety in
neighborhoods and communities throughout the country.

We will accomplish this by putting into practice the concepts of community
policing in order to reduce levels of disorder, violence and crime through the
application of proven, effective programs and strategies. We will meet the
needs of our customers through innovation and responsiveness. We will create
a workplace that encourages creativity, open communication, full participation,
and problem solving.

We will carry out these responsibilities through a set of core values that reflect
our commitment to the highest standard of excellence and integrity in public
service. (COPS Mission Statement, 1997.)

Simplifying grant applications. The objective of the COPS Office simplification
effort was to eliminate grant submission requirements that often generated
voluminous proposals with "addenda" and other related materials appended to
each proposal. In the minds of some, such grant application packages created
undue burdens on both the agencies that had to prepare and submit them and
DOJ program managers and staff members, who had to review and evaluate
them in the process of making funding decisions. Indeed, a number of COPS
Office staff members had acquired experience with such applications in
previous positions in the OJP agencies.

COPS staff designed greatly simplified forms and submission requirements.
These forms, initially as short as one to two pages for jurisdictions of less than
50,000, were designed to record only the information that was critical to
program decisionmaking. Appended to each of these applications were the
required "Assurances" that were signed by each applicant stipulating that 
all information in the package was accurate and truthful.

The staff designed the grant solicitation packages for each of the major grant
initiatives to streamline and speed up the process. These were color coded
according to the particular type of solicitation. These packages provided
prospective applicants with easy-to-read information concerning the scope of
the program, the funding requirements and expectations or desired outcomes.
They included a question and answer section that provided answers to
questions that the staff thought would be frequently asked by applicants.

Serving customers. The dominant service standard within the COPS Office was
a strong commitment to rapid, responsive, and quality customer service.
Management was determined that the new agency would not become a large
bureaucracy in the traditional and negative sense and that its "customers" would
always come first. 

For example, a DOJ Response Center was created within the COPS Office
and staffed by Aspen Systems, the contractor that already provided support to
OJP in the operation of the National Criminal Justice Reference Service
(NCJRS). The COPS Office widely disseminated the Response Center's toll
free number and encouraged agencies to call for all grant-related information
and other relevant publications produced by the COPS Office, OJP, or their
grantees.

COPS Office grant advisors were assigned to specific States and regions of the
country as points of contact on all existing and prospective grant initiatives
supported by the office. These staff members were to get to know the agency
representatives in their assigned geographic areas and to keep themselves
available to answer telephones and questions. A high priority also was given to
returning telephone calls as soon as possible.

Pursuing Program Objectives

Through its first 5 years, the COPS Office maintained the cultural priorities
discussed above as it pursued three primary functional objectives: fulfilling
presidential promises regarding 100,000 police officers, ensuring that funds
were spent according to the provisions of Title I, and promoting community
policing as the wave of the future.

100,000 officers

The first statutory purpose of Title I (Sec. 10002 (1)) was to "substantially
increase the number of law enforcement officers interacting directly with
members of the community," with no specific target number mentioned.
However, White House speeches put 100,000 on the public screen and, soon
thereafter, into COPS Office public information materials. Through its first 5
years, the COPS Office pursued this target through aggressive marketing and a
demanding but fast-paced review procedure for grant applications. On May
12, 1999, these efforts culminated in a White House ceremony at which it was
announced that the 100,000-officer goal had been met. The following
subsections describe the marketing and grant review processes more fully and
explore implications of the announcement.

Marketing COPS grants. To further its first purpose, the COPS Office
developed an aggressive external marketing and dissemination strategy to
inform law enforcement agencies of its planned and pending grant solicitations
on a timely and user-friendly basis. Individual grant solicitation packages were
developed by Grants Division staff to summarize all relevant administrative
requirements for COPS grants in the simplest possible language. These
information packets were reinforced by an active Web site, a widely
disseminated newsletter, and a series of fact sheets that addressed specific
areas.

The COPS Office director traveled extensively throughout the country to
conferences and meetings to "market" the program and educate the law
enforcement community about resources available to them as part of the 1994
Crime Act. In telephone conversations, grant advisors and other staff
encouraged executives of grantee and nongrantee agencies to apply for
supplemental or new grants. Aggressive marketing was a key activity because
COPS Office executives felt it was critical to attaining the goal of funding
100,000 police officers. Jurisdictions needed some level of convincing that the
COPS Office grant process was, in fact, streamlined rather than cumbersome
and that the office culture emphasized being "customer friendly" rather than
bureaucratic.

From applications to awards. While external processes were designed to make
grant application and administration as customer friendly as possible, elaborate
but fast-paced internal review and administrative procedures were required to
ensure that funds were spent as Title I intended while demonstrating progress
toward the goal of 100,000 officers.

COPS Office grants staff, supervisors, and managers reviewed each application
and made funding decisions. From the outset of the COPS hiring programs, key
programmatic decisions about each application concerned agency eligibility,
adequacy of its community policing strategy, evidence of intent to use the grant
funds for precisely the purposes and types of resources allowed under the
specific COPS program funding the grant, and the status of applicants'
compliance with other DOJ regulations. Later, checks were added to ensure
that awards would reflect need and would not impose undue financial burdens
at the end of the grant. COPS MORE applications requesting support for
technology had additional requirements. Finally both COPS Office and OC
staff screened applications for compliance with administrative requirements.

For most law enforcement agencies, eligibility status was clear before the
application was submitted: Public general jurisdiction law enforcement agencies
were eligible, whether they policed municipalities, counties, States, Indian or
tribal lands, or special jurisdictions such as highways, university campuses, or
parks. Jurisdictions with startup agencies were eligible, as were jurisdictions
with no law enforcement agencies, which could apply for grants either as
members of consortia or to contract for services from county- or State-level
agencies. Private jurisdictions such as homeowners' associations were ineligible.
Eligibility decisions for sheriffs' departments were made on a case-by-case
basis, depending on whether the department had law enforcement functions
beyond operating detention facilities. The Methodological Appendix contains
further details about eligibility criteria.

Each applicant, regardless of the type of program solicitation, was required to
complete a community policing information sheet as part of the grant application
package. This form was designed to facilitate the quick profiling of agencies in
terms of their level of commitment or experience with community policing. In
addition, agencies serving jurisdictions of more than 50,000 were required to
submit written community policing strategies; the strategies submitted ranged
from simple to elaborate.

Evidence of insufficient knowledge or commitment regarding community
policing did not result in rejection of the grant application. Rather, staff used
information from this work sheet to identify agencies in need of training and
technical assistance to familiarize them with community policing and its
implementation. These services were offered by the Community Policing
Consortium (CPC), which BJA had launched in 1993. 

Applications for COPS MORE funds were subject to three additional checks.
First, "[e]quipment and technology which does not directly contribute to
increased community policing presence through redeployment . . ." (Office of
Community Oriented Policing Services, 1994a:2-3. Emphasis in original) was
not an allowable use of COPS MORE funds. For some types of technology,
the basis for exclusion was evident: Weapons, office furnishings, and equipment
for undercover operations or riot control were unlikely to increase community
policing presence. Other distinctions were more discretionary: Automated
booking systems, for example, were listed as an example of eligible technology,
while an application to purchase a flashing speed sign was rejected even though
the jurisdiction projected that the sign would free up an officer from radar patrol
to community policing.

Second, applicants were required to demonstrate that the MORE funds would
free up full-time equivalents of officers at least as cost-effectively as a hiring
grant of the same amount. For agencies with annual salaries and fringe benefits
exceeding $33,333, this requirement would be met if the applicant projected
that the MORE-funded resources would yield at least four FTEs per $100,000
funded.[6]The COPS Office required justification for the projection, politely
reduced obviously inflated projections and, after fiscal 1995, used four FTEs
per $100,000 as the standard for agencies' accountability and as the counting
factor toward the goal of funding 100,000 officers.

Third, because applications for COPS MORE funds exceeded the statutorily
available amounts,[7] some eligible applications were rejected on the basis of
proposal quality and related discretionary factors.

A final step in the COPS Office award decision process involved vetting
applications at senior levels within DOJ. Normally, executive management and
the relevant U.S. Attorney were given 2 weeks to point out "vetting problems"
such as ongoing investigations or findings of noncompliance with programmatic
or administrative requirements on other DOJ grants, civil rights violations, or
other matters.

In June 1997, the COPS Office grant administration unit added a "pre-vetting"
step, which was intended to ensure that applications reflected legitimate needs
and that applicants were not taking on nonsustainable financial burdens to
retain COPS-funded officer positions after grants expired. To check needs,
staff used data on sworn force per capita to ascertain whether award of a
requested number of officers, combined with previous awards, would give an
applicant substantially more officers per capita than other agencies in its State.
To check on sustainability, staff computed the percentage increase in the
applicant's sworn force that an award would produce. When a requested grant
would raise the count of COPS-funded officers per capita by too much in
relation to its current size or to the average for the applicant's State, applicants
were contacted by phone and case-by-case decisions were made. The usual
remedy was to reduce the size of the officially recorded request and award.

When the COPS Office decided to make an award (in official terms, to "accept
the application"), it normally notified the relevant U.S. Representative, then the
successful applicant, that an award would be made, subject to budget and 
administrative review by the OJP Office of the Comptroller (OC). Awards in
this category were commonly accumulated over several weeks, publicly
announced by a high-ranking DOJ or White House official, and counted in the
total of police officers "funded" for public information purposes.

Meanwhile, the accepted applications would have been forwarded to OC for
clearance. For hiring grants, OC reviews typically concerned relatively
clear-cut financial issues, such as the allowability of all fringe benefit
components and the accuracy of computations. For COPS MORE grants,
more complex but fairly unambiguous issues arose, such as the allowability,
procurement procedures, and pricing of specific components of the overall
technology. While resolving these issues sometimes entailed delays and
exchanges of correspondence, they had only short-term program effects, which
are discussed in chapter 3.

Following OC clearance, the COPS Office mailed successful applicants an
award package, containing official notice of the award and its administrative
and programmatic conditions. OC obligated the grant funds (i.e., made them
available for grantees to draw down) upon receipt of the grantee's signed
acceptance of the award and agreement to comply with the conditions.

A milestone reached? On May 12, 1999, at a White House ceremony,
President Clinton announced that "[t]he COPS Office met its goal of funding
100,000 community policing officers, ahead of schedule and under budget."
(U.S. Department of Justice, 1999:4). The meaning and accuracy of this claim
quickly fell into dispute; resolution of the dispute is clouded by semantic
matters, local implementation issues, and program complexity.

The claim was first officially questioned just 2 months later, in a summary report
by the DOJ's Office of Inspector General (OIG) based on its audits of 149
COPS grantees (USDOJ/OIG, 1999). OIG began by questioning the COPS 
Office description of its goal as funding (i.e., approving grant applications for)
100,000 officers by the end of fiscal year 2000, in contrast to having 100,000
officers hired and on the street by that time. OIG quoted a DOJ annual report
and strategic plan, as well as press releases by the COPS Office and the White
House that seemed to point to the latter objective. Having officers on the street
is, of course, a more demanding goal and one that depends on actions at both
the Federal and grantee levels. After the COPS Office "accepts" a hiring grant
application and begins counting the awarded officers, the application must still
clear OC review and local acceptance before the grantee can begin the process
of recruiting, testing, training, and deploying them. As discussed further in
chapter 4, training inexperienced recruits requires upwards of 5 months in many
large agencies; recruiting, testing, and postacademy field training can further
delay deployment by several months.

For COPS MORE grantees, redeployment of officers or their full-time
equivalents to community policing cannot occur until civilians are hired or
technology procured (both are usually under time-consuming local regulations),
technology is implemented, civilians are trained in their specialties, and (in some
agencies) officers are trained in community policing. To accommodate these
considerations, it was common for grantees to request and receive
no-additional-cost extensions of their hiring and MORE grants; the OIG report
cites a COPS Office projection that only 59,765 of the funded officers would
be deployed by the end of fiscal 2000.

While the respective roles of policy makers and public information offices in
blurring the distinction between officers funded and on the street remain to be
sorted out, the OIG argued further that even the goal of funding 100,000
officers--in the sense that funds were obligated and available for grantees to
draw down--might not be met by the end of fiscal 2000. OIG estimated that
grants accounting for 2,526 officers and FTEs had not been mailed to
awardees, and awardees had failed to accept grants accounting for another
7,722 FTEs, even though an average of 12 months had elapsed since they were
notified of the award.

Local interpretations of complex features of COPS MORE and the hiring
programs added further difficulty to measuring program effects on the number
of officers and FTEs "on the street" at any point in time.[8] Measurable
productivity gains from MORE-funded resources require both that the
resources be deployed and that the expected productivity increases occur. 

As explained more fully in chapter 4, observing whether or not both steps have
been accomplished is relatively straightforward in the case of civilians: at any
point in time the funded civilians are either hired or not, and the sworn officers
they were to replace are either redeployed to the field or not. In contrast,
achieving projected productivity gains from technology depends on changes in
the way humans spend their time--often a matter of a few minutes or hours per
day for each officer. Ascertaining the implementation status and field use of a
specific productivity-enhancing feature of technology is sometimes difficult;
nevertheless, it is clear that implementation of the most commonly requested
technology lagged well beyond expectations. 

Even worse, measuring changes in officers' use of their time is likely to require
elaborate measuring devices and perhaps a fairly complex before/after study
design to rule out alternative explanations of an observed change. Therefore,
documenting MORE productivity effects can easily require resources that are a
sizable fraction of the productivity gain itself. Due at least in part to these
difficulties, the OIG reported that 78 percent of the MORE grantees they
audited could not demonstrate achievement of their projected productivity
gains. 

Even measuring how COPS hiring grants affected the size of the sworn force is
difficult because of confusion surrounding two complex but key administrative
requirements: nonsupplanting and officer retention. The logic of nonsupplanting
is simple: Federal resources should supplement and not replace local resources
dedicated to the same function. However, as explained further below and in
chapter 4, application of this logic to specific local circumstances was
occasionally very difficult.

As explained further below, the officer retention requirement evolved over the
life of the COPS program into its present form: that grantees retain the
COPS-funded officer positions (or MORE-funded resources) using local funds
for at least one agency budget cycle following grant expiration. Since 12-month
budget cycles are commonplace, some September 1994 awardees could, in
theory, have laid off their COPS-funded officers in October 1999 without
violating the retention requirement. At that time, new officers were still being
funded and hired, and previously awarded MORE-funded technology was still
being implemented. Because these resources did not come on stream until later,
it seems clear that if the COPS program contribution of officers and FTEs on
the street turns out to be 100,000 (or some lower number), that achievement
must be interpreted analogously to attendance at an "open house," where some
guests arrive early and leave before other guests arrive. Unless all grantees
retain their COPS-funded resources well beyond the requirement, there will be
no single day on which all COPS-funded resources are deployed
simultaneously.[9]

Compliance with nonsupplanting, retention, and other requirements is discussed
below, and the implications are explored more fully in chapter 5, where we
present interim estimates of the COPS program impact on sworn police
strength. We plan to update the chapter 5 estimates in a future report based on
an agency survey being conducted during the summer of 2000.

Ensuring compliance with Title I

COPS grantees must comply with nine categories of requirements. This study is
intended to evaluate the program not to monitor compliance. Therefore, we
made no attempt to define or measure compliance with four basic financial and
administrative requirements: filing timely financial and progress reports, limiting
expenditures to allowable cost categories, and observing Federal security and
privacy regulations on criminal intelligence systems funded under COPS
MORE.

Other requirements had programmatic implications and were therefore of
interest to us. Requirements to implement community policing and, for some
agencies, to be trained in community policing, are discussed later in this chapter,
and COPS program effects on community policing implementation are
addressed in chapter 6. The requirement that COPS MORE grantees monitor
redeployment of officers due to productivity gains from the MORE-funded
resources is discussed in chapter 4 and its implications in chapter 5.

Defining and measuring compliance with the two remaining requirements--
retention of COPS-funded officers and nonsupplanting of local funds with
COPS funds--proved elusive. The resulting uncertainty may well have had
implications for local decisions to apply for grants, for the COPS impact on the
national count of sworn law enforcement officers, and for later adverse findings
in OIG audits.

Fostering compliance. Throughout the first 5 years of the COPS program, five
separate organizations dealt with the nonsupplanting and retention requirements
as they fostered grantees' compliance with applicable Federal regulations.
Within the COPS Office, the Legal Division defined compliance by applying the
regulations to specific local circumstances to determine whether or not a given
plan or action would comply and provide legal guidance through determination
letters to potential and actual COPS grantees who inquired or were referred for
investigation of signs of potential noncompliance.[10] The Legal Division also
reviewed COPS Office fact sheets and other publications for accuracy
regarding these requirements before they were disseminated to the field.

The Grants Division encouraged compliance by informing potential applicants
and grantees regarding eligibility conditions and grant requirements, reviewing
applications for compliance with programmatic requirements (e.g., adequacy of
the community policing strategy, allowability of proposed technology), and
assigning each grantee an advisor to maintain regular contact. Grant advisors
served as a two-way communication channel, informing grantees of
requirements and informing the Legal Division or other units of possible
violations that came up in the course of conversations with grantees, progress
reports, or other communications.

The Grants Monitoring Division took a proactive approach to monitoring
compliance through site visits to agencies selected randomly or through referrals
from grant advisors. Monitoring Division staff visited 432 grantees in fiscal
1998 and planned to expand the number of fiscal 1999 visits to 900. Visits
were planned to all grantees with populations of more than 150,000 or total
grants exceeding $1 million and to a sample of jurisdictions with smaller
populations and smaller grants. 

The OJP Office of the Comptroller established a separate branch to monitor
grantees' compliance with financial and administrative regulations. OC had two
primary concerns: whether grantees' accounting and administrative controls
were adequate to detect violations, and whether violations actually occurred.
OC's activities included reviews of periodic financial status reports and site
visits to observe grantees' controls and record systems.

The DOJ Office of Inspector General (OIG) enforced these and other
regulations, criminal and civil laws, and ethical standards for all DOJ 
programs including COPS. In this role, it audited COPS grantees in search of
possible violations of these regulations, either locally or by the COPS Office
itself. 

Retention and nonsupplanting. Lingering uncertainty in the field over two
administrative requirements had potential programmatic consequences both
before and after COPS grants were awarded. The first, "retention," is specific
to COPS hiring programs and concerned grantees' obligations after expiration
of their grants. The second, "nonsupplanting," is a standard requirement of all
DOJ grant programs that Federal funds increase total resources dedicated to
the purpose of the grant, not replace local resources diverted from that purpose
in anticipation of the grant award.

Consistent with the customer service orientation of the COPS Office, early
materials disseminated to prospective applicants were designed to explain the
requirements as simply as possible. The simple explanation and the evolution of
the retention requirement over time created a situation in which applicants and
potential applicants could interpret the requirements in unintended ways. From
the inception of the COPS program, the Legal Division responded with detailed 
opinion letters to agencies' questions about applications of the requirements to
their specific situations. Later the COPS Office proactively disseminated less
simplified guidance materials that were approved by the Legal Division.
Nonetheless, some agencies that did not take the initiative to request Legal
Division opinions were unnecessarily discouraged from applying because they
interpreted these requirements too conservatively, while some grantees were
subjected to adverse OIG audit findings because they (and in some cases, the
COPS Office) interpreted them more liberally than OIG.

The retention requirement was problematic for three reasons. First, the length of
the required retention period was not determined until August 1998, when the
Attorney General approved setting it at one budget cycle following grant 
expiration. Therefore, prospective applicants in the first 3 years of the program
were left to form their own expectations about the requirement. 

Second, several years elapsed before all documentation and application forms
disseminated to potential applicants consistently made clear that the object of
the requirement was officer positions rather than officers (see, for example,
Universal Hiring Program Application Kit, 1995).[11] The distinction mattered
because an agency could satisfy a requirement to retain the COPS-funded
officers (or replacements) at no local cost through attrition, by failing to replace
other officers who left the department. However, this approach would create
no lasting net increase in sworn force size, defined in terms of officer positions.
The COPS Office Legal Division informed agencies that inquired, or whose
retention plans relying on attrition came to its attention, that "retention by
attrition" was unacceptable because the correct interpretation concerned officer
levels or positions. Nevertheless, confusion on the point remained in the field.

Third, interpretations varied, and rules changed, on whether formal retention
plans were required. The 1995 COPS Universal Hiring Program Application
Kit (OMB #1103-0027, exp. 5/98, Community Policing Information Part II, p.
2) required an explanation of how retention would be accomplished only from
agencies that did not provide written assurance from their local governments
that the officers would be retained.[12] A 1997 COPS Facts publication on
monitoring made clear that grantees were required to plan to retain their officer
positions but did not address the question whether a formal written retention
plan was required. Later, however, following audits of several agencies in which
OIG could find no written documentation of good faith efforts to retain the
officers, it recommended that the agencies develop a written plan although it
was not a formal grant requirement. In August 1998, the COPS Office began
requiring written retention plans as a grant condition (USDOJ/OIG, 1999).

The August 1998 articulation of the retention requirement--in terms of both the
required length of time and the need for a written plan--barely preceded
expiration of the first large wave of 3-year COPS FAST grants to more than
6,500 agencies serving jurisdictions of less than 50,000. Retention was
problematic in some small communities, in which the addition of just one or two
officer positions could amount to a 25 or 50 percent increase in sworn force
size, and therefore in the law enforcement budget following grant expiration. To
ease the transition, the COPS Office established a Small Community Grant
program on September 1, 1998, which awarded grants to cover 1-year
retention costs in 774 small jurisdictions.

The nonsupplanting requirement requires the applicant to certify: 1) "that
Federal funds will not be used to replace or supplant State or local funds  that
would, in the absence of Federal aid, be made available to or for law
enforcement; and 2) that funds required to pay the . . . 'cash match' . . . shall be
in addition to funds that would otherwise be made available to or for law
enforcement purposes" (see COPS Universal Hiring Program Application Kit,
OMB #1103-0027, exp. 5/98, Appendix A--Legal Certifications). Further, the
kit expressed an expectation that "grantees . . . proceed with new hiring at a
level consistent with historical practice, and . . . take positive steps to fill all
vacancies resulting from attrition." 

The nonsupplanting requirement, of course, discourages the strategy of
"retention through attrition." Yet it, too, raises a series of fairly subtle questions:
What constitutes a commitment to hire--an offer letter, authorization to hire, or 
a local budget appropriation to hire? What if "positive steps" fail to fill all
vacancies, as is often the case in poor, low-salary jurisdictions? What if
"historical practice" entails a chronic gap between actual and authorized sworn
force levels because of turnover? What if "historical practice" is to reduce
sworn force size during periods of declining crime? Useful guidance was
especially difficult for prospective applicants to obtain with respect to two
issues: the meaning of supplanting in the context of a declining trend in funds for
law enforcement and the precise benchmark for measuring supplanting.

From the start of the program, COPS Office materials prominently featured the
requirement that grant funds must supplement and not supplant local
expenditures. Most explanations included an example similar to the following
from the Universal Hiring Program Grant Application Kit (OMB No. 1103-
0027, p.5): "If a grantee, prior to applying to participate in the COPS Universal
Hiring Program, had committed to hire ten new officers, then the grantee must
hire those ten officers in addition to those requested under COPS Universal
Hiring." Further, both COPS and OIG posted examples of supplanting on their
Web sites. COPS examples included grantees hiring officers before award
dates, using COPS funds for the salaries of previously hired officers, and using
COPS funds to pay for previously authorized positions (emphasis added)
(http://www. usdoj.gov/cops/toolbox/general_info/compliance/ default.htm,
6/23/99, page 1 of 6). OIG examples included: a department with vacancies at
the start of the grant period that hires no new officers other than COPS-funded
hires, a department that does no timely hiring to fill vacancies created by
attrition before or during the grant period, and use of grant funds to replace or
reallocate funds already committed for law enforcement purposes (emphasis
added) (http://www. usdoj.gov/oig/au9914/-9914pt2.htm, 6/19/99, page 2 of
6). 

The two agencies' explanations were not entirely consistent at all times, and
none of the published examples suggested the possibility that an agency could
avoid supplanting in the context of a local hiring freeze or declining trend in the
size of its sworn force. It is possible that the absence of such explanations or
examples discouraged agencies in fiscally stressed jurisdictions from applying.
Yet agencies that proactively requested advice on these questions were advised
that it was possible that no violation would occur if the jurisdiction certified that
the reduction or freeze would have occurred regardless of the anticipation of
grant funds.

Similarly, as we discuss further in chapter 3, confusion about whether the
appropriate benchmark for supplanting was the "authorized," "committed" (i.e.,
budgeted), or "actual" sworn force level may have unintentionally discouraged
some eligible agencies from applying for grants. Because full law enforcement
careers are typically only 20 or 25 years long, large police agencies often faced
attrition rates of at least 6 percent annually, and so their actual sworn force
levels tended to be chronically below their authorized levels. In jurisdictions that
anticipated a semipermanent replacement lag, it was not unusual for the
budgeted sworn force to lie between its authorized and actual levels.

Although the committed or budgeted level was the intended benchmark
throughout the program, some potential applicants may have been confused by
various widely disseminated uses of the other standards. The only benchmark
requested on the one-page COPS FAST application (OMB No. 1105-0081,
p. 1) was the actual number. The 1995 COPS Universal Hiring Program
application (OMB No. 1103-0027) required the actual and authorized counts
but not the budgeted. And for a time, an example of supplanting on the COPS
Office Web site erroneously referred to the authorized level instead of the
budgeted level
(http://www.usdoj.gov/cops/toolbox/general_info/compliance/default.htm,
6/23/99, page 1 of 6).

As in the context of declining budgets, guidance was available upon request
from the COPS Office Legal Division. Yet some agencies that interpreted the
requirements over-conservatively decided not to apply for COPS funding
without having sought guidance. Others with arguable but more liberal
interpretations of the retention and nonsupplanting requirements were later 
described as noncompliant by OIG auditors. According to the OIG's 1999
Summary of Audit Findings, 58 percent of OIG-audited grantees had violated
the retention requirement, and 41 percent showed indicators of supplanting.
The COPS Office formally appealed the OIG results, and an independent
mediator reviewed a random sample of 64 OIG findings of noncompliance. On
December 21, 1999, the Deputy Attorney General adopted the mediator's
determination that audited grantees were actually in compliance in 33 percent of
the retention issues and 65 percent of the supplanting issues in the sample. The
programmatic effects of long-term uncertainty in the field about these two key
requirements are discussed more fully in chapters 3 and 4.

While second-guessing individual Federal or local agencies' compliance
determinations is not an issue for this report, the possibility that prospective
grantees may have had a hazy view of an evolving standard raises the possibility
that confusion over these requirements may have had adverse program effects--
an evaluation question addressed in chapters 3 and 4.

Starting and accelerating transitions to community policing

The third COPS objective, fostering transitions to community policing, was
complicated for a number of reasons. Not the least of these was the wide array
of tactics discussed earlier in this chapter, which were plausible elements of
community policing at the start of the program. Another was the fact that
agencies could adopt "signature" tactics of community policing without
embedding them in a comprehensive strategy intended to better align interests
of the police and the policed. 

The COPS Office took a number of steps to operationalize community policing,
disseminate its view of the concept, and refine the concept. It specified a set of
community policing objectives. It expanded the Community Policing
Consortium, which BJA had launched in 1993 to provide training and technical
assistance. It set up special Innovative Community Oriented Policing grant
programs to encourage local agencies to test creative ways of dealing with
specific forms of crime or disorder within a community policing framework. It
funded 28 Regional Community Policing Institutes under competitive grants and
carried out additional training and technical assistance programs. These
activities are described more fully in the following paragraphs.

On December 7, 1995, in testimony before the House Crime Subcommittee,
COPS Office Director Brann removed some of the ambiguity surrounding
community policing by succinctly stating his office's view of its "three critical
elements." He described them as: (1) building crime fighting partnerships among
the police, community, and other governmental resources; (2) developing
effective problem-solving tactics that involve all three of these stakeholders so
that officers no longer respond to recurring incidents at the same location, and
(3) refining organizational structures and improving deployment tactics to
enhance the overall community policing strategy (Brann, 1995). Crime
prevention was also a part of the concept, as explained and inventoried, for
example, in the COPS FAST community policing strategy checklist.

The COPS Office did not immediately develop any kind of formal publication
elaborating on these principles in operational terms. However, it did fund the
development of such descriptions by the Community Policing Consortium,
which had been launched earlier with BJA support. 

At the beginning of Phase III of the Community Policing Consortium's work,
the COPS Office picked up the costs of consortium funding and oversight from
BJA. The COPS Office faced a formidable problem very different from the 
one confronting BJA. While BJA had used the consortium as an incubator for
developing and promulgating the community policing concept, the new COPS
Office had to anticipate awarding thousands of community policing grants within
a few months. It needed a large-scale provider of training and technical
assistance that could specifically target the grantees that needed these services.
The consortium was a natural to assume this role, given its many community
policing curriculum modules in hand, with many more under development by the
staffs of consortium organizations. However, it needed to expand and change
its approaches to delivering training and technical assistance.

With COPS Office support, the consortium developed a clearinghouse and a
series of publications and curricula about community policing, available to all
law enforcement agencies. It operated training and technical assistance
programs that were available to any agency but required by the COPS Office
of grantees whose community policing strategies reflected a lack of
understanding or support of the concept. The consortium provided training for
many thousands of law enforcement personnel from these grantee agencies. Its
operations continue at a high level today.

The 1994 Crime Act authorized the COPS Office to spend up to 15 percent of
its appropriation on innovative programs that showed particular promise and
hope in dealing with crime and violence. During its first year, the agency chose
not to award any of these grants due to the priorities of hiring staff and
processing and awarding hiring grants. In subsequent years, however, several 
of these programs were launched, to award a limited number (usually 10 to 20)
of grants for local demonstration initiatives against such problems as gangs,
domestic violence, youth firearms violence, and later methamphetamine. Other
innovative programs funded community police officers for special areas such as
schools and distressed neighborhoods. Still others were funded to implement
problem solving and to advance community policing through supportive
organizational innovations.

In 1997 the COPS Office solicited competitive proposals and awarded
cooperative agreements for 28 Regional Community Policing Institutes (RCPIs)
throughout the country. These institutes required partnerships among one or
more law enforcement agencies, community-based nonprofit organizations, and
an educational institution (i.e. police academy or university); because the
awards were cooperative agreements rather than grants, the COPS Office itself
retained a partner's role. Each RCPI was to design and deliver a broad array of
training and technical assistance curricula and services within its region of the
country.

Up to 3 percent of COPS funds can be set aside for training and technical
assistance. Clearly, the consortium is being funded under this category.
Additionally, there were about 11 targeted training grants awarded by COPS in
1996, which involved a number of different projects aimed at the development
and delivery of community policing training and technical assistance, including
three grants that were awarded to community organizations. Training grants
were also awarded to many U.S. Attorneys' Offices throughout the country in
support of their coordination of community policing training programs.

Evaluation Questions

The events related above raised a number of questions for this evaluation.
Chapter 3 reports our findings on field perspectives on and responses to COPS
Office operations: agencies' decisions regarding grant applications and
withdrawals, their satisfaction with the COPS Office grant simplification and
administrative activities, and the resulting distribution of funds. Chapter 4
describes grantees' implementation of their COPS grants: the hiring and
deployment of officers, and expectations regarding postgrant retention;
civilianization and technology implementation funded under COPS MORE; and
redeployment of officer full-time equivalents from productivity increases due to
MORE-funded resources. Chapter 5 draws on the preceding chapters to
estimate increases in the number of officers and FTEs deployed to the street
through mid-1998 and to make preliminary projections of eventual deployment
based on the grants for 100,000 officers awarded by May 12, 1999. Chapter
6 reports our findings on how grantees met their commitments to implement
community policing. Finally, chapter 7 describes how local leaders used COPS
funds to change their organizations in various local contexts.

Notes

1. Costs of the COPS program and certain other components of the 1994
Crime Act are still charged against the trust fund as an accounting device in the
Federal budget and annual appropriations bills, but the significance of the trust
fund has faded as the Federal budget has shifted from deficits to surpluses.

2. The specific methods mentioned decreased the number of officers on foot
patrol, reduced the number of precinct stations, and insisted that patrol officers
spend less time on maintaining relations with citizens on the street.

3. This description summarizes a more complete discussion in Moore
(1992:132-133).

4. The second tactic was the alternative actually used in the Coconut Grove
district of the Miami Police Department and observed on a site visit during this
project.

5. In fiscal 1995, the first year of the program, COPS MORE grants were also
awarded to support officer overtime, but this option was eliminated for
subsequent years.

6. The 3-year hiring grants were subject to a 3-year cap of $75,000--an annual
average of $25,000 per officer, or, equivalently, four officers per $100,000.
Because the grants were to cover 75 percent of salary and fringe, the caps
came into play only when those costs exceeded $33,333 per year.

7. In fiscal 1998, MORE requests totaled $760 million, with only $240 million
available.

8. Our analyses here and elsewhere in the report abstract from the fact that on
average and independently of the COPS program, upwards of 20 percent of a
typical large agency's sworn force is unavailable for street duty on a given day.
This gap occurs because of assigned days off during the 7-day week, vacation
and sick leave, duty restrictions because of disability, and time required for
court appearances, training, and other duties.

9. The OIG report (99-21) estimated that if all grantees attained only minimal
compliance with the retention requirement, at least 26,518 funded officers and
FTEs will have terminated by the last day of fiscal 2000.

10. Memo to Pam Cammarata, assistant director, from Charlotte C. Grzebian,
associate general counsel, "Comments re: Urban Institute Draft Report," August
6, 1999.

11. Interim program guidelines (60 FR 3648, Section 4.2.5.) published January
18, 1995, refer explicitly to "continuation of the increased hiring level using
State or local . . . funding." Yet the COPS FAST fact sheet published October
15, 1994, mentioned no retention requirement, and the COPS FAST
application form (OMB No. 1105-0081, page 6, item 8) mentions only that
"the Federal grant share must decrease each year leading to full local funding of
officers' salaries and benefits at the end of the grant period." Similarly, the
Universal Hiring Program Application Kit (OMB No. 1103-0027), published
in May 1995, states that "by the end of the three-year grant period, the
department is wholly responsible for funding of the officers hired under the
grant" (p. 2), and Part II (P.2, item 6) of the accompanying application form
refers to plans for a good faith effort to retain the new officers following
expiration. By at latest mid-1997, in contrast, COPS Facts materials on
Monitoring (updated July 14, 1997) and the Universal Hiring Program (updated
September 1, 1998) made quite clear that the requirement concerned officer
positions. [All emphases added.]

12. The item read as follows: 6. b) Do you have assurance from your local
government that these officers will be retained? [Yes or No]

If you have answered Yes, attach any written letters or other assurances to
this application. If you have answered No, explain how you intend to retain the
officers.

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

3. The Flow of COPS Funds

Jeffrey A. Roth, Calvin C. Johnson, Gretchen Maenner, and Daryl E. Herrschaft
with Mary K. Shelley

To a degree rare among Federal grant programs, local decisions drove the
distribution of COPS funds. Beyond a broad statutory requirement that funds
distributed to jurisdictions of less than 150,000 population equal funds awarded
to jurisdictions exceeding that size, no Federal formula governed the allocation
of funds. Yet the program was not typical of discretionary grant programs
either.

Initially, Federal discretion was limited to determining applicants' eligibility,
vetting applications to prevent awards to agencies that potentially violated
statutes or regulations unrelated to COPS, specifying allowable uses of funds,
and occasionally postponing award decisions into a new fiscal year as a
short-term cash management tool. In years when MORE grant applications
exceeded available funds, COPS Office staff reportedly considered the merits
of proposed technology projects and applicants' implementation capacities in
selecting applications for awards. In 1997, as a few agencies accumulated
multiple large awards, the office limited awards to amounts that would not
cumulatively increase a grantee agency's sworn force size substantially more
than either its pre-COPS size or typical per capita sizes of other agencies in its
State. Within these broad limits, local governments' decisions largely
determined the patterns of grant awards and COPS funds.

We asked the following questions about local decisionmaking and the resulting
flow of funds:

1. Who was involved in decisions to apply?

2. What factors influenced local decisions to apply and occasionally to
withdraw from grants after award?

3. What was the total number and value of COPS grant awards?

4. What was the distribution pattern of COPS grants in terms of concentration
across agencies, region, population, and crime?

5. How did grantees coordinate their use of COPS grants with other streams
of funding for community policing?

6. How satisfied were grantees with their relations with the COPS Office, and
what were their intentions to apply for future grants?

7. How much time elapsed between the submission of applications and the
receipt of spendable funds?

Wave 1 of our national survey of law enforcement agencies, conducted in
autumn 1996, addressed questions 1, 2, and 6. Wave 3 of the national survey,
conducted in summer 1998, updated the answers to questions 2 and 6 for
medium and large local/county agencies[1] (see the methodological appendix for
details of the survey design). We used periodic updates of COPS Office grant
management data through the end of 1997 to address question 3 and combined
it with Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and Census data to address question 4.
To address question 5, we conducted a special survey of the 100 grantees
serving the most populous jurisdictions in our Wave 1 sample, and we
augmented 5 of our site teams with a grant administration specialist to study that
process. Finally, we merged the COPS Office database with a file obtained
from the DOJ Office of the Comptroller (OC) in late 1996 to address question
7.

Overview of Findings

Participants in application decisions

Virtually all decisions to apply were reportedly made by law enforcement
agencies' chief executives, usually in consultation with elected officials and
sometimes with participation by others. Elected heads of local government and
their budget officers were involved in nearly 90 percent of the agencies.
Apparently recognizing that successful implementation of the required
community policing strategies would require broader consensus and
participation, some departments brought other stakeholders into the decision
process. When asked to list participants in their application decisions, about
half the agencies named sergeants, 40 percent named patrol officers, and 25
percent mentioned union representatives. Various segments of the community
were named by 20 to 45 percent.

Despite substantial and successful COPS Office efforts to simplify grant
application procedures, some 40 percent of grantees reported using consultants
in the application process. Among the largest 100 grantee agencies in our
sample, only 11 used consultants, in part because large agencies tend to have
their own grant writers on staff.

Influences on application and withdrawal decisions

Throughout the first 4 years of the COPS program, financial concerns were the
predominant influence on local decisions to apply, according to survey
responses. Of these, the most important in 1996 were costs during the 3-year
grant period: both the explicit 25-percent match requirement and expectations
about "implicit match" in the form of uncovered collateral costs. For hired
officers, these included training, weapons, vehicles and annual salary and fringe
benefits exceeding $33,333 per officer. For technology funded by COPS
MORE, the most commonly mentioned uncovered cost was technical staff to
integrate new systems into ongoing systems or projects.

Postgrant costs, primarily retaining COPS-funded officer and civilian positions
and maintaining MORE-funded technology, were mentioned somewhat less
frequently in our 1996 survey. However, even though the length of the required
retention period was not announced until after we completed data collection,
post-grant costs had become the primary influence on application and
withdrawal decisions by 1998. Local government officials in several of the sites
we visited mentioned the political dilemma presented by the COPS program:
"Do I take political heat now for passing up 'free' officers or later for raising
taxes to keep them?"

Various administrative difficulties were a factor in something less than 10
percent of application decisions during the first 2 years of COPS and largely
disappeared thereafter. Philosophical objections to either community policing or
Federal grants in general were cited as an influence on decisions by about 8
percent of respondents. 

In summer 1998, 74 percent of local/county COPS grantee agencies indicated
they planned to apply for at least one more COPS grant during 1998 or 1999.
Of those, 61 percent intended to apply for MORE technology grants, either
alone or in combination with grants to hire officers or civilians. Only 6 percent
of the prospective applicants planned to apply for hiring grants only.

Among possible considerations in future application decisions, the most
commonly named were the explicit local match requirement (by 55 percent of
grantees) and restrictions on allowable purposes and types of resources (by 40
percent each).

Value of COPS awards

By the end of 1997, the COPS Office had received more than 19,000 grant
applications for hiring and MORE grants. Virtually all hiring grant applications
from eligible agencies that cleared the vetting process were accepted for
funding (i.e., the COPS Office announced a decision to award a grant). The
COPS MORE program became more popular over time, while the statutory
limits on MORE program size remained fixed. Therefore, rejection rates for
MORE applications rose from 5 percent in 1995 to 21 percent through 1997.

By the end of 1997, 18,138 grant applications, worth $3.47 billion, had been
accepted. Of those, 754 were for innovative programs, which are beyond the
scope of this evaluation and are intended to encourage local innovation rather
than to support hiring new officers. The remaining 17,384 grants to create
additional officer time carried a total of $3.388 billion in awards: about 75
percent under hiring grants, 16 percent under COPS MORE, 7 percent under
Police Hiring Supplements and COPS Phase I, and 2 percent to support a
variety of innovative programs. Some 75 percent of the funds went to municipal
or county police agencies, 15 percent to sheriffs 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.

Grants designated for award by the end of 1997 were projected to support
40,806 hired or rehired officers and 22,437 full-time equivalents (FTEs) of
officers projected from productivity gains to be achieved using MORE-funded
resources. Under those projections, the grants awarded through 1997 would
support the equivalent of 63,243 full-time officers deployable to community
policing.

Funding distribution patterns

The growth in awards after the first full year of COPS was driven largely by
requests from previous grantees, not awards to new grantees. Between 1995
and 1997, the number of agencies with designated grant awards grew from
8,332 to 9,593, while the value of the awards approximately doubled, from $1.6
billion to $3.4 billion. By the end of 1997 $1.42 billion or 42 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 concentrated over time, with
the 1 percent of agencies with the largest grants having received some 40
percent of COPS funds. Those agencies serve approximately 11 percent of the
U.S. population.

Awards to repeat grantees helped to focus cumulative COPS awards on
grantees that suffer disproportionately from serious crime. Of the 8,062
agencies that submitted 1997 UCR data and received at least one COPS grant
by the end of 1997, the 1 percent with the largest murder counts received 31
percent of cumulative COPS awards 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 awards. A similar pattern occurred with respect to
robbery.

Participation in COPS varied significantly by region, but regional patterns
differed depending on how participation was measured.[2] 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 Middle 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,[3] 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). On both the per capita and per crime
bases, mean awards to core cities were highest in the Middle Atlantic region and
lowest in the West South Central region.

Integrating multiple funding streams

As of autumn 1996, about 25 percent of COPS grantees reported tapping
other funding sources for community policing. The most commonly mentioned
external source was "State administered funds other than Byrne grants," which
often turned out to be programs that several States created to help local
agencies meet the COPS match requirements. Local general revenues, Local
Law Enforcement Block Grants (LLEBG), and business sources were the next
most commonly mentioned.

In a special survey in 1997, the 100 largest[4] local/county grantee agencies in
our national sample described themselves as "integrating the multiple funding
streams to implement a local vision." Eighty-two of the 100 believed they
interpreted grant requirements to implement that vision. Only 37 reported feeling
constrained by grant conditions, and only 31 believed their agencies would be
better off if the Justice Department offered only a single law enforcement
assistance program.

The most common example of local integration of multiple Federal funding
streams was that 88 of these very large agencies reported using LLEBG funds
for community policing, despite the absence of a requirement to do so. One
common approach was to use LLEBG funds to cover the unallowable collateral
costs of hiring COPS-funded officers and implementing MORE-funded
technology; the two programs thus complemented each other.

Grantees as customers

One Justice Department goal in creating the new COPS Office was to achieve
high satisfaction among its "customers," the grantees, with simplified application
forms, rapid decisions, and regular contact. This goal was achieved well in the
early years, especially for small local/county police agencies, but less well for
sheriffs, State police, and other special jurisdiction agencies. Satisfaction
declined slightly between 1996 and 1998, which may have reflected localities'
experience with the simpler LLEBG program, increases in COPS Office staff
members' workloads, COPS Office staff turnover, or the accumulation of
experience with the more complex COPS MORE grants.

Our Wave 1 survey indicated high grantee satisfaction with the COPS FAST
program, which used a so-called "one-page" application form for small
agencies. About one-fourth of FAST grantees had prior Federal grant
experience; of these, 77 percent found the COPS application process easier
than other grants, and 73 percent found COPS grants easier to administer than
other grants. For the AHEAD program (aimed at larger agencies) and the
MORE program, these percentages were some 20 to 30 points lower. In
1996, grantees reported high satisfaction with the COPS Office, with upwards
of 80 percent describing their COPS grant advisor as helpful and easy to reach.

Among local/county police, sheriffs/State police, and special jurisdiction police,
similar portions (67 to 72 percent) described the COPS grant application
process as easier than others they had experienced. In contrast, 66 percent of
local/county police described grant administration as easier than they had
experienced with other programs, compared with 50 percent of sheriffs/State
police and 47 percent of special jurisdiction police. Local/county agencies were
also more likely than the other types to describe their COPS Office grant
advisors as "easy to reach."

Between 1996 and 1998, as COPS grantees gained experience with other
Federal grant programs, especially the formula-driven LLEBG program, they
were less likely to describe the COPS application process as simpler than other
Federal programs. As the percentage of medium and large jurisdictions with
other program experience grew from 64 to 72 percent, the percentage
describing the COPS application as simpler fell slightly, from 49 to 46 percent.
Among small-agency MORE grantees, the percentage with other program
experience grew more sharply, from 38 to 59 percent, and the percentage
describing COPS applications as simpler than others fell from 63 to 47 percent.

Over the same period, the percentage of medium and large local/county
agencies describing their COPS grant advisor as "helpful" remained at around
86 percent, while the percentage who found their advisor "easy to reach"
dropped from 81 to 74 percent. While about 78 percent of medium and large
local/county agencies described the COPS Office as "excellent" or "good" in
answering questions and making decisions, only 68 percent rated paperwork
processing speed so favorably. In general, the most populous 10 percent of
grantees in the sample rated the COPS Office higher than did other grantees on
these satisfaction measures.

Time from application to award

In general, the local processes of hiring officers, hiring civilians, or implementing
technology could not begin until grant budgets had been approved, official
award documents mailed, Federal funds obligated, and signed acceptances
returned by awardees.[5] For hiring grants, the mean time to complete these
steps was more than 224 days for both 1995 and 1996 applicants, of which 70
to 75 days was used by the grantees to sign and return the acceptance letters.
For MORE grants, whose complex budgets required more extensive reviews,
processing required an average of more than 481 days--16 months--for 1995
applications and 322 days for 1996 applications. The extra processing time for
1995 applications was related to a 6-month congressional delay in appropriating
the fiscal 1996 COPS Office budget. At the same time, a Federal Government
shutdown halted OC's budget review process. The COPS Office was not shut
down then but had difficulty filling staff vacancies because its future was
uncertain.

The remainder of this chapter examines these matters in more depth. We begin
by explaining in some detail the terms of COPS grants, which framed local
agencies' decisions to apply or not.

The Terms of COPS Grants

The COPS hiring and MORE programs presented potential grantees with a
strategic-decision problem in which the immediate rewards were clear but the
costs were unclear because two key requirements were not fully understood
from the outset of the program.

Under the FAST and AHEAD programs, and later under UHP, agencies could
receive 3-year grants for 75 percent of the first $100,000 of salary and fringe
benefit costs incurred for a newly hired entry level officer during the life of the
grant--up to a 3-year cap of $75,000. In 1995, the first year of COPS MORE,
successful applicants could receive 75 percent of the cost of acquiring new
technology, hiring civilians, or paying officers' overtime provided that, according
to the applicant's projection, COPS MORE expenditures on these resources
would yield at least as many full-time equivalent officers in the form of time
saved as would a hiring grant of the same amount. Starting in 1996, overtime
was disallowed.

Programmatically, grantees committed themselves to implement community
policing as they defined it in strategies submitted with their grant applications.
Chapter 6 describes the variety of community policing programs implemented
by grantees and nongrantees.

Some of the financial obligations were clear from the outset. Grantees were
required to provide explicit match: 25 percent of the first $100,000 in salary
and fringe benefit costs during the 3-year grant period. Grantees for which the
full 3-year costs exceeded $100,000 per officer (i.e., average annual salary and
fringe costs exceeded $33,333) faced an implicit match requirement of the
entire excess over the grant period. In addition, all grantees paid the collateral
costs of hiring an officer, including training, equipment, vehicles, and uniforms,
for example.

As explained more fully in chapter 2, uncertainty existed for several years about
two other financial requirements, retention, and nonsupplanting. First, through
August 1998, the COPS Office required hiring grant recipients to make a "good
faith effort" to retain their COPS-funded officer positions after their grants
expired but was silent on the length of the retention commitment. At that time,
the Attorney General set the length of the retention commitment at one grantee
budget cycle following grant expiration and required applicants to submit written
retention plans.

Until the required retention period was set in 1998, a jurisdiction could
reasonably assume it extended through an officer's entire 20- or 25-year
career; some jurisdictions made this assumption. Because of the $75,000
3-year cap on hiring grants and the exclusion of collateral costs from
reimbursement eligibility, the actual COPS share of the cost of an officer varied
markedly depending on the length of the retention requirement and on an
agency's levels of salary, fringe benefits, and collateral costs.

Table 3-1 demonstrates this sensitivity in four hypothetical but plausible agency
settings. In a "low-salary" agency in which a 3-year hiring grant of $67,500
covered 75 percent of the nominal 3-year salary and fringe cost, the grant
would cover 52 to 60 percent of the real (i.e., inflation-adjusted) 3-year total
cost including salary, fringe, and collateral cost, depending on whether the
collateral cost is assumed to be 25 or 50 percent of salary. The grant would
cover only 7 to 10 percent of the discounted total cost of an officer's entire
20-year career. In a hypothetical "high salary" agency, the grant would cover
only 29 to 34 percent of 3-year total cost and about 4 percent of the
discounted 20-year cost, depending on the assumed collateral cost.

The expected retention cost for an officer fell dramatically when the expectation
was finally set at one budget cycle beyond grant expiration, commonly 1 year.
As shown in Table 3-1, a COPS hiring grant to a low-salary, low-cost agency
that would cover only 10 percent of the discounted 20-year cost of an officer
will cover 38 percent of the discounted 4-year cost (i.e., the grant period plus 1
year) for that officer. A grant to a high-salary, high-cost agency that covers only
4 percent of the 20-year cost will cover 17.5 percent of the 4-year cost. 

Because of the high retention costs that hiring grants were presumed to entail,
COPS MORE was seen as a financially attractive alternative for higher salary,
higher cost agencies, especially when funds were used for new technology.
MORE grantees assumed the 25-percent explicit match requirement, and some
reported unexpected collateral costs for systems development, training, and
maintenance contracts (see chapter 4 for further discussion). However, net
retention costs for technology may actually be negative or positive, depending on
whether the future streams of redeployed officer time and other benefits exceed
the future streams of maintenance and other costs of the technology during its
useful life.

Second, as with all Department of Justice grant programs, grantees were
required to certify that grant funds would supplement, not supplant, local
financial effort. Although the COPS Office Legal Division provided guidance on
interpretation of the nonsupplanting requirement to agencies that requested it,
outreach materials that explained the requirement contained examples of only
some allowable courses of action. Therefore, an agency that based its
application plans on erroneous assumptions without seeking advance
clarification ran the risk of making a less than optimal decision.

Local interpretations of the nonsupplanting requirement ranged from
conservative to aggressive. During a pretest of one of our instruments, we
encountered one nonapplicant agency whose budget and sworn force were
slated to be cut in its next fiscal year; its chief stated he declined to apply for a
hiring grant because the grant funds would simply replace the funds and officers
to be eliminated--which he construed as a violation of the nonsupplanting
requirement. Yet other agencies in similar circumstances treated their
anticipated (lower) future budgets as baselines for assessing their own potential
compliance with the requirements and successfully applied for COPS grants.[6]
During site visits, we found local agencies were similarly ambiguous about
whether to count salaries of staff assigned to ongoing technology projects as a
match for their MORE grants--with one MORE grantee having done so and
another regretting that it had not. 

Agencies' Application and Withdrawal Decisions

In this section we report findings about potential grantees' decisionmaking
processes, the grant characteristics, and other factors they considered in
applying and the factors they weighed in deciding whether to accept their
grants.

The application process

Although COPS is a law enforcement program and chiefs and sheriffs are its
primary focus, the potential effects of accepting and implementing a COPS
grant ripple well beyond headquarters. Elected legislative and executive officials
and their budget staffs accept financial obligations. Most versions of community
policing alter the discretion and responsibilities of line officers and their
supervisors. New personnel rules that agencies might choose (e.g., to place
ethnically appropriate officers in certain neighborhoods, to give community
police officers flextime to facilitate work with community organizations, to
minimize rotation of community police officers out of their patrol areas) may run
afoul of union contracts. Functional community policing creates new
relationships between the police and segments of the community such as
business, churches, and grassroots organizations. Finally, jurisdictions
sometimes involve planning or grants staff in the offices of elected officials, city
or county managers, or police chiefs. Some agencies engage consultants to
prepare grant applications.

For all these reasons, the list of potential participants in local decisions about
COPS grant applications--especially development of the required community
policing strategy--is long. We surveyed grantees about their lists of actual
participants, as both an indicator of how broadly they anticipated ripple effects
and a possible predictor of success in implementing community policing. We also
surveyed both grantees and nongrantees about the considerations that influenced
their decisions to apply for grants or to withdraw after receiving awards.

Participation in application decisions

According to Wave 1 survey responses, the application process for COPS
grants nearly always involved five categories of participants: senior executives,
senior command staff, and planning/grants officers in the law enforcement
agency; chief executives of local government; and the local government's budget
office. However, a sizable minority of agencies reported a broader range of
people "actively participated in the application process" for COPS grants (see
the methodological appendix for survey methodology).[7] These results are
reported in table 3-2.

Chiefs or sheriffs themselves reportedly participated in virtually all agencies'
decisions; for all agency categories except sheriffs and State police, senior
command staff reportedly participated in at least 80 percent of agencies'
applications. Of the 55 percent of agencies that considered a deputy chief's
input "applicable," 75 percent reported that he or she participated in the
process. Among local/county agencies, only about half involved sergeants in the
application process, and only about 35 percent involved officers below that
rank.

Police unions generally did not participate in the application process, even
though many styles of community policing involve changes in working hours,
assignment procedures, and other working conditions commonly covered in
union contracts. Among sheriffs and State police, agencies with special
jurisdictions, and small local/county jurisdictions, between 50 and 60 percent
reported that unions were not applicable to the process. This compares with 21
percent of the medium and large agencies, in which union representation is more
common. However, even among agencies reporting that unions were
applicable, only 26 percent of small local/county agencies, 21 percent of
medium and large local/county agencies, and 9 percent of special agencies
reported that unions participated. In contrast, among sheriffs' departments that
considered unions applicable, 54 percent reported the unions participated in the
COPS application process.

Agency planning directors were described as "not applicable" in about half of all
agencies, presumably because the departments had no such position. About 70
percent of the agencies with such positions reported they participated in the
COPS application process. Similarly, grant managers were described as "not
applicable" in 60 percent of responding agencies; not surprisingly, virtually all
the agencies that had them involved them in the application process.

Elected officials and their staffs generally participated in COPS application
decisions. Among local/county agencies, 87 to 90 percent described their chief
executives (e.g., mayors or city/county managers) as active participants, and
only slightly fewer--81 percent--reported their local legislative bodies were
involved. Eighty-two to 87 percent of local/county agencies also described their
budget offices as involved.

The application requirement to include a community policing strategy evidently
drew some nongovernmental participants at least nominally into the application
process. Few respondents in any category described the religious or business
community, community organizations, or individual residents as not applicable.
Generally 19 to 27 percent of small local/county agencies (populations less than
50,000) and 32 to 45 percent of medium and large agencies reported that these
segments of the community participated in the process. Site visits revealed
substantial variation in the local meaning of participation, however, a matter to
which we return in chapter 6.

During the site visits, agency staff typically spoke in terms of four stages in grant
application: discovering the opportunity, deciding whether to apply and for how
much money, obtaining approval, and preparing the application. Because
COPS Office outreach efforts were aimed at agency chiefs, the police chief or
sheriff was often the first person to learn of the provisions and deadlines
associated with the various COPS programs. Most commonly, word came
through COPS Office mailings. However, more than one-fourth of the 100
largest agencies in our sample--agencies that participated in a supplemental
study of larger agency grant management--reported using the Internet as a
source of grant information. In some of the larger jurisdictions, a centralized
grants office reporting directly to the city or county manager or the senior
elected official would also become aware of the COPS grants about the same
time; however, several jurisdictions we visited that had such offices were in the
process of decentralizing grant application decisions to the relevant agencies,
including law enforcement. 

In small departments that we visited, chiefs or sheriffs typically made initial
application decisions, obtained approval, and prepared the streamlined
applications for FAST grants. In our special large agency survey, 57 of the 100
largest COPS grantees in our national sample reported having offices staffed by
a civilian, midlevel, or senior sworn officer who focused on grant application
and administrative activities. Most of these predated the COPS program, but
11 of the 100 agencies had established their grant offices more recently,
reportedly because of the increase in grant activity, which was predominantly
COPS-related.

Typically, the grants offices in the largest agencies reported they handled budget
and procedural aspects of grant applications but relied on staff in the units that
would carry out work under the grant to write the substantive content. Under
this model, directors of community policing would normally write the community
policing plans for COPS grants and the hiring and retention discussions for
hiring grants, while information services units would describe the substance of
MORE applications for technology support. 

The COPS Office devoted substantial effort to making the application process
simple in comparison with other law enforcement grant programs such as Byrne
grants, Weed and Seed, and other discretionary programs. This effort was
intended both to encourage applications and to comply with a statutory
requirement of simplified application processes for "small" agencies that served
jurisdictions with populations of less than 50,000. By any objective standard,
the COPS Office succeeded in simplifying the application form.

Perhaps ironically in light of the successful simplification effort, consultants
participated in COPS applications in all but the largest agencies. About 40
percent of both local/county agencies of all sizes involved them, as did even
greater proportions of sheriff/State agencies and special jurisdictions. Only
among the 100 largest agencies in our national sample, who were surveyed in a
special study of grant administration, were consultants less visible. Eleven of the
100 reported using consultants in grant writing, and about one-third of
those--mostly agencies pursuing multiple grants, especially under innovative
COPS programs, COPS MORE, and non-COPS programs--described the
consultant's role as "major." By way of comparison, only 3 percent of LLEBG
recipients in the large agency special study and 7 percent of Byrne grant
recipients used consultants in their applications for those grants.

Evidently, the grant managers in large agencies felt confident enough to prepare
and submit applications without consultants' assistance. Among small agencies,
the explanation for use of consultants seems to have been disbelief that the
application was as simple as it seemed, combined with fear of losing the award
because of a procedural error. Of survey respondents from small agencies, 72
percent stated they had no prior experience with Federal grants before the
COPS program, and, as one small-agency chief explained to a visiting site
team, "We wanted a consultant to check it over and make sure we hadn't left
anything out."

Early influences on agencies' application and withdrawal decisions

Through the end of 1997, the share of eligible law enforcement agencies with
COPS grants (i.e., their applications were successful, and they had not
withdrawn after receiving awards) was 77 percent of the 397 eligible agencies
serving large jurisdictions (populations of more than 150,000), 67 percent of
the 1,003 serving medium jurisdictions (populations between 50,000 and
150,000), and 49 percent of the 17,775 small-agencies serving jurisdictions
with smaller populations. We surveyed grantees and nongrantees in our sample
about considerations that had weighed in their application decisions.

Financial considerations. Financial considerations were the primary influences
on local agencies' application decisions, with application process difficulties
playing some role in the early years of the program and philosophical
considerations playing almost no role.[8]

Based on our national survey, financial requirements of COPS grants were
among the most common reasons for not applying, as of October 1996.
Respondents were most likely to mention the retention requirement (15 percent),
the explicit 25-percent match requirement (mentioned by 13 percent), implicit
match to cover uncovered fringe benefits and collateral costs (3 percent), and
the $75,000 3-year cap on COPS grants (0.6 percent). Local finances also
surfaced as an explanation, with 8 percent of agencies reporting "no need" and 2
percent reporting they "had other community policing funds." Our national survey
findings, shown in figure 3-1, were approximately consistent with those of the
General Accounting Office (1997). Specific categories of agencies' concerns are
described below.

Application process. Difficulties with the application process itself, such as tight
deadlines and lack of information (20 percent), lack of staff to write the
application or administer the grant (16 percent), and local paperwork problems
(1 percent) were all cited as reasons for not applying as of autumn 1996, when
our first survey was conducted. However, the influence of these startup
administrative barriers declined over time, as the rules became more widely
understood; they were mentioned only rarely in our Wave 3 survey.

Philosophical considerations. It seems clear that objectives to the community
policing objective of Title I were of negligible importance as a barrier to
applying for COPS grants. Objections to community policing or to Federal
grants in general were mentioned by only 8 percent of grantee and nongrantee
agencies in our national sample. Further, we conducted a supplemental survey
of the 100 largest agencies in our national sample to ask how they administered
multiple funding streams for community policing. Of the 96 agencies in that
sample that had received Local Law Enforcement Block Grants, 88 percent
reported using at least part of their LLEBG funds to support community
policing initiatives, even though community policing was not a LLEBG
requirement. As we discuss further in chapter 6, however, the widespread local
approval of community policing as a concept may well be related to its
ambiguity, which allowed agencies to apply the label to a wide variety of
policing styles.

As another test of the relationship between community policing status and
COPS application decisions, we compared COPS awardees with
nonawardees as of April 1995, controlling for jurisdiction population, in terms
of the extent to which the community frequently interacted with police in nine
ways, such as attending community meetings, describing crime patterns in
helpful ways, and using influence in the neighborhood to increase citizen
acceptance of community policing initiatives. As shown in table 3-3, 1995
differences in community support between grantees and nongrantees
depended on population. In places of 50,000 or more, community
organizations or residents of grantee jurisdictions were reportedly four times
more likely than residents of nongrantee jurisdictions to attend regular meetings
with police, twice as likely to provide specific information about active cases,
75 percent more likely to make constructive suggestions for community
relations, and 38 percent more likely to use political influence with public
officials to promote community policing efforts. However, they were only about
67 percent as likely to assist in operations, and there were only small
grantee-nongrantee differences with respect to other tactics. In places of less
than 50,000, differences were less clear, although residents of both grantee and
nongrantee jurisdictions were reportedly less likely to provide most forms of
assistance.

Local officials' priorities. Based on our national sample, 5 percent of the
agencies that did not apply for COPS grants cited disapproval by elected
executive or legislative officials (see figure 3-1). Such disapproval, of course,
may have reflected financial, programmatic, or other concerns. In several sites,
elected officials described the local dilemma they believed the COPS program
posed. On one hand, they experienced public pressure to accept "free" COPS
officers, but on the other, they feared future opposition if there was a need to
raise taxes to retain the new positions.

Some large urban jurisdictions that we visited, such as Newark and Milwaukee,
expected no such COPS-related future tax increase because the officers were
an integral part of a larger economic development strategy. In those and other
cities where downtown areas had suffered economic dislocations, it was hoped
that the reality and public perception of a safer downtown would draw
commercial interests, workers, customers, or conventions back to the city
center. If successful, the increased tax revenue stream would finance
improvements in city services across the board, including retention of the
COPS-funded position. 

Misunderstandings of eligibility requirements. As discussed earlier in this
chapter, project senior staff encountered a few apparently eligible agencies that
did not apply because they believed they were ineligible, evidently because their
interpretations of the nonsupplanting, match, and community policing
requirements were erroneous and overly conservative. Situations involving
budget cuts were discussed earlier. Other agencies mentioned situations in
which their personnel rolls included officers who were expected to leave after
the application deadline because of disability or impending retirement. The chief
of another small agency reported that he believed in good faith that his agency
had engaged in community policing for several years but accepting a COPS
grant would require the launch of a new community policing program; he did
not apply because he contemplated no new programs. 

We could not directly estimate how commonly such misunderstandings
prevented eligible agencies from applying. However, we believe that all such
cases are included among either the 4 percent of nonapplicant agencies that
"doubted eligibility" or the 1 percent classified as "logistical/department mix-up"
in figure 3-1.

By the end of 1997, 10,537 agencies had received grant awards, and 761 had
withdrawn. Figure 3-2 displays the agencies' reasons for withdrawal, as
reported to survey interviewers in autumn 1996 by the 45 sampled agencies
that had withdrawn.

As shown in figure 3-2, financial issues dominated agencies' withdrawal
decisions, just as they did in the decisions to apply in the first place. However,
the relevant financial considerations differed. Forty percent of the withdrawn
agencies cited the implicit match requirements--unfunded collateral costs such
as training, patrol cars, and other equipment--as the reason for withdrawal.
About 18 percent cited the explicit 25-percent match requirement, 6 percent
mentioned doubts about the agencies' ability to retain the officers after the grant
expired, and 5 percent cited the $75,000 3-year maximum for COPS hiring
grants, which makes the grantee responsible for 100 percent of salary and
fringe benefits over $100,000 during the 3-year grant period. 

Nearly 13 percent cited executive or legislative disapproval as the withdrawal
reason. In specific comments, respondents typically blamed this reversal of the
decision to apply on a new chief or an inability to obtain reauthorization for 
the local match payment. In many localities, reauthorization became necessary
because the official COPS grant award did not arrive until the local fiscal year
following the one for which the local match expenditure had been authorized.

Excessive administrative requirements were mentioned by 9 percent and
philosophical objections either to community policing or to Federal grants in
general by another 6 percent--usually after a leadership transition. Respondents
linked smaller fractions of withdrawals to the receipt of other community
policing funds and to "unexpected outcomes" of the COPS grant application.
One example was a partial MORE award that covered a civilian operator of
technology but not the technology itself.

Trends in decision criteria in medium and large local agencies

For medium and large local and county agencies without COPS grants, we
used our Wave 1 and Wave 3 surveys to ascertain, at least roughly, whether
the factors that influenced application and withdrawal decisions changed
between 1995 and 1998. The comparison is approximate because we coded
single responses to an exploratory open-ended question in Wave 1 but asked
respondents to mark all that applied from a series of closed-end choices in
Wave 3.[9] 

Two distinct types of financial concerns emerged from the Wave 1 responses to
open-ended questions. Immediate concerns included the explicit and implicit
matches and the $75,000 3-year cap on COPS grants. Long-term concerns
had to do with postgrant retention of the COPS-funded officer positions. At the
time, potential retention costs appeared substantial.[10] 

The Wave 3 sample included 42 medium and large local/county agencies that
stated they were nongrantees because they had not applied.[11] For them,
postgrant money issues had moved slightly ahead of immediate costs as the
most common reason for not applying.[12] 

Because the Wave 3 respondents could choose more than one reason for not
applying, the percentage distribution is not directly comparable with the Wave 1
distribution, which is based on single responses and therefore sums to 100
percent. Therefore, to compare the two sets of responses, we placed them in a
rank-order table (table 3-4).

As table 3-4 shows, financial considerations during the 3-year grant were the
main reason for nonapplication in 1996. Retention was a distant third. By 1998,
long-term retention concerns had moved slightly ahead as the top reason for
nonapplication, followed by immediate financial considerations and problems
related to application and administration. Agencies evidently began to think
beyond the initial grant administration and match concerns that were so
important the first year. 

In both years, a small percentage of agencies felt they had "no need" for COPS
grants. Philosophical objections were broken down into two distinct categories:
skepticism about community policing and skepticism about Federal grants in
general. Skepticism about Federal grants remained in fifth place for both years.
Skepticism about community policing dropped from sixth place in 1996 to last
place in 1998. Less than 3 percent of medium and large local/county agencies
mentioned community policing skepticism in 1996, and none did so in 1998.

In both 1996 and 1998 a few grantee agencies either failed to accept their grant
awards or withdrew after accepting them. At the time of the Wave 1 survey in
the autumn of 1996, 45 agencies, 2.3 percent of all awardees, had
withdrawn.[13] By the end of 1997, 7.2 percent of the 10,537 awardee
agencies for whom grant awards had been designated had withdrawn. 

As with reasons for nonapplication, we asked Wave 1 respondents from
withdrawn agencies an open-ended question about their reasons. We coded
the responses and used them as closed-end responses for Wave 3 respondents
from nongrantee agencies that had either declined to accept their grant awards
or withdrew from their grants. Because of the difference in approaches, we
used the same kind of rank-order table to compare reasons for withdrawal or
nonacceptance at the two points in time. However, in the Wave 3 sample, only
4.6 percent of nongrantees had withdrawn, and 5.6 percent had not accepted.
Therefore, our findings about reasons for withdrawals and declinations to
accept awards are based on only 12 observations and must be treated
cautiously.

At Wave 1, reasons for withdrawal were similar to those for not applying:
immediate financial concerns and application/administrative problems
dominated the list, with concerns about retention and skepticism about Federal
grants lower on the list of concerns. Among the 12 agencies surveyed in Wave
3 for whom the question was relevant, the leading reasons for withdrawal and
failure to accept grants were retention, immediate financial considerations, and
skepticism about Federal grants. No agencies in either year attributed their
withdrawals to skepticism about community policing.

The Flow of COPS Funds

This section describes the distribution of COPS awards through 1997 in terms
of grants and dollars, funding concentration, and funding distribution patterns.

Agency participation in COPS programs

For the COPS hiring programs, an eligible agency's decision to apply virtually
assured award of a grant, although requested grant amounts were occasionally
reduced. Cumulatively through 1997, the COPS Office rejected only 217
applications including those from ineligible agencies, out of 14,508 applications
received, a rejection rate of 1.5 percent.[14] In contrast, discretionary rejections
of COPS MORE applications became more common over time as the program
became more popular, while the statutory limit on the size of the MORE
program remained in place. The cumulative rejection rates for MORE
applications grew from 5 percent through 1995 to 13 percent through 1996
and 21 percent through 1997.

During 1994 and 1995, about 45 percent of all eligible law enforcement
agencies received at least one grant from one of the following programs: Police
Hiring Supplements (PHS), COPS Phase I, a COPS hiring program, COPS
MORE, or an Innovative Community Policing Program. During the next 2 years
participation broadened very little, but previous grantees continued to request
and receive additional grants.

This section, which is based on COPS Office grant records, describes 1995-
97 trends in the number of agencies receiving grants from the COPS Office or
its predecessors. We categorized agencies as small if they served jurisdictions
of less than 50,000 in population;[15] medium if they served jurisdictions
between 50,000 and 150,000; and large if they served jurisdictions with
populations of more than 150,000.

As shown in table 3-5, we estimate that a minimum of 19,175 agencies was
eligible for COPS grants: 17,775 small agencies, 1,003 medium agencies, and
397 large agencies. Table 3-5 also reports that the COPS Office rejected
applications that it received from 1,330 agencies, which is about 35 percent of
the 3,748 possibly ineligible agencies that came to our attention in databases
maintained by the COPS Office, the FBI's UCR and NCIC programs, or the
Bureau of Justice Statistics for use in its Law Enforcement Management and
Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey.[16]

By the end of calendar 1995, the first full year of COPS Office existence, grant
awards had been announced to 8,612 eligible agencies under PHS, a grant
program administered by the COPS Office, or both.[17] Awardees included
7,655 small agencies, 667 medium agencies, and 290 large agencies. Coverage
increased with jurisdiction size, so that 43 percent of eligible small agencies, 66
percent of eligible medium agencies, and 73 percent of eligible large agencies
had applied and been awarded funding by the end of 1995.

The second full year of COPS, 1996, saw slow growth in the number of
grantee agencies in all three size categories: to 8,408 small agencies (less than
10 percent growth), to 693 medium agencies (4 percent growth), and to 328
large agencies (13-percent growth). In 1997 the number of small-agency
awardees continued to grow at about half the rate of the preceding year.
However, the increase in agencies designated for award was more than offset
by withdrawals during 1997 and expirations of grants awarded during 1994.
Therefore, the actual number of grantee agencies fell by 16 for medium
agencies and 22 for large agencies. For all size categories combined, the
number of grantee agencies increased by 4 percent, to 9,776 (see figure 3-3).

Nearly all the agencies that received any COPS grant received at least one
under one of the hiring programs (FAST, AHEAD, or UHP) or COPS MORE.
By the end of 1997 this proportion was nearly 99 percent for small agencies,
about 95 percent for medium agencies, and 92 percent for large agencies.
Overall, the number of agencies receiving awards under at least one of these four
programs grew by only 15 percent, from 8,332 to 9,593, between 1995 and
1997. Because these four COPS programs were the only ones that were
operating as we designed the evaluation, they received our primary evaluation
attention. Therefore, as shorthand through the rest of this chapter, we refer to
those four COPS programs collectively as "primary programs."

As early hiring grant awardees began greater participation in COPS MORE,
the number of agencies with both hiring and MORE grants more than doubled,
from 825 in 1995 to 1,733 in 1997. Between 1995 and 1997, the number of
designated MORE grantees grew by 90 percent, from 1,264 to 2,399. This
1,135-agency increase is composed of 908 agencies with both hiring and
MORE grants but just 227 MORE-only agencies.

As shown in figure 3-4, COPS program growth between 1995 and 1997
reflected primarily supplements and new awards to previous grantees rather
than a broadening of the program to new agencies. The number of grantee
agencies with only one primary program grant decreased in both absolute and
relative terms, from 7,387 (89 percent of all grantees) to 5,327 (55 percent of
all grantees). Meanwhile, the number of agencies with three or more grants
grew by a nearly offsetting amount, from 57 (0.7 percent of all grantees) in
1995 to 1,907 (19.8 percent of all grantees) in 1997. By 1997, 11 percent of
grantees, or 1,060 agencies, had been designated for four or more grants.
During 1996, the COPS Office awarded only 874 Universal Hiring grants and
45 MORE grants to agencies receiving their first grants. 

The trend toward greater concentration of COPS grants among multiple
grantees was especially pronounced among the large agencies. While the
number of large-agency grantees grew by only 8 percent, from 261 to 282,
between 1995 and 1997, the percentage with three or more grants more than
tripled, from 15 percent to 55 percent. By 1997, 40 percent of large-agency
grantees had applied for and received four or more primary COPS grants.

Funding distribution patterns

Through the end of calendar 1997, the COPS Office had awarded about
$3.388 billion in grants under the primary programs. About 75 percent of those
funds, $2.52 billion, were awarded under the officer hiring programs FAST,
AHEAD, and UHP (see figure 3-5). Just under 15 percent of all awards,
$528.3 million, were made for resources to support redeployed officer time
under COPS MORE, reflecting statutory limitations on MORE program size.
Another $81.7 million was awarded for innovative programs, and PHS and
Phase I grants awarded in 1994 accounted for another $340 million. 

Distribution by agency type. As the COPS program grew between 1995 and
1997, local and county law enforcement agencies applied for and received
about three-fourths of the awards designated each year. As shown in table 3-6,
which displays cumulative COPS MORE and hiring grant awards, local and
county police departments had accumulated $403 million in COPS MORE
awards by the end of 1997, along with $2.0 billion in COPS hiring awards--a
total of $2.4 billion. By the end of 1997, sheriff's departments and State police
had accumulated about $517 million in hiring and MORE grants. Others,
including tribal and other special-jurisdiction agencies, had been awarded $176
million.

Concentration of COPS funds. Between 1995 and 1997, COPS grant funds
became heavily concentrated among multigrant agencies, as repeat grantees
sought and received increasingly large hiring and MORE awards. Figure 3-6
displays cumulative grant awards by jurisdiction size and number of grants
designated for award through 1995, 1996, and 1997. During that period
COPS funds awarded to agencies with only one primary program grant
decreased in both absolute and relative terms, from $787.9 million through
1995 (64 percent of grant funds designated for award) to $547 million through
1997 (18 percent of grant funds), as more agencies applied for and received
multiple grants. During the same period, funds awarded cumulatively to
agencies with three or more grants grew about 16-fold, from $123.6 million (10
percent of 1995 grant funds) to $1.98 billion (65 percent of funds awarded
cumulatively through 1997). Through 1997, $1.42 billion, or 47 percent of all
funds designated for award, were allocated to agencies with four or more
primary hiring or MORE grants. COPS MORE awards were even more heavily
concentrated. Figure 3-7 shows that agencies with four or more grants received
$329.9 million in MORE funds, 62 percent of all MORE awards through 1997. 

Some effects of repeat applications on the concentration of awards are
summarized in figure 3-8 and table 3-7. The 1 percent of agencies with the
largest cumulative grant awards, which serve about 11 percent of the U.S.
population, received about 40 percent of all funds awarded through 1998. The 5
percent of agencies with the largest grants serve 27 percent of the U.S.
population and received 56 to 59 percent of all funds awarded. Award
concentration was similar for local/county agencies and for all agency types
combined and changed only slightly between 1996 and 1997. A related question
is whether the process of multiple applications and awards helped to target
COPS resources on jurisdictions where crime disproportionately occurs. To
examine that issue, we ranked the 8,062 COPS grantees that also participate in
UCR in descending order of their reported 1997 UCR murder counts. We then
tabulated theshares of total COPS grant awards (including grants to
nonparticipants in UCR), cumulatively through 1997, that went to grantees that
account for large shares of total U.S. murders. The 1 percent of grantees with
the largest UCR murder counts accounted for 54 percent of all murders and
received 31 percent of total COPS funds awarded through 1997. The top 5
percent received 44 percent of funds, and the top 10 percent received 50
percent of total awards. We found a similar pattern for robbery.

Distributional equity

Within broad constraints, such as annual appropriation amounts and the
requirement that funds be split equally between jurisdictions with populations of
more and less than 150,000, the allocation of COPS funds was largely the
outcome of eligible agencies' decision processes, which we described earlier in
the chapter.

Despite the driving role of local decisions in the allocation of COPS funds, it is
reasonable to ask how "equitably" those funds were distributed. At least three
criteria for equity are potentially relevant: the relationship between awards and
the number of agencies, the relationship between awards and population, and
the relationship between awards and crime patterns.

Patterns by region. We measured regional COPS funding distribution patterns
in three ways: the percentage of all eligible agencies in a region that requested
and received at least one grant, cumulative grant award per 10,000 population,
and cumulative grant awards per 1,000 index crimes. The results are displayed
in table 3-8 and figures 3-9, 3-10, and 3-11.

Regional COPS participation patterns emerged in 1995 and remained stable
through 1997, as measured by the ratio of grantees to eligible agencies (see
table 3-8 and figure 3-9). Through 1997, 58.5 percent of eligible agencies in
the Pacific region--the most active--had received at least one COPS MORE or
hiring program grant. Just behind were the New England (57.2 percent) and
East South Central (56.2 percent) regions. The two least active regions were
West North Central (36.6 percent) and Middle Atlantic (41.3 percent). 

As figures 3-10 and 3-11 indicate, regional distributions of COPS funds on per
capita and per crime bases differ from the distribution measured in terms of
eligible agency participation. The Pacific region, which was top-ranked in terms
of eligible agency participation, ranked third in COPS dollars awarded per
capita and sixth in dollars awarded per 1,000 index crimes. The Middle
Atlantic region (i.e., New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey), which ranked
first in terms of both per capita and per crime awards, ranked eighth in eligible
agency participation rate; this probably reflects large awards to major
metropolitan police departments, while the many town and township police
departments were less likely to apply for grants at all. New England ranked
second on all three measures, and the West South Central ranked among the
bottom third on all measures. The table also displays mean jurisdiction size (i.e.,
population per eligible agency) and indicates that it correlates rather poorly with
all three distribution measures.

Urbanization patterns. Of all agencies selected for awards by the end of 1997,
only 4 percent served core city jurisdictions,[18] which are home to 27 percent
of the U.S. population (see table 3-9). They received 40 percent of COPS
dollar awards for all programs combined but 62 percent of all COPS MORE
funds. Through 1997, 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).

On both the capita and per crime bases, mean awards to core cities were
highest in the Middle Atlantic region and lowest in the West South Central
region.

Coordination of Multiple Grants for Community Policing 

Prevalence of multiple grants

By autumn 1996, when Wave 1 of our national survey occurred, about 25
percent of all COPS grantees were combining other sources of support with
their COPS grants for their community policing initiatives. This fraction
continued to grow, at least among medium and large urban departments as they
committed LLEBG funds to community policing programs.

Table 3-10 describes how commonly agencies reported using specific other
sources, both as a percentage of all COPS grantees and as a percentage of all
grantees that used at least one other source. Agencies reported that besides
COPS grants, support for their transitions to community policing came from a
broad spectrum of sources, including all levels of government and local business
communities. The four non-COPS resources most commonly tapped for
community policing were State funds other than Byrne grants (by 14.5 percent
of COPS grantees), Local Law Enforcement Block Grants (by 7.8 percent),
local general funds (by 7.3 percent), and business communities (4.9 percent).

Byrne grant support for community policing was mentioned by 4.5 percent of
COPS grantees. Many of the agencies that reported use of State-administered
funds other than Byrne grants mentioned State programs created specifically to
pay the local match for COPS grants. California, New Jersey, and Virginia
were among the States that created such programs.

Use and coordination of multiple grants

To explore the use of multiple grants in more detail, we conducted a
supplemental telephone survey of the 100 COPS grantees in our national
sample with the largest numbers of sworn officers. We also augmented five of
our programmatic site assessment teams with an additional member, a criminal
justice planning expert. The intent was to learn how agencies managed and
coordinated COPS Hiring, MORE, and Innovative Program grants along with
grants from the other two large programs that assist local law enforcement
agencies: the Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement
Assistance Program (Byrne grants) and Local Law Enforcement Block
Grants.[19] Results of that supplemental study will appear in a forthcoming
report.

As expected, the 100 very large city and county agencies selected for the
supplemental study tended to manage several large grants from multiple
sources. Of the 100 agencies surveyed, 65 percent of the agencies had at least
one COPS hiring grant, and their average cumulative amount was $5,399,000.
Seventy-one percent had COPS MORE grants, with a mean cumulative value
of $1,146,000; 49 percent had grants for one or more of the COPS Innovative
Programs, averaging a total of $361,000; 30 percent had Byrne grants, worth
an average of $586,000; and 98 percent had LLEBGs, which averaged
$1,260,000.

The vast majority, 86 of the 100 respondents from these agencies, reported
their agencies used their grant funds from all these Federal sources to make
permanent agency improvements. The most commonly cited specific
improvements were updated technology (mentioned by 38 respondents),
increased staff (20 respondents), and the creation of new programs and patrol
units (18 respondents). Eighty respondents stated they expected these
improvements to have long-term agency impacts.

Only 37 respondents agreed or strongly agreed that for at least one of these
grant programs, "specific grant conditions often constrain us from using grant
funds in ways that best support agency needs." Twenty-three respondents
agreed with that assessment of COPS hiring grants, 18 with respect to COPS
MORE, 13 with respect to a COPS innovative policing program, 13 with
respect to Byrne grants, and even 10 percent with respect to LLEBGs.

Despite these concerns of a few, most respondents portrayed their agencies as
orchestrating multiple funding streams to implement a local vision of policing.
Few saw themselves as entrepreneurs seeking all available Federal funds,
regardless of how grant program conditions fit into their overall programs. Of
the 100 agencies, 35 strongly agreed and 47 agreed with the statement that
their "agency has a clear vision and is able to interpret grant requirements to
support that vision." Only nine disagreed or strongly disagreed with that
statement. Respondents preferred the complexity of administering multiple
grants to the potential loss of freedom that might accompany a "monopoly"
grant program. Only 31 percent agreed or strongly agreed with the statement
that "local agencies would be better off if DOJ set up just one law enforcement
grant and stuck with it," while 43 percent disagreed or strongly disagreed.

Both the survey data and onsite observation suggest that the three types of
COPS grants, LLEBG, and Byrne grants were used in complementary ways to
fit large agencies' specific local circumstances. For example, a common refrain
during site visits to large metropolitan jurisdictions was that COPS offered big
city agencies much better opportunities for grants than did the Byrne block
grant program, which is administered at the State level.

The very large agencies in this supplemental study blended COPS and LLEBG
funds to advance their visions of community policing, even though community
policing was not an LLEBG requirement. Of the 100 agencies, 88 reported
using LLEBG funds to support their community policing initiatives, despite the
absence of a requirement to do so. During site visits, many agencies mentioned
they used their LLEBG funds to cover the unfunded collateral costs associated
with COPS-funded officers and technology. In short, the agencies appeared to
combine their COPS and LLEBG funds into a package for covering the
short-term costs of transition to their visions of community policing. 

Grantees as Customers

As explained in chapter 2, one of the primary motives for creating the new
COPS Office instead of processing grants through existing agencies in the
Office of Justice Programs was that a new agency, inventing its policies and
procedures from scratch, would encourage participation in the program by
achieving a high level of satisfaction among its "customers," the grantees. We
first examined this dimension of success in our Wave 1 survey by asking
grantees various questions about their satisfaction with application and
administrative procedures for COPS grants. Later, for local and county
agencies, we measured changes in satisfaction between Waves 1 and 3. Also in
Wave 3, we surveyed respondents about their intentions to apply for COPS
grants in future years.

Customer satisfaction: The early years

In the Wave 1 survey, respondents designated by chief executives to speak on
behalf of funded agencies were asked a series of questions about their
satisfaction with application and administrative procedures for COPS grants. Of
all those questioned, 39 percent had personal experience applying for other
government grants and were therefore in a position to compare experience with
COPS grants with experience with other Federal grants. Of these experienced
respondents, 71 percent said applying for a COPS grant was easier than
applying for previous grants.

Fewer respondents in small agencies had previous Federal grant experience,
but those who did found the COPS grant application relatively simple. Only 36
percent of small-agency respondents reported previous application experience,
while 68 percent of the largest agencies reported past experience. Smaller
agencies were, however, more likely to view the COPS application process as
easier than were larger agencies (73 percent compared with 57 percent). This
reflects a success of the "one-page" COPS FAST application, which was
designed to satisfy the Title I mandate for a simplified application process for
agencies serving jurisdictions of less than 50,000 in population. 

Thirty-one percent of respondents reported having administered grants of
similar size. Of these, 64 percent said in the Wave 1 survey that COPS grants
were easier to administer. As with the application process, smaller agencies
reported less experience with administering similar grants (28 percent) than the
largest agencies (56 percent). Among agencies with such experience, the
percentage that rated administration easier for COPS grants declined as agency
size grew, from 67 percent of small agencies with populations less than 50,000
to 52 percent of the large agencies with populations exceeding 150,000.

Satisfaction with the COPS application process was similar for all agency
types. The percentage of respondents describing the COPS application process
as relatively simple was 71 percent for local/county police agencies, 67 percent
for State and sheriff agencies, and 72 percent for agencies with special
jurisdictions.

State police, sheriffs' agencies, and special police agencies were somewhat less
satisfied than local/county agencies with grant administration. Exactly 50
percent of State/sheriff agencies and 47 percent of special agencies said COPS
grants were easier to administer than other grants, as opposed to 66 percent of
local/county agencies. Further, 22 percent of State and sheriff agencies
reported that COPS grants were more difficult to administer than other grants,
compared with only 5 percent of local/county agencies, and 3 percent of special
agencies.

Finally, looking at agencies' satisfaction with application procedures and
administrative requirements by grant program reveals some major differences in
agency satisfaction. Among agencies with previous experience, FAST grants,
with their "single-page" applications for small agencies, were considered easier
to apply for and administer (77 percent and 73 percent respectively) than other
types of COPS grants. Only 43 percent of larger agencies rated AHEAD
grants as easier to apply for than other government grants. MORE and UHP
grants also registered low ratings for ease of administration compared with
other COPS grant programs; 45 and 49 percent respectively said these grants
were easier to administer than other government grants.

Overall, satisfaction with the COPS office staff was high and largely unrelated
to the size or type of the agency. Ninety percent of funded agencies said the
COPS staff was helpful, and 84 percent said their COPS Office contact was
easy to reach. State, sheriff, and special agencies reported somewhat less ease
in reaching their COPS office contact; 26 percent said their contact was hard to
reach as opposed to 15 percent of local/county agencies.

Customer satisfaction trends in local/county agencies

For medium and large local/county agencies with MORE or hiring grants and
small agencies with MORE grants, we measured changes between 1996 and
1998 in opinions about COPS program administration, based on a series of
questions at Wave 1 and Wave 3.[20]

Our Wave 3 sample comprised three subsamples of local/county agencies:
Wave 1 interviewees in the medium/large AHEAD and UHP strata, Wave 1
interviewees in both the small and the medium/large MORE strata, and
medium/large Wave 2 interviewees in a stratum of 1996 first-time UHP
awardees. To measure 1996-98 customer satisfaction trends for medium and
large local/county agencies, we analyzed only the 303 such agencies interviewed
at both Wave 1 and Wave 3. For small agencies, the trend analysis 
is based on only the 176 members of the small MORE grantee stratum
interviewed at both Wave 1 and Wave 3. The 303 medium/large agencies were
used throughout the customer satisfaction analysis, including the analysis of
several new questions added to the survey at Wave 3. In general, satisfaction
levels declined slightly over time, and the highest satisfaction levels were found
among the very largest grantee agencies.

Between 1996 and 1998, the medium and large local/county grantees in the
Wave 1 and Wave 3 samples gained in personal experience with Federal grants
other than COPS, and there was a slight drop in ratings of ease of the COPS
grant application process. The percentage of respondents from medium and
large local/county agencies that reported previous personal experience rose
from 64.3 percent in 1996 to 72.2 percent in 1998. Among those with such
personal experience, the percentage that considered COPS grant applications
easier than other Federal grant applications fell slightly, from 48.9 percent to
45.6 percent over the same period. This small drop may reflect the start of
LLEBG, which simultaneously broadened experience with Federal grants and
set a new standard for application simplicity, since these funds were distributed
by formula.

We found somewhat greater changes between 1996 and 1998 for small
agencies with MORE grants.[21] At Wave 1, 37.5 percent of the small
jurisdiction MORE grantees reported personal experience with other Federal
law enforcement grants, and 63.4 percent of those agencies stated that the
COPS application was easier in terms of applying for funds. At Wave 3, 59.1
percent of small MORE grantees reported involvement with other Federal
grants, but only 47.1 percent described the COPS application as easier than
other grant programs. The decreased perception of simplicity between 1996
and 1998 may reflect additional budget reviews and revisions that occurred for
MORE grants still in process at the time of Wave 1 data collection.

Among the medium and large local/county grantees, overall satisfaction with the
COPS Office remained high between 1996 and 1998, with one exception. The
percentage of this sample that described the COPS Office as "helpful" 
remained in the 86 to 87 percent range between 1995 and 1998, while the
percentage saying the COPS Office was "easy to reach" fell from 81.2 to 73.6
percent. However, the agencies with the largest grants reported more positive
experience; 85.4 percent of agencies with total grant sizes above the 90th
percentile described the COPS Office in 1998 as easy to reach. 

Several questions were added in 1998, which asked respondents from
local/county grantees to describe COPS Office speed and accuracy in
answering questions, making decisions, and processing paperwork. On the first
two measures about 78 percent of respondents described the office favorably
(i.e., "excellent" or "good") in terms of answering questions and making
decisions. Only 67.7 percent of respondents rated the speed of COPS in
processing paperwork as excellent or good (see figure 3-12). In each instance,
agencies with grants larger than the 90th percentile rated the COPS office more
favorably than did agencies with smaller grants. This group ranked the speed and
accuracy of answering questions 10 percentage points higher than the total and
the speed and accuracy of making decisions 6 percentage points higher than the 
total. The favorable rating for processing paperwork rose from 67.7 percent for
all medium and large agencies to 78.3 percent (10 percentage points) for 10
percent of agencies with the largest grants.[22] 

Future application intentions

To learn grantees' intentions to seek additional funding under COPS, we asked
all 547 grantee respondents in Wave 3 what they planned to do about future
grant applications. As of summer 1998, 73.5 percent of grantees stated they
planned to apply for additional grants in 1998 or 1999; 65.9 percent of small
agencies, 78 percent of medium agencies, and 88.6 percent of large agencies
planned to apply in the future. MORE technology grants were the most popular
choice, named by 80.7 percent of grantees, followed by UHP (57.5 percent),
Innovative Programs (43.7 percent, although applications for these grants have
been by invitation only), and finally MORE civilian grants (31.3 percent). 

As the large sum of these percentages suggests, respondents were asked to list
all the types of grants they planned to apply for, and many responded with
multiple choices. Figure 3-13 displays the various grant combinations chosen. 

Among the agencies that did plan to apply again, MORE technology grants and
combinations including them were resoundingly popular. Of all agencies, 20
percent named MORE technology only, 7 percent planned to apply for MORE
technology and MORE civilians, 25 percent planned to apply for MORE
technology plus UHP, and 9 percent planned to apply for all three--MORE
technology, MORE civilians, and UHP. Only 13 percent planned to apply
exclusively for combinations of grants to hire sworn and civilian staff (6 percent
UHP only, 4 percent MORE civilian and UHP, and 3 percent MORE civilian
only or not sure).

The UHP grant is of interest to more grantees than the MORE civilians grant.
The most popular combination is MORE technology and UHP, with 25 percent
of grantees planning to apply for that combination of grants in the future. Only 7
percent of grantees plan to apply for MORE grants involving technology and
civilian hiring.

Grantees--both prospective applicants and others--were asked what factors
could affect their decisions about grant applications. The categories were
presented to the respondents as a closed-end list of options, and they were
asked to rank the importance of each category to their decisionmaking process
for grant application (see figure 3-14).[23] 

As in our earlier surveys of influences on application decisions, financial
concerns topped the list of considerations, with 54.9 percent of grantees
describing the required local match rate as a very important consideration in
grant application decisions. Grant flexibility was also described as important.
Restrictions on the purposes for which grant funds could be spent and the types
of resources on which grant funds could be spent were each very important
concerns for more than 40 percent of the grantees. Agencies also cited
unallowable but expected collateral costs like training, equipment, or uniforms
for hiring grants, and systems development, training, and maintenance contracts
for MORE grants (see chapter 4). As with Wave 3 nongrantees, characteristics
like difficulty of application and administration were not as important.

From COPS Office Grant Decisions to Funds Expended

Through calendar year 1997, the COPS Office made decisions to award
17,384 hiring and MORE grants worth $3.388 billion to increase numbers of
officers or hours of officer time. Under projections included in grant
applications, these grants were intended to support the full-time equivalent of
67,216 new officers deployable to community policing for at least 1 year.
Before grantees can achieve that potential, funds must be obligated after budget
reviews, official grant award packages must be prepared, and awardees must
accept all award conditions in writing. 

In the early years of the COPS program, the times required for these steps
limited the speed with which officer deployment and technology implementation
could begin.

COPS Office award decisions

Tables 3-11a-c summarize cumulative award decisions through calendar years
1995, 1996, and 1997, tabulated from a COPS Office grants management
database received in April 1998. As shown in table 3-11c, the Justice
Department had decided by the end of 1997 to award an overall total of
18,138 grants worth $3.47 billion (i.e., COPS Office databases indicated
"accepted" status). As the "hiring subtotal" line indicates, 17,384 grants to
create additional officer time carried a total of $3.388 billion in awards. These
grants were projected to support 40,806 hired or rehired officers and 26,410
full-time equivalents through MORE-funded resources--the equivalent of
67,216 officers deployable to community policing for at least 1 year, and
63,243 for at least 3 years.

These 1997 figures were the culmination of substantial increases since 1995,
the first full year of the COPS program, when 9,946 awards had been made
totaling $1.57 billion in value, intended to support 32,784 officers and FTEs
(see table 3-11a). During calendar 1996, despite a 6-month delay in approval
of the COPS Office fiscal 1996 budget, the agency's award decisions had
brought the hiring subtotal of grants to 14,652, worth $2.868 billion, intended
to support 53,140 new officers and FTEs (see table 3-11b).

Application processing time

The decision to award a grant ("accept the application" in COPS Office
nomenclature) is only the first step in making funds available to grantees. As
explained in chapter 2, the Justice Department's Office of the Comptroller
reviews all grant budgets to ensure that only allowable expenditures are
included, that budget assumptions comply with departmental regulations, and
that the grantee maintains adequate fiscal and administrative controls. This
process was relatively straightforward for hiring grants, where issues involved
primarily compliance with the nonsupplanting and match requirements, along
with allowable items to include in calculating fringe benefit rates. For MORE
grants, budget review was far more complex and time consuming because of
issues surrounding the purchase of expensive and elaborate technology;
frequently, the process required budget revisions and resubmission by the
applicants. Following successful budget review, official award packages were
prepared and mailed to awardees. The packages listed award conditions with
which applicants had to promise compliance by returning an acceptance of the
award signed by an authorized official.

Table 3-12 summarizes the mean elapsed times for these steps for 1995 and
1996 applicants. For 1996 applicants, the average time between receipt of the
application at the COPS Office and mailing the award package to the grantee
was 269 days for MORE grants and 149 days for hiring programs. The
4-month difference reflects the extra complexity of MORE budget reviews.

Negligible time elapsed between mailing the award packages and formal
obligation of the funds (i.e., creation of an account from which the grantee could
draw down funds as needed). However, 1996 applicants took an average of
75 days to return their signed acceptances of hiring grant awards and 53 days
to accept their MORE awards (the average excludes the 24 percent who had
not returned their acceptances by April 1998, when our database was created).
This delay probably involved a combination of routine paper flow delays at the
local level, time to resolve second thoughts over acceptance of the award as the
costs of implicit match and retention became more concrete, and the need for
local reauthorization of the matching funds in jurisdictions that had begun a new
fiscal year between application submission and award receipt. In total, then, for
1996 applicants, the average elapsed time for the entire process, from
application receipt to award acceptance by the grantee, was 224 days for hiring
grants and 322 days for MORE grants.

MORE applicants in 1995 faced much longer elapsed times because of
congressional budget debates between October 1995 and April 1996. While
the COPS Office was exempted from the Federal Government shutdown
caused by that debate, it was affected by the 7-month delay in approval (and
$500 million cut) of its fiscal 1996 budget. Because MORE applications
received during the first 9 months of 1995 exceeded available fiscal 1995
funds, many applicants were informed in the closing weeks of fiscal 1995 that
approval was likely but would have to be delayed until fiscal 1996 funds
became available. While that period would have been no more than a few days
under normal conditions, it became a matter of 7 months because of the delayed
appropriation. For these reasons, MORE awards to 1995 applicants occurred
an average of 400 days after applications were received. As a result, for 1995
applicants the entire average elapsed time from MORE application receipt to
award acceptance was 481 days, or 16 months.

Award obligations and expenditures

Because of the processing delays just explained, COPS funds obligated at any
point in time were less than the award amounts discussed in earlier sections. 

As shown in table 3-13, obligated total awards for all programs intended to
increase policing strength (i.e., PHS, Phase I, FAST, AHEAD, UHP, and
MORE) were $950 million by the end of 1995 and $2.1 billion by the end of
1996. Respectively, these amount to 60 percent of funds awarded by the end
of 1995 and 73 percent of the funds awarded by the end of 1996. In each
year, these percentages were similar for MORE and the hiring programs.

Notes

1. Throughout this chapter, "local/county agencies" refers to municipal and
county police agencies; sheriffs were classified separately. We defined "small"
agencies as serving jurisdictions with populations less than 50,000, "medium" as
serving jurisdictions of 50,000 to 150,000, and "large" as serving still larger
jurisdictions.

2. Regions were defined as follows: New England (ME, NH, VT, MA, RI,
CT); Middle Atlantic (NY, NJ, PA); East North Central (OH, IN, IL, WI,
MI); East South Central (KY, TN, AL, MS); South Atlantic (MD, DE, VA,
NC, SC, GA, FL); West North Central (MN, IA, MO, ND, SD, NE, KS);
West South Central (AR, LA, OK, TX); Mountain (MT, ID, WY, CO, NM,
AZ, UT, NV); Pacific (WA, OR, CA, AK, HI).

3. Core cities are the largest city in a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA).
MSAs must include: (a) one city with 50,000 or more inhabitants or (b) a
Census Bureau-defined urbanized area of at least 50,000 or more inhabitants
and a total metropolitan population of at least 100,000. 

4. Measured by jurisdiction population.

5. Through the end of 1995, the primary hiring programs, COPS FAST and
COPS AHEAD, were "accelerated," in the sense that applicants were
encouraged to recruit and hire on the basis of preliminary notifications ("Go
FAST" and "Go AHEAD" letters) that they were likely to be awarded funds for
a specified number of officers.

6. For the COPS Office Legal Division, no supplanting would occur in this
situation if the budget cut was made independently of the COPS program and
not in anticipation of a grant.

7. Reported percentages are based on agencies that did not classify the named
position as "not applicable."

8. Respondents were asked to name all explanations that applied.

9. In survey Wave 1, seven categories of nonapplication reasons displayed in
figure 3-1 were coded from responses to an open-ended question about why
an agency did not apply for a COPS grant. In Wave 3, these categories were
presented to respondents as a closed-end list of options, from which they could
select as many as needed. The categories were as follows: no need for funds,
problems related to the application or administrative requirements, financial
considerations during the 3-year grant period, concerns about officer retention
after the grant expires, skepticism about community policing, skepticism about
Federal grants in general, and something else.

10. In our Wave 1 sample, 75 large local/county agencies (71 percent of all
nongrantees) had not applied for a COPS grant as of 1995. The frequency with
which they cited various reasons were: immediate financial considerations (40
percent), application/administrative problems (33.3 percent), retention costs
(9.3 percent), no need (8.0 percent), skepticism about Federal grants (5.3
percent), skepticism about community policing (2.7 percent), and other (1.4
percent).

11. The 42 nonapplicants in the Wave 3 sample are not a pure subset of the 75
nonapplicants in the Wave 1 sample; 45 Wave 1 respondents were removed
from the Wave 3 sample, and 12 agencies in the Wave 3 sample did not
appear in the Wave 1 sample. The 45 agencies removed consist of: 9
nonrespondents to Wave 3; 6 "item nonrespondents" that skipped the relevant
Wave 3 items; 19 that became grantees between Waves 1 and 3; 2 that
became members of funded consortia; 2 that applied but were rejected; 1 that
withdrew; 5 that responded "something else happened" (other than the above);
and 1 "don't know." The 12 agencies in the Wave 3 sample that were not in the
Wave 1 sample included: 5 that were selected as nongrantees for Wave 1, but
reported they had grants at Wave 1, and answered as nonapplicants in Wave
3; 3 that were grantees at Wave 1 but claimed not to have applied at Wave 3;
3 that successfully applied but withdrew between the two waves; and 1 that
applied but was rejected between the two waves.

12. The top three reasons were concern about retention after grant expires
(87.7 percent), financial consideration during the 3-year grant period (85.3
percent), and problems related to application/administration (80.9 percent).
Another 7.6 percent stated no need as a reason, followed by 5.5 percent who
were skeptical about Federal grants in general and 1.3 percent who gave
another reason. None of the nongrantees mentioned skepticism about
community policing as a reason for nonapplication.

13. Of the 45 Wave 1 withdrawals, 15 withdrew from MORE grants, 28
withdrew from hiring grants, 2 withdrew from both hiring and MORE grants.

14. We believe that all 217 rejections involved either ineligible agencies or
problems that surfaced during the Justice Department's vetting process, but we
did not undertake the manual inspection of applications that would have been
needed to verify this belief.

15. The "small" category also included agencies with unknown populations. As
explained in chapter 2, these cutoff points had statutory and administrative
significance: Title I required a simplified application process for jurisdictions of
less than 50,000 and equal distribution of funds between jurisdictions of less
than and more than 150,000.

16. Our procedures for ascertaining eligibility are explained in the
methodological appendix. The sum of eligible and ineligible agencies in table 3-
5, 22,923, is larger than our sample frame of 20,894 as reported in table
MA-2 of the methodological appendix. The difference is due to additional
agencies identified after our sample was drawn when we received the 
updated Bureau of Justice Statistics sample frame created for use in LEMAS.
N=19,175 is a conservative estimate of eligible agencies, limited to agencies
recognized by the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

17. In this chapter, we use the term "awarded" as equivalent to "accepted"
status in the COPS grants management databases, meaning that the COPS 
Office had accepted the application and notified the applicant of the award. We
do so to distinguish this stage from signed acceptance of the award by the
grantee. Our counts of grants and funds awarded and funds drawn down by
grantees are based on databases generously provided by COPS and the Office
of the Comptroller. In these analyses, "COPS programs" refers to several
programs in addition to the "primary programs" that received our central focus,
COPS FAST, COPS AHEAD, Universal Hiring (UHP), and COPS MORE.
The additional programs included in these counts are: Police Hiring
Supplements, COPS Phase I, Troops to COPS, and all the "innovative
programs" developed or administered by the COPS Office. 

18. Core cities are the largest city in a Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA).
MSAs must include: (a) One city with 50,000 or more inhabitants or (b) A
Census Bureau defined urbanized area of at least 50,000 or more inhabitants
and a total metropolitan population of at least 100,000. 

19. LLEBG was created in 1996 as the first block grant program to distribute
funds by formula directly to local law enforcement agencies, which may spend
the funds for functions and on types of resources of their own choosing, subject
only to very broad constraints. The Byrne Program makes funds available in
two ways: through a small program of discretionary grants directly to local
agencies and private organizations for specific programs; and through a large
program of block grants to States, whose planning agencies administer
subgrants to local agencies and private organizations for projects to achieve any
of 26 statutorily prescribed purposes. Each program is funded at approximately
$500 million annually, about one-third the annual COPS appropriation during
our period of study. However, while only law enforcement agencies are eligible
for COPS and LLEBG funds, Byrne funds can be used to support all functions
of criminal justice.

20. Three additional customer satisfaction questions were added at Wave 3.

21. At Wave 3, the sample included large local county agencies and all MORE
agencies. Therefore, the only comparable group of small agencies at Wave 1
and Wave 3 is small MORE agencies (n=176).

22. The agencies above the 90th percentile in terms of total awards are repeat
grantees, with a large fraction of the Nation's crime problems. However,
because this group contains only 31 agencies, findings should be interpreted
with caution.

23. The rank options were very important, fairly important, not important at all.

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

4. Using COPS Resources

Jeffrey A. Roth, Christopher S. Koper, Ruth White, and Elizabeth A. Langston

Once Federal funds are awarded, success in achieving the Federal goal of
increasing the level of sworn officers on the street by 100,000 depends on
grantees' success in implementing their COPS grants. For hiring grantees,
implementation requires them to hire and train officers, deploy them to
community policing activities, and retain their positions in compliance with grant
conditions. Recipients of MORE (Making Officer Redeployment Effective)
grants must first either purchase and implement technology or hire civilians.
Then they must use these resources in a way that increases sworn officers'
productivity and yields officer-hours that can be redeployed to community
policing.

We measured grantees' early implementation status in Wave 1 (autumn 1996)
and Wave 2 (autumn 1997) surveys, interspersed with site visits. In a Wave 3
survey of two subsamples conducted in the summer of 1998, we updated these
data and collected additional information on grantees' retention plans for officer
positions and additional deployment enabled by MORE-funded resources. The
subsamples were: (1) medium and large local/county recipients of hiring grants,
and (2) local/county COPS MORE grantees of all sizes. The surveys are
explained more fully in the methodological appendix.

Overview of Findings

This section summarizes our findings about local implementation for officer
hiring programs and technology implementation and civilian hiring funded by
COPS MORE.

Hiring programs 

The COPS hiring programs required grant recipients to: (1) hire the funded
officers, train them as needed, and deploy them or an equivalent number of
other officers to communities, (2) retain the COPS-funded officer positions
after grant expiration, and (3) have the deployed officers practice community
policing.

Hiring officers. Officer hiring proceeded smoothly throughout the entire 1996-
98 observation period. About two-thirds of 1995 grantees had hired their new
officers within 3 months after their awards were announced, and more than 95
percent had hired them within 10 to 12 months of award obligation. About half
of all small agencies deployed their new hires directly to community policing,
while medium and large agencies more commonly assigned them to "backfill"
for more experienced officers who were redeployed to community policing. By 
autumn 1996, more than 80 percent of officers hired by 1995 grantees were on
the street in their first regular assignments. This pace of recruitment, hiring,
training, and deployment continued at least through the summer of 1998, when
we conducted the Wave 3 survey.

Retaining officers. 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. Nevertheless,
survey respondents in 66 percent of the agencies reported feeling "certain" they
would retain their officers. However, when we probed more specifically about
the nature of these agencies' expectations, their responses indicated uncertainty
and confusion. Many respondents reported they intended to follow two or more
of the plans we posed to them (a plausible response for agencies with multiple
cohorts of COPS officers). Many responded in ways that were arguably
inconsistent with Department of Justice retention and nonsupplanting
requirements. Some 42 percent indicated expectations of retaining the COPS
officers through natural attrition of other officers, and 25 percent expected they
would retain the COPS-funded officers by cutting positions elsewhere.

Uses of officer 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 40 percent reported their COPS-funded
officers would spend substantial amounts of time on "quality of life" policing, a
style some believe requires strong community control if it is not to undermine
community partnership building. Routine patrol and "squeezing in proactive
work" were both mentioned by about 30 percent of the agencies.

COPS MORE grants 

COPS MORE grant awards were more highly concentrated than hiring grant
awards, with 50 percent of the MORE dollars going to the 1 percent of
grantees with the largest grants by the end of 1997. MORE grants tended to
fund technology, either alone or in combination with civilian staff.

Grant applicants projected that MORE grants for civilians would yield the
full-time equivalent (FTE) of 4.54 officers per $100,000 of grant funds. This
projection makes civilian grants a cost-effective alternative to COPS hiring
grants, which yield four officers per $100,000 in agencies where annual salary
and fringe benefits exceed $33,333 (see chapter 3 for details). For appropriate
tasks, civilians can replace sworn officers on more than a one-for-one basis at
lower salary and fringe benefit costs.

Applicants for 1995 COPS MORE technology grants projected on average
that their grants would yield an average of 6.12 FTEs per $100,000 through
productivity increases. However, the experience base for such projections was
sparse, especially for mobile computers, the most commonly funded category
of technology. While the COPS Office continued to require subsequent
applicants to include projections, it lowered the count--for grantee accountability
and for its own published counts of funded officers--to four FTEs per $100,000
for grants awarded from 1996 on. 

Uses of COPS MORE technology grants. As of mid-1998, 79 percent of
MORE technology grantees planned to use the funds for mobile computers,
usually to be deployed in patrol cars for automated reporting, wireless queries to
license tag and other databases, or both. About 45 percent of grantees planned
to acquire desktop computers for general and administrative purposes.
Computer-assisted dispatch (CAD) systems, booking/arraignment equipment,
telephone-reporting systems, and other technologies were requested by smaller
fractions of MORE grantees.

In 1995 COPS MORE applications, each mobile computer assigned to an
officer was projected to yield an average of 2.4 hours per shift. However,
research available at the time indicated that automated field reporting could
yield such productivity gains only through wireless field reporting, for which no
off-the-shelf technology existed. Later research suggested that even with
wireless field reporting, productivity gains may be limited.

Implementation of MORE-funded technology. Implementation of
MORE-funded technology has proceeded slowly. When we surveyed a sample
of 1995 MORE grantees in mid-1998, only 43 percent with mobile computers
described themselves as being fully operational, compared to about 64 percent
of grantees with desktop or other management/administrative computers and 38
percent of grantees with computer-assisted dispatching systems. Grantees
reported expecting to have all technologies except telephone reporting units
fully operational by June 2000; however, confidence must be tempered by the
reported expectations of our Wave 2 survey sample of MORE grantees in
autumn 1997, 100 percent of whom expected to have their mobile computers
fully operational by June 1998.

Implementation of mobile computing beyond basic functions has been delayed
by a variety of difficulties. These include developing reporting software,
integrating it with existing record management systems, and upgrading or
acquiring the telecommunications infrastructure needed for wireless reporting.

Productivity gains from MORE-funded technology. 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 their projected FTEs, but the number of such
grantees is too small for an adequate national estimate. Our estimate of
productivity gains will be updated in a future report based on our Wave 4
survey, which is being fielded in June 2000, when more grantees are expected to
have experience with fully operational technology.

Other benefits of MORE-funded technology. 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
community (though some report adverse reactions from victims and 
witnesses); more information sharing across shifts; better communication 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.

MORE-funded civilians. MORE-funded civilians were hired to create sworn
officer time for community policing in four ways. These include: shedding
routine tasks from sworn officers to specialized civilians, such as crime scene
technicians; replacing sworn personnel in existing positions, such as dispatchers;
placing civilians in specialist positions that are expected to improve officer
productivity, such as computer technicians; and staffing new community policing
positions, such as domestic violence specialist or CPTED (Crime Prevention
Through Environmental Design) planner, instead of a sworn officer.

Hiring of civilians generally proceeded smoothly and rapidly. MORE-funded
civilians are generally retained at least for several grant periods, and about 90
percent of MORE grantees with civilians report achieving at least the sworn 
officer time savings they projected.

These findings are explained in more detail in the remainder of this chapter.

Hiring Grants: Recruiting, Training, and Deployment

For hiring grant programs, the relationship between COPS dollars and officers
on the street depended on grantees' success in hiring, training, deploying, and
retraining COPS-funded officers. This section describes that progress using
data from both the Wave 1 and Wave 3 surveys. The most current results are
from the Wave 3 survey, and they describe the progress of medium and large
municipal and county agencies (defined as those serving populations of 50,000
or greater) as of June 1998 in utilizing COPS awards they received through the
end of 1997 under COPS FAST (Funding Accelerated for Small Towns),
COPS AHEAD (Accelerated Hiring, Education, and Development), and the
Universal Hiring Program (UHP). FAST grants were awarded to agencies
serving populations of less than 50,000, and AHEAD grants were awarded to
agencies serving populations of 50,000 or more, so that "FAST agencies" are
synonymous with "small agencies," and AHEAD agencies with "medium and
large agencies."

Most of the findings in this section describe the progress of medium and large
municipal and county police ("local/county" in much of the following text)
agencies because hiring grantees in that category were surveyed at both Waves
1 and 3.[1] Comparisons at Wave 1 suggest that through 1996, local/county
agencies above and below the threshold of 50,000 had made similar progress
in key respects. Therefore, many of the generalizations drawn below from the
medium and large agencies in both samples are likely to apply to small agencies
as well.[2,3] The Wave 4 survey, in progress at this writing, will recontact
agencies of all types and sizes surveyed in previous waves.

Recruitment and hiring

Throughout the COPS initiative, agencies have made steady progress in
selecting, training, and deploying officers. At the time of their interviews, large
majorities of the agencies surveyed in the autumn of 1996 and the summer of
1998 had hired and deployed all of the officers for whom grants had been
awarded in prior calendar years. The results from both surveys suggest that
most COPS-funded officers were hired and deployed within a year of grant
award.

As of the September-November 1996 Wave 1 survey period, 94 percent of
both the FAST (i.e., small) and AHEAD (i.e., medium and large) grantees
reported they had hired their officers funded through calendar 1995 (see table
4-14).[5] More than 80 percent of both FAST and AHEAD agencies reported
their new officers were on the street in their first regular assignments. FAST and
AHEAD agencies had made virtually identical progress in hiring officers and
deploying them to the street at the time of the Wave 1 survey.

In June 1998, nearly 2 years later, 83 percent of medium and large
municipal/county agencies reported in the Wave 3 survey they had hired all of
their COPS officers funded through 1998 (see figure 4-1). Further, nearly 70
percent of the agencies reported all of their officers were finished training and
working on their first regular assignments. Agencies reported expecting to have
all of their pre-1999 COPS officers on the street by June 2000 (see figure
4-2).[6]

Relative to the Wave 1 results, the Wave 3 numbers may suggest some gradual
slowing in the speed with which agencies have hired and deployed COPS
officers. Note, however, that the FAST and AHEAD programs were
"accelerated" hiring programs under which the COPS Office permitted and
encouraged agencies to hire officers even before funds were officially obligated.

The Wave 1 survey permitted a more detailed assessment of the speed with
which agencies hired FAST/AHEAD officers, though these results may not
represent later COPS hiring grants which did not have "accelerated" status.
Among FAST/AHEAD agencies which had hired their officers as of the fall of
1996, approximately two-thirds of FAST agencies and three-quarters of
AHEAD agencies had done so within 3 months after their awards were
announced and funds were obligated by the Federal government (see table 4-2).
More than a third of the FAST agencies that had hired officers and half of the
AHEAD agencies that had hired officers did so prior to the award obligations,
as was permitted and encouraged under these accelerated programs. FAST
agencies that hired their officers during or after the month of award obligation
averaged 4.8 months from obligation to hiring. The comparable figure for
AHEAD agencies was 4.7 months.[7] The Wave 4 survey is updating time
estimates by stage, from recruiting to deployment.

Cross-hiring

The use of COPS funds to hire former sworn officers and to recruit officers
directly from other police agencies has been fairly common throughout the
history of the COPS program. We refer to the latter practice as cross-hiring.
Cross-hiring facilitated the process of moving newly hired officers into their first
assignments by reducing or eliminating training requirements. It also helped some
agencies to deploy experienced officers directly into community policing
assignments. Cross-hiring has the potential to reduce the net national increase in
officers attributable to COPS rather than local expenditures.[8] However,
estimates presented in chapter 5 indicate this effect was small.

Approximately 40 percent of FAST agencies and 20 percent of AHEAD
agencies surveyed in late 1996 indicated one or more of their funded positions
was used or would be used to hire former sworn officers. Forty percent of the
FAST agencies hiring former sworn officers and 56 percent of the AHEAD
agencies hiring former sworn officers recruited directly from another agency.
Overall, therefore, 16 percent of the FAST agencies and 11 percent of the
AHEAD agencies reported recruiting one or more officers directly from other
agencies.

Approximately 41 percent of the agencies surveyed in June 1998 indicated one
or more of their funded positions was used or would be used to hire former
sworn officers, and about 14 percent reported they had hired or were going 
to hire former sworn officers for half or more of their new positions. Among
agencies hiring former sworn officers, about 43 percent recruited at least some
of these officers from other agencies. Therefore, nearly 18 percent of the Wave
3 agencies recruited one or more officers directly from other agencies. In
comparison to the Wave 1 figure for AHEAD agencies, this suggests that
cross-hiring increased over time among medium and large local/county agencies.

Training

Wave 1 survey respondents were questioned about sources of training given to
or planned for COPS-funded officers.[9] Results are displayed in table 4-3.
Training at State academies and on the job training was most common for
FAST agencies, followed by field training and inservice training. Field,
on-the-job, and inservice training were the most common modes for AHEAD
agencies. State and local training academies were the most common forms of
formal curricula training for AHEAD officers.

Approximately 5.6 percent of the FAST agencies did not intend to train their
officers. The majority of these agencies (69 percent) indicated their
COPS-funded officers were former sworn officers. Only 1.5 percent of the
AHEAD agencies indicated they were not going to train their COPS-funded
officers.

Deployment progress

As noted earlier, 68 percent of hiring grant agencies reported in the Wave 3
survey that all of their pre-1998 COPS officers were on the street in 
June 1998, and respondents expected all pre-1998 COPS officers to be on the
street by June 2000.[10] 

The Wave 1 survey allowed a more detailed assessment of the speed with which
agencies deploy COPS officers. Table 4-4 displays the distribution of months
elapsed from hiring to hitting the street for FAST and AHEAD officers. Newly
hired FAST officers hit the streets more quickly than did AHEAD officers.
Nearly three-quarters of FAST officers were on the street or were expected to
be on the street within 3 months of being hired. On average, FAST agencies
reported 2.6 months between hiring and hitting the street. AHEAD agencies
were somewhat slower, but three-quarters of their officers were in the field or
were expected to be in the field within 6 months of hiring. AHEAD agencies 
reported an average of 4.5 months from hiring to hitting the street.

Nearly all of the COPS-funded officers for both programs were in the field or
expected to be in the field within a year of hiring. Thus, the results suggest that
the overwhelming majority of agencies of all sizes deploy all their COPS-funded
officers into field assignments within less than a year of hiring them.

Community policing deployment strategies

In addition to increasing levels of policing, the COPS program is intended to
encourage community policing. Not surprisingly, 94 percent of the Wave 3
respondents reported one officer was being deployed to community policing for
every officer hired. Of the others, 63 percent reported that more than half of the
COPS-funded officers or the officers they replaced were deployed to
community policing. The activities of funded officers are described in the next
section, and chapter 6 describes the range of policing styles that COPS
grantees described as community policing.

The two major strategies for deploying officers into community policing are the
direct deployment and "backfill" strategies. Direct deployment occurs when
newly hired officers are deployed directly into community policing roles. The
backfill strategy, which the COPS Office encouraged where appropriate,
involves replacing existing patrol officers with the new hires and redeploying the
experienced officers into community policing roles. 

Medium and large agencies have relied more heavily on the backfill strategy
throughout the COPS program. Two-thirds or more of those agencies surveyed
in both 1996 and 1998 indicated using the backfill strategy exclusively or in
combination with direct deployment (see tables 4-5 and 4-6).[11]

In contrast, Wave 1 results suggest that small agencies have made greater use
of direct deployment (see table 4-5). The majority of FAST agencies surveyed
in 1996 planned to deploy their new officers directly into community policing,
while only about 38 percent planned a backfill strategy. Field observations by
project staff suggest this reflects the fact that the new COPS officers were
frequently the first community policing officers in those agencies. Survey data
provide further support for that hypothesis. FAST agencies that reported doing
community policing prior to 1995 showed a slight tendency to rely more on the
backfill strategy than did FAST agencies that did not practice community
policing prior to 1995; 41 percent of the former group and 34 percent of the
latter group planned to utilize the backfill strategy.[12]

At both Wave 1 and Wave 3, agencies utilizing a backfill deployment strategy
were asked about the process of selecting, training, and redeploying officers into
community policing. Wave 3 results indicate 86 percent of agencies had selected
all of their backfilled community police officers and 72 percent had reassigned all
of their backfilled officers to community policing by June 1998 (see figure 4-3).
Moreover, respondents expected all backfilled community police officers to be
redeployed as of June 2000 (see figure 4-4).

In medium and large agencies, the processes of deploying new officers into the
field and redeploying older officers into community policing occurred in tandem.
As noted earlier, 85 percent of AHEAD agencies had hired and deployed their
officers funded before 1996 to the street by October-November 1996.
Likewise, table 4-7 shows that 90 percent of the AHEAD agencies employing
the backfill strategy had selected, trained, and deployed community police
officers by that time. Consistent results were obtained in the summer of 1998.
By then, 68 percent of surveyed agencies had deployed all of their COPS
officers funded before 1998 into the field and, as shown in figure 4-3, 72
percent of the agencies using the backfill strategy had redeployed all of their
community police officers.

Small agencies seem to progress more slowly in training and redeploying
backfilled community police officers, based on results from the Wave 1 survey
(see table 4-7). As of late 1996, 82 percent of FAST grantees had hired and
deployed their new officers (see table 4-1), but only 61 percent of the FAST
agencies using a backfill strategy had completed training and redeployment of
backfilled community police officers.[13] Therefore, the Wave 3 results
indicating that all backfilled officers will be redeployed as of June 2000 may not
be generalizable to small agencies. 

Finally, the Wave 1 survey inquired about training modes for the redeployed
experienced officers. Training modes for redeployed officers are displayed in
table 4-8. Inservice and on-the-job training were the most common modes of
training reported by both FAST and AHEAD agencies. AHEAD agencies
relied much more heavily on inservice training than did the smaller FAST
agencies. Roll-call training, field training by field training officers, and other
forms of training were common as well. Agencies utilizing "other" forms of
training reported sending officers to a variety of specialized seminars and
courses, often conducted either outside the department (e.g., at State or local
colleges, police academies, or conferences) or by outside specialists. During
site visits conducted in 1998, research teams observed or were told about
several successful training sessions conducted by COPS-funded Regional
Community Policing Institutes.

Officer Retention and Redeployment

As explained in chapter 2, two key requirements for recipients of COPS hiring
grants were retention of the officer positions after the 3-year grants expired and
deployment of the hired officers into community policing. This section describes
agencies' expectations about how they would cope with the retention
requirement and their reports of the activities to which the COPS-funded
officers were deployed.

By June 1998, when our Wave 3 survey was conducted, only 21 percent of all
COPS grants awarded by the end of 1997 had expired, and these accounted
for only 18 percent of all COPS-funded officers. Therefore, while concern over
retention costs loomed large in the minds of many grantee agencies, actual
post-grant retention experience was too rare at that time to support meaningful
statistical description. None of the respondents in our Wave 3 sample was
aware of COPS-funded officers in their agencies whose grants had expired.
Therefore, this section describes respondents' estimates of the likelihood that
their agencies would retain their COPS-funded officer positions and their plans
for doing so.

Turnover and replacement during grant periods

Although 54 percent of Wave 3 respondents reported that some of the original
officers funded since 1994 under any COPS hiring program had left their
agencies by the Wave 3 survey period (June 1998), 98 percent still retained all
their COPS-funded positions.[14] Considering all officers funded under any
hiring program, 46 percent of the medium and large local/county agency
respondents reported that all of the officers were still with the agency as of the
date of the survey in 1998 (table 4-9). For the 54 percent of the agencies that
reported some officers were no longer with the agency, 92 percent indicated
that those COPS-funded officers who had left had been replaced. For those
agencies that reported the COPS-funded officers had not been replaced, 71
percent indicated they would replace the officer as soon as a qualified recruit
was found. In all, approximately 98 percent of the agencies reported that the
original officers had stayed through the grant period, had been replaced, or
would be replaced when a suitable replacement was found. 

Not surprisingly, the turnover rate depended on the number of officers funded.
According to table 4-9, agencies with 1 to 10 COPS-funded officers were
more likely to report that all of them were still with the agency (62 percent).
Only 36 percent of the agencies with 11-49 officers funded and 27 percent of
agencies with more than 49 officers funded reported that all of them were still
with the agency at the time of the survey in 1998.

Retention after grant expiration

We asked the respondents in our Wave 3 sample two sets of questions about
postgrant retention. First, we asked them how certain they were that their
agencies would retain their COPS-funded officers after their hiring grants
expired. Second, we asked how their agencies planned to retain those officers.
Multiple options were provided for the respondents to choose from, to allow for
the possibility of different short- and long-term retention plans for different
subsets of officers. We conducted the Wave 3 survey before the Justice 
Department announced the duration of the retention requirement: one local
budget cycle after grant expiration.

Approximately 66 percent of Wave 3 respondents reported they were "certain"
their agencies would retain the COPS-funded officers when their grants
expired, 24 percent indicated they were "almost positive" they would retain the
officers, 6 percent were "pretty sure," and 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. As shown in table 4-10,
about 52 percent stated they were uncertain about long-term retention plans.
However, 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 (see chapter 2 for details), the persons authorized to speak to our
interviewers on behalf of the agency 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 under some
conditions would violate the nonsupplanting requirement (see chapter 2); and 5
percent agreed that the COPS-funded officers were likely to retain officers both
through attrition and by cutting back elsewhere. Now that the retention
requirement has been spelled out in more detail, we are reexamining long-term
retention plans in the Wave 4 survey.

Time uses of COPS-funded officers

One purpose of the COPS program was to increase officer time spent doing
community policing. Addressing whether that happened directly would have
required measurements of individual officers' time use before and after grant
award, for representative samples of officers in representative samples of
grantee and nongrantee agencies. That approach was impractical because of the
large sample sizes needed to achieve adequate statistical power for any given
department, the difficulty of obtaining preaward measurements, and the
difficulties of multisite analyses using multiple agencies' reporting code systems.

In chapter 6, we measure COPS program effects by comparing grantee and
nongrantee agencies' use of community policing tactics before and after the
launch of the COPS program and asking grantees about the role of COPS funds
in starting or expanding the use of new tactics. Here, we report the results of an
alternative approach to measuring how COPS-funded community policing
officers spent their time.[15] We asked respondents approximately how much
time their COPS-funded officers spent on a short but varied list of activities,
some of which are--commonly considered "community" policing, while others
are less clear.

Specifically, we asked Wave 3 survey respondents about the planned uses of
time by their COPS-funded officers. Respondents were read a list of possible
assignments. They were asked to think about the specific duties of the officers 
deployed in the community, whether directly or through backfill, and whether,
for the group as a whole, each assignment duty accounted for "little or none of
their time," "some of their time," or "most or all of their time" which we
designated "substantial."

More agencies reported that COPS-funded officers were "spending most or all
of their time doing" problem solving (43 percent) and working with community
groups and residents (39 percent) than any other activity (see table 4-11). The
activities next most commonly described in this way were routine patrol (32
percent), "squeezing in proactive work as time permits" (30 percent), and " 'zero
tolerance' or 'quality of life' policing" (26 percent). Prevention was described this
way by 13 percent. Virtually no agencies reported that their COPS-funded 
officers would spend "most or all" of their time on undercover, tactical,
administrative, or technical assignments; however, 20 to 40 percent reported
their COPS-funded officers spent "some" time on these activities.[16]

As shown in table 4-12, the majority of grantees (58.3 percent) expect their
COPS-funded officers to spend at least some of their time on prevention
programs; however, only 12.9 percent expected prevention to occupy a
substantial amount of time. Table 4-12 also shows that almost all of the
agencies spend at least some of their time working with community groups
(95.9 percent) and problem solving (95.5 percent). Less than 1 percent of
agencies report spending little to no time on all three of these activities.

As shown in table 4-11, 32.3 percent of agencies reported that their
COPS-funded officers (or the redeployed community police officers they
backfill for) spend "most or all" of their time on routine patrol. The meaning of
this statistic depends on the departmental structure for delivering community
policing. In generalist departments, where all officers are expected to
incorporate community policing into their daily activities, routine patrol and
community policing are intended to be indistinguishable. In specialist
departments, where a specialized unit delivers all community policing, one would
expect the COPS-funded officers to be assigned to those units. (Our
generalist/specialist classification, which is derived from IACP (1997)
departmental community policing structures, is explained more fully in chapter
6.[17]) 

As expected, agencies with specialized community policing structures were less
likely than agencies with generalist structures to report that their COPS-funded
officers spent most or all of their time on routine patrol.[18] As shown in figure
4-5 and table 4-13, "specialist" agencies were 15.5 points less likely than
"generalist" agencies to report that their COPS-funded officers would spend
substantial amounts of time on routine patrol duty (39.9 percent of generalists,
24.4 percent of specialists). Also, a higher percentage of the specialist agencies
(34.7 percent) reported that their new officers spend "little to no time" on
routine patrol, as opposed to 19.5 percent of the generalist agencies.

If COPS-funded officers in specialist agencies are not doing as much routine
patrol, one would expect them to do more core community policing activities:
more partnership building, more problem solving, prevention, and quality-of-life
policing where that is considered community policing. That is what specialist
agencies report; 49.1 percent of the specialist agencies, as opposed to 36.3
percent of the generalist agencies, report spending "most or all" of their
COPS-funded officers' time on problem solving. The trend is similar for other
community policing objectives.

More than 95 percent of the medium and large local/county agencies surveyed
in Wave 3, whether generalist or specialist, acknowledged their COPS-funded
officers would be "squeezing in" proactive work such as the core community
policing functions at least some of the time. Moreover, about 30 percent
reported they were doing so a substantial amount of the time (see table 4-14).
During site visits, our teams frequently observed that instead of setting aside
blocks of time for solving problems or building community partnerships,
agencies encouraged officers to squeeze these tasks in between responses to
calls. We observed a number of creative ways of making time for such
activities. Examples included taking a few extra minutes for a walkby security
check of nearby high-risk areas when responding to calls from a crime "hot
spot" or offering the neighbors prevention advice or quick security checks
before leaving the scene of a burglary call. These and other examples are
described in a supplemental Issues Brief from this evaluation project (Maxfield,
1998).

Respondents were asked how their agencies encourage the COPS-funded
officers in the community to spend their time on community policing activities.
Respondents were given a closed-end list and could choose as many methods of
encouragement as needed. The most frequently named methods were: memos
from headquarters (58.4 percent), reminders from supervisors (75.2 percent),
including community policing in performance ratings (60.2 percent), supervisors'
periodic monitoring of officers' daily journals (79.5 percent), and awards and
recognition for community policing activities (67.3 percent). The most popular
methods both involve contact with direct supervisors, as opposed to
headquarters or other levels of management. Only two agencies did not report
using any methods to encourage community policing activities.

External effects of officers' activities

Most agencies reported their COPS-funded activities affected other
government agencies and community organizations.[19] These effects include: a
greater demand on local agencies responsible for code enforcement, sanitation,
and the like (83 percent); and greater demands on neighborhood or community
associations, block groups, and local businesses (83.3 percent). These are
consistent with the responses discussed above, that problem solving and
partnership building were the activities on which agencies most commonly
expected COPS-funded officers to spend substantial time. In addition, 65.6
percent reported that their activities placed greater demands on agencies that
deal with violence in the home. This suggests that those agencies began giving
domestic violence cases higher priority than previously.

Effects on court caseloads were also reported by many agencies. Most reported
an increase in misdemeanor caseloads (70.4 percent) and felony caseloads
(43.6 percent). Fewer reported decreased caseloads for felonies (21.3 percent)
and misdemeanors (32.3 percent). One-third of the respondents reported other
effects as well.[20] These included a number of verbatim responses that we
grouped as "criminal justice system strain" (50.1 percent); partnerships with
other government and nongovernment agencies, schools, businesses, and other
law enforcement agencies (29.3 percent); and agency self-improvement (9.3
percent).

The effects of COPS-funded activities clearly extends beyond the grantee law
enforcement agencies. Community policing strategies involve not only the
traditional law enforcement agencies but agencies involved in code
enforcement, nuisance abatement, domestic services, and so forth have
reportedly experienced ripple effects. More felony and misdemeanor caseloads
are increasing strain on the system: effects on courts, prosecution, prisons/jails,
and probation and parole were reported by the majority of those reporting
auxiliary effects. Chapter 6 describes several examples observed during site
visits.

Implementing COPS MORE

The MORE program (Making Officer Redeployment Effective) took an
alternative approach to increasing the quantity of community policing effort.
Officer time was to be saved through productive use of new grant-funded
information technology, civilians, and, in 1995 only, overtime. In turn, that time
was to be redeployed to community policing activities. The MORE-funded
resources also had other potential benefits to local agencies that could increase
their effectiveness; while these no doubt played a role in local application
decisions, they were statutorily not relevant to Federal funding decisions. 

The extent to which redeployment and other benefits were actually achieved
depended on local progress in implementing the technology, hiring the civilians,
and productively using newly deployable time of sworn officers. Technology was
projected to increase available officer time because it would reduce the time
officers spend writing reports, transporting reports, or doing other tasks,
depending on the type of technology. Hiring civilians was expected to increase
available officer time for community policing most directly because selected
tasks or positions could be reassigned to civilians, thus freeing up sworn officers
to be redeployed to community policing. Overtime was usually intended to pay
officers to do community policing tasks such as teaching DARE classes only
during the school year that, by nature, require less than a full-time officer.

By statute, only applications that projected MORE funds would increase officer
time available for community policing were considered. Agencies were required
to project that the time saved by the use of the MORE-funded technology,
civilians, and overtime would redeploy officers at least as cost effectively as the
hiring program.

COPS MORE funding and agency decisions to apply

Larger agencies were more likely than smaller agencies to request and receive
COPS MORE grants. As shown in table 4-15, this trend is much more
pronounced for the MORE program than for the hiring grants. Of the agencies
that serve jurisdictions of less than 25,000, 38.9 percent received at least one
hiring grant, but only 5.4 percent received a MORE grant. Of the jurisdictions
with populations exceeding 1 million, however, 53 percent received at least one
MORE grant, while 77 percent received a hiring grant. This may reflect both
large agencies' greater technology needs and the more adverse effects of both
the 3-year $75,000 cap and the retention requirement for hiring grants in large
jurisdictions facing higher salary structures.

For each population category, table 4-15 also displays, separately for MORE
and hiring grants, the mean award amounts per eligible agency and per grantee
agency. Not surprisingly, the average sizes of both MORE and hiring grants
increase with jurisdiction population. However, the concentration of awards in
the very largest cities is striking. The average award to a grantee in a
jurisdiction of more than 1 million in population exceeded the average award to a
grantee in a jurisdiction of more than 500,000 but less than 1 million in
population by a factor of 8.9 for COPS MORE and 6.6 for hiring grants.

Concentration of COPS MORE funding. To compare the concentration of
MORE and hiring funds more precisely, we ranked all grantees in order, from
largest accumulated MORE awards to smallest and then computed the share of
MORE dollars awarded to the agencies with the largest grants. Table 4-16
compares 1996-98 trends in this measure for MORE and for hiring grants, for
local/county and for all MORE grantees. For all grantees, COPS awards
through 1998 were, in fact, more highly concentrated for MORE grants than for
hiring grants: the 1 percent of agencies with the largest MORE awards received
50 percent of total MORE dollars, while the 1 percent with the largest hiring
awards received 43 percent of all hiring program dollars. The contrast between
MORE and hiring concentration was even greater among local/county agencies;
among them, 58 percent of the MORE funds went to the top 1 percent,
compared to 39 percent of the hiring funds.

Trends between 1996 and 1998 indicate that MORE awards became slightly
less concentrated over time, while hiring awards became slightly more so.
Among all agencies, the MORE share going to the largest 1 percent declined
from 54 percent to 50 percent, while the top-bracket share of hiring awards
rose from 37 percent to 43 percent. One very large 1995 MORE award to
New York City Police Department accounts for the early high concentration of
MORE funds among the largest local/county agencies.

Types of resources supported by COPS MORE. In 1995, technology
absorbed more than half of the COPS MORE funds, civilians slightly less, and
overtime less than 10 percent according to COPS Office records. In 1998,
Wave 3 survey results indicate that MORE grantees were still more likely to get
funds for technology than for either of the other two resources (see figures 4-6a
through 4-6c).[21] The fractions of MORE grantees with only technology grants
was 29 percent for medium-sized agencies (with populations between 50,000
and 150,000), compared to 38 percent of large agencies and 45 percent of
small agencies. In contrast, 22 percent of the medium-sized agencies had
MORE grants for civilians only, similar to the 21 percent of smaller agencies,
but more than the 8 percent of larger agencies. The combination of technology
and civilians was most popular among the large agencies (44 percent),
compared to 33 percent of medium and 14 percent of small agencies.

Redeployment estimates by resource type. Title I required that each MORE
grant increase sworn officer time allocated to community policing by at least as
much per year as a hiring grant of the same amount. To implement this threshold
requirement, the COPS Office asked agencies to estimate the amount of time
that would be saved by MORE-funded resources and redirected into
community policing. These were estimated in terms of FTEs, meaning the time
needed to redeploy one full-time officer for a year, which the COPS Office
standardized at 1,824 working hours. The application included a
cost-effectiveness worksheet (CEW) to filter out MORE applications that failed
to meet the threshold requirement. The CEW took applicants through several
calculations, essentially to verify that each $100,000 in MORE funds would
generate at least four FTEs of projected officer time.[22] On average, COPS
MORE applications projected redeployment of 6.12 officers per $100,000
spent on technology, substantially higher than the 4.54 average for civilians or
4.92 for overtime.

For civilians, the calculation was usually a straight one-to-one replacement of
sworn officers, which would precisely meet the cost-effectiveness threshold of
four FTEs per $100,000 of MORE funds if civilian and sworn salary and fringe
benefits were equal. Because civilians' salaries and fringe costs are lower on
average than officers' and some civilians were slated for positions intended to
increase officers' productivity, the actual average projection for civilian awards
was higher, 4.54 per $100,000.

Overtime, which was an allowable use of MORE funds only for 1995
applications, was usually requested to support some community policing
function during part of a work year, such as a part-time DARE instructor for
just the school year. By comparing the part-year overtime cost to the full-year
cost of a full-time officer, MORE overtime grants could be projected to yield
more than four FTEs per $100,000, despite overtime premiums. The average
was 4.92.

For technology, which consumed the largest share of MORE funds, the
projections were higher, an average of 6.12 per $100,000. However, they
were also far more speculative. Much of the technology was so new or even
nonexistent at the time that few working examples were in place to serve as
guides for redeployment estimates. During site visits, many of the grant writers
acknowledged that their projections were simply guesses. 

The lack of an experience base for projecting time savings was especially acute
for mobile computing, which was the most common MORE-funded technology.
According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics 1997 LEMAS report (Reaves and
Goldberg, 2000), 18 percent of municipal police agencies with more than 100
officers used car-mounted digital computers in 1997, and 59 percent used
mobile computers. However, only 11 of the 454 municipal agencies in the
LEMAS sample used them for wireless transmission of field reports, which was
the application typically expected to save officer time.

Recognizing that existing analyses provided little basis for estimating
productivity increases from technology, the COPS Office provided guidance in
the 1995 MORE application kit, in the form of an example:

. . . for example, a mobile computer programmed for automated report
generation might be shown to free up two hours in report writing per officer per
eight hour shift. If officers using this technology were to engage in community
policing during those two hours, the total amount of redeployment would equate
to an increased community policing presence of one-quarter year of officer time.

This example would exceed the cost-effectiveness threshold requirement of four
FTEs per $100,000 for MORE grants as long as the computers cost less than
$6,250 per unit. This is a generous allowance even including ruggedization and
vehicle mounts but only if mounts and software are readily available.

Agencies' projections turned out remarkably similar to this example. In a
representative sample of 1995 MORE applications, we found the mean
projected number of hours saved per 8-hour shift was between 1.8 and 2.6
hours, depending on the type of technology. Projections fell into this narrow
range despite wide variation in agency size, local conditions, technology plans,
rationale for the time savings, and projection formula used. Although a few large
agencies actually carried out small-time studies, formulas of the following sort
were more common:

average time writing reports/year (all officers) = 7012.8 hrs./year x 70 

percent savings of time = 4090 hrs. saved yearly / 2080 = 2.36 FTEs.

The sparse available data calls into question large projections of saved officer
time from mobile computers without wireless reporting. A National Institute of
Justice (1993) report on a mobile computer project in Los Angeles Police
Department found no change in the amount of time officers spent in
investigation, report writing and approval, or travel activities in connection with
report processing. Police supervisors reported no change in the amount of time
they spent reviewing and correcting reports, and there was a slight increase in
total clerical time spent on each report because the reports were entered
manually into the mainframe computer. However, the report estimated that if the
modem connection could be made to work (it was intermittently successful at
the time of the project), a cost savings of $5.4 million in officer time could be
achieved if officers used wireless transmission rather than traveling back to the
station to file each paper report.

A more recent study suggests that even time savings from wireless report
transmission will be limited by the small percentage of officer time spent on
report preparation (Frank, Brandl and Watkins, 1997). According to this
study, only about 8 percent of Cincinnati officers' time is spent preparing
reports. Even if the mobile computers saved all the report preparation time--a
wildly implausible assumption--units costing $5,000 each (including software
and transmission infrastructure) would save officer time only at the rate of 1.6
FTEs per $100,000. The fact that these numbers were not available until
recently is reflected in the optimistic projections agencies made when predicting
future FTE deployment.

Technology accounted for 52 percent of MORE funds awarded through 1996.
However, because of the high productivity estimates, it accounted for 59
percent of projected FTEs.

From the start of COPS MORE, implementation of technology occurred more
slowly than civilian hiring or overtime use. The GAO, in its 1996 survey, asked
respondents to calculate the number of full-time equivalent positions their
agencies had redeployed to community policing as a result of MORE grant
funds spent in fiscal years 1995 and 1996. The agencies estimated that only
about 40 percent of all FTEs redeployed through fiscal 1996 came as a result
of equipment/technology purchases, even though this category had accounted for
52 percent of MORE funds awarded and 59 percent of projected FTEs through
the calendar year. Some agencies reported they were unable to calculate
redeployment because the equipment had not yet been purchased or had not
been installed or it was too early in the implementation phase to calculate time
savings. Later sections describe implementation progress since the GAO study.

MORE-supported technologies

The 1995 MORE application kit listed the following examples of items that
were allowable technologies if they directly contributed to community policing:
portable computers, automated booking systems, cellular telephones, local 
area networks, and geo-mapping systems. Cell phones were disallowed in
1996 and after. Other disallowed uses of MORE funds included surveillance
cameras and beepers for undercover narcotics investigations, office furnishings,
riot control equipment, weapons and ammunition, vehicles (including cars,
bicycles, motorcycles, and mobile trailers), radios, pagers, uniforms, dogs,
horses, bulletproof vests, Breathalyzers[Trade Mark], radar guns, video
cameras, phone lines, voice mail systems, educational material (e.g., pamphlets,
posters, or other literature), and televisions/VCRs.

The technologies that were often funded by MORE '95 and subsequent years
are described more fully in the following paragraphs. Table 4-17 shows the
proportion of MORE grantees receiving each one in 1996 and 1998, for
local/county agencies.

Mobile computers. By far the most commonly awarded technology, COPS
MORE had awarded mobile computer technology to 60 percent of technology
grantees by 1996, and to 79 percent by 1998. These awards funded primarily
two hardware configurations: (1) laptop or notebook computers, either carried
by officers or mounted in vehicles, and (2) modular units, with separate
keyboard, monitor, and CPU mounted in vehicles. Units permanently mounted
in vehicles are most commonly used for so-called "MDT functions" after Mobile
Data Terminals, which first came into widespread use in the 1980s. 
Examples of MDT functions are computerized dispatch; queries to automated
databases, such as state vehicle registration, driver's license, and stolen auto
files, and the FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC); and car-to-car
and car-to-station messaging. MORE-funded mobile units not permanently
mounted in vehicles, usually ruggedized laptops, were most commonly
requested for automated field reporting, so that traffic, crime, and other reports
could be completed on the mobile computers while officers maintained a field
presence. Reporting software ranged from well-known word processing
packages for writing narratives to elaborate locally developed software using
menus to navigate through agency-specific reporting forms. Other functions
envisioned by some departments include displays of computerized maps, state
statutes, and mug shots.

The most elaborate version of mobile computing technology is generally known
as Mobile Computer Terminals (MCTs): vehicle-mounted mobile computers
that combine the MDT functions with wireless automated field reporting from
throughout the jurisdiction, so that officers can potentially save the time of
returning to the station during their shifts to submit reports. At the time of our
second round of site visits in 1998, no MORE grantees had fully functional
departmentwide MCTs in use under this definition, although both the San Diego
and Miami Police Departments were reportedly nearing the final stages of field
testing. In a random sample of 1995 COPS MORE applications, each mobile
computer deployed was projected to free up an average of 2.4 hours of officer
time per shift.

Management/administration computers. These desktop or mainframe
computers had been awarded to 23 percent of MORE technology grantees by
1996 and to 45 percent by 1998. They are used to do basic administrative 
functions within the agencies--tasks such as correspondence, records
management, payroll, keeping track of staff hours, etc. Some computers were
used to develop new databases such as wanted notices and warrants and to
computerize arrest reports previously filed on paper only. Among municipal
police agencies with more than 100 officers, 98 percent used computers by
1993, according to LEMAS data (Reaves and Smith, 1995). For some of the
smaller agencies, however, the MORE-funded computers were among the first
in the agency and replaced typewriters. Some agencies also used the
MORE-funded computers for desktop publishing tasks related to community
policing, such as publishing community newsletters. In a representative sample
of 1995 COPS MORE applications, implementation of the requested
equipment was projected to increase officer productivity by an average of 2.6
hours per officer per 8-hour shift.

Booking/arraignment technologies. MORE grants for various booking and
arraignment technologies had been awarded to 10 percent of MORE technology
grantees by 1996 and 12 percent by 1998. They are intended to reduce the time
spent on this lengthy process--easily an hour or more in most jurisdictions. Two
new technologies can speed this process. One is an automated fingerprint
scanner, which scans fingerprints through a glass plate, transferring the data to
fingerprint cards and sometimes sending the data through a modem to local and
state fingerprint databases for identification. Remote video camera hookups
allow a prisoner to be arraigned by a judge in another location, eliminating the
need to transport the arrestee from the jail to the courthouse. In a representative
sample of 1995 COPS MORE applications, the booking/arraignment systems
requested were projected to free up an average of 2.6 hours per officers per
shift.

CAD systems. Computer-aided dispatch systems were awarded to 1 percent
of MORE technology grantees by 1996 and 12 percent by 1998. They allow
the computer to determine which vehicle is closest to the scene, give responding
officers call histories for the call address, and allow agencies to keep track of
various statistics such as call response time, time on problem-solving projects,
and times that patrol vehicles are in service. In a representative sample of 1995
COPS MORE applications, CAD systems were projected to increase officer
productivity by an average of 2.6 hours per officer per shift.

Other items. This category included a geo-mapping system, and a reverse 911
system in which citizens can be automatically called by a computer system, and
a variety of other technologies.[23]

Redeployment from time saved due to MORE-funded technologies: Agency
projections As discussed previously COPS MORE grant applicants were
required to include projections of officer full-time equivalents that would be
saved through productivity increases and redeployment to community policing
after the technology was implemented. Table 4-18 summarizes redeployment
projections for MORE technology grants awarded through June 1998,
according to COPS Office records. Projections are summarized by mutually
exclusive combinations of technology. Because mobile and desktop computers
accounted for such high proportions of all technology funded, all others--CAD,
booking/arraignment systems, telephone reporting systems, and others--were
grouped in an "other" category. The mobile computers only category accounts
for 34 percent of all 16,870 projected FTEs funded through June 1998.

From the inception of COPS MORE, the COPS Office screened out clearly
inflated projections. Starting in 1996, the office credited only four FTEs per
$100,000 toward its running count of officers funded, and it held grantees
accountable for achieving only that number. Nevertheless, the accuracy of even
the constrained estimates was unknown at the time of award.

Technology implementation status

Different technologies take different lengths of time to become operational,
depending upon their complexity, the size of the project, and the novelty of the
technology and applications. Small agencies that were funded for stand-alone
computers for office work purchased the computers and software off the shelf.
Agencies that purchased automated fingerprint devices encountered a delay as
they checked to be sure the equipment would be compatible with State or other
local systems as needed. Agencies installing mobile computer systems had even
longer delays as they and their vendors crossed a number of technological
barriers associated with this new technology. These are described more fully in
appendix 4-A. 

We measured technology implementation status at three points in time: October
1996, September through October 1997, and June through July 1998.

In October 1996, to help us plan site visits to agencies where we could observe
the roles of MORE-funded technology in meeting COPS redeployment goals,
we conducted a telephone survey of 31 randomly selected agencies with MORE
awards for any type of technology. These agencies were selected because they
had received official notice by April 1996 that their MORE '95 awards had been
federally obligated and were therefore available for local use. Five months after
clearance, of the 31 agencies in the sample, 18 had purchased at least some
mobile computers, of which 11 reported having their mobile computers in use by
at least some of the officers. 

A year later (September and October 1997) we collected data on the
implementation timetables from 183 agencies to whom MORE funds had been
awarded for mobile computers between September 1995 and September
1996. Portable computers were selected for study because they accounted for
such a high share of projected FTEs.

Most recently, in our Wave 3 survey, July-August 1998, we reinterviewed the
local/county agencies in our sample that had received MORE grants in 1995 for
any type of technology; these grantees had had the longest time periods to
complete implementation. In the following pages, we first report their estimated
implementation timetables for all types of technology and then explore the special
case of mobile computing technology in more detail.

Technologies other than mobile computing. To determine the status of
technology implementation, we used the Wave 3 survey to estimate the
percentage of fully implemented technology by jurisdiction size as of June 1998.
Figure 4-7 shows the implementation status for the three most commonly
awarded technology categories: mobile computers, desktop computers, and
booking and arraignment systems. In the case of laptop and desktop
computers, small agencies were most likely to report completion of full
implementation. For booking and arraignment systems, large agencies were
slightly ahead, with the small agencies not far behind. Small agencies may have
had an easier time implementing mobile and desktop computers for two
reasons. First, they had less equipment to procure, perhaps less complex
procurement procedures to follow, and certainly fewer people to train. Second,
larger agencies often had more complex visions for computer systems, which
often required upgrading telecommunications technology and integrating the
new computing technology with existing records management systems (see
appendix 4-A).

Figure 4-8 summarizes agencies' June 1998 reports of their actual and
expected implementation progress between 1995 and 2000. Lines on the graph
represent actual progress through June 1998 and expected completion dates
thereafter. As figure 4-8 indicates, implementation speed depended on the
technology type. More agencies reported that desktop computers and "all
other" technologies (e.g., scanners, Global Positioning System car locators,
digital cameras, in-car video recorders) were more fully complete at the time of
the survey in 1998 than other types of technology. However, despite the
off-the-shelf nature of the "all other" category, only slightly more than 60
percent of the agencies with those technology types reported having that
technology fully implemented. For computer assisted dispatch (CAD), this
number is only 30 percent, presumably for two reasons: CAD awards began
later, and implementation requires adapting an off-the-shelf system to local call
codes and dispatch procedures.

Agencies were optimistic, though. More than 80 percent of the agencies
expected their technology to be fully implemented by the end of 1998, and all
expected the technology to be fully implemented by June 2000. We are
remeasuring their actual and expected progress in our Wave 4 survey.

Implementation of mobile computing technology. An examination of the
implementation history for mobile computing technology helps both to explain
the time path of implementation and to illustrate a persistent optimism
concerning implementation schedules.

In December 1996 (Wave 1 data collection completion) 27 percent of MORE
grantees funded for mobile computers reported they had selected their
equipment and had it in use. By the fall of 1997, this percentage had grown to
59 percent, and 83 percent had taken delivery of the equipment. At that time,
82 percent expected to have the equipment in operation 7 months later, by June
1998. In June 1998, however, our Wave 3 survey found that only 44 percent
of MORE grantees funded for mobile computers described themselves as fully
operational; the drop probably reflects new awards for mobile computers
between fall 1997 and June 1998.[24] 

The Wave 2 survey of 1995 mobile computer grantees allowed us to estimate a
more detailed timetable of agencies' implementation accomplishments within
two years after award: figure 4-9 illustrates the agencies' progress in each of
four common implementation milestones. Not all agencies planned to do all of
the steps; for example, smaller agencies may not have had to go through a
procurement step of releasing a request for proposals (RFP), and not all
agencies planned a pilot test. Of the 88 percent of 1995 grantees that planned to
release an RFP, 83 percent had done so within 2 years. By that time, 
83 percent had their equipment delivered, 58 percent that planned pilot tests
had completed them, and approximately 59 percent of the agencies had the
equipment in use by the end users.

Of 10 1995 MORE grantees selected for site visits on the basis of their reported
success in implementing mobile computing technology, only two--Austin, Texas,
and Racine, Wisconsin--had the majority of their mobile computers in full use
when our visits occurred between February 1997 and June 1998. At that time,
Austin was the most advanced operational agency among our sites in its
automated report writing, with more than 500 reports per day being submitted
by portable computers. The agency estimated the implementation of more than
200 mobile computers, each saving 1 hour of officer time per day, would save
an estimated 42 FTE positions. This time savings was to be achieved through
more efficient report writing and a reduction in supervisor time. Whether the
computers saved this time as estimated could not be independently confirmed
during our visit, but the agency had done a small before-after time study that
yielded results consistent with projections.

In Racine, the agency estimated its mobile computers would save an average of
1.5 hours per day per officer. At the time of our visit, the computers were used
only for the MDT wireless access functions, which save officer time by
eliminating the wait for the dispatcher to run license and registration checks from
the patrol car. Running a large number of checks sometimes occurs in the course
of a problem-solving project, but usually the time savings from wireless checks
do not accrue in large enough segments to allow the officers to do other tasks.
At that time the wireless access had had the benefit of encouraging officers to
run more vehicle tag checks. The biggest redeployable time savings was
expected from automated field reporting, which was planned for the future. The
agency is setting up a system to take advantage of officer time saved--a loosely
structured problem-solving operation which will work as a fourth shift. This shift
will handle chronic problems and will be freed from answering calls.

Three of the agencies we visited were pursuing wireless, or at least remote, field
reporting with MCTs. Miami Police Department proceeded in stages, had the
MDT functions operational by August 1997, and was recently reported to be
testing wireless field reporting using Cellular Digital Packet Data technology.
The San Diego Police Department (SDPD) was approaching operational status
for its elaborate menu-driven field reporting software in several districts, with
submission from within 1,000 feet of receiving towers outside district
headquarters, using AERONET antenna cards plugged into the computer units.
Using the SDPD reporting software, the San Diego School Police planned to
save officer time by remote submission from their assigned schools to police
headquarters over the school administration Wide Area Network (WAN).
Unfortunately, the WAN was upgraded in a way that made it incompatible with
the reporting software, and so reports were still being submitted by fax and
interoffice mailing of diskettes at the time of our second visit.

Mobile computing technology implementation is complex, and understanding it
requires some specific background on its intended uses. These details are
explained in appendix 4-A.

Time savings and other effects of technology

As explained in chapter 2, COPS MORE emerged as a resolution of two
competing priorities: (1) advancing, through redeployment of time saved
through enhanced productivity, the administration's goal of adding 100,000
officers to the Nation's sworn force, and (2) responding to some prominent
local police and elected officials' pleas for new technology instead of additional
police officers. Therefore, we wanted to measure both productivity increases
and other local benefits and costs flowing from MORE-funded technology. 

Specifically, our Wave 3 survey included items to learn the following from
COPS MORE technology grantees as of June-July 1998:

1. How many FTEs of sworn officer time are being saved from operational
technology?

2. How many FTEs of sworn officer time are expected from technology when it
becomes operational (which we expressed as a percentage of projected
savings in the grant application)?

3. How are sworn officer time savings being measured?

4. What other local costs and benefits are expected from the MORE-funded
technology?

Summer 1998 was still early to assess the effects of MORE-funded
technologies. Systems other than mobile and management/administrative
computers were requested and funded too rarely to support detailed estimates.
For the computers, the local knowledge base regarding their operation was
sparse because few grantees had fully operational systems. The preliminary
data available at that time suggested that redeployable officer time will fall short
of projections and be difficult to measure but that other local benefits are
already occurring.

Based on Wave 3 survey data, we estimate that, as of June 1998, operational
technology of all types yielded 15 percent of the 16,870 projected FTEs
funded through December 1997. Grantees expected to receive another 34
percent of projections, so the funded technology would eventually yield 8,326
FTEs or 49 percent of total projections. Mobile computers alone, which 
accounted for about a third of total projections, were expected to yield only 31
percent of projections when all were fully operational. Only half of all MORE
technology grantees reported having systems in place to measure redeployment
when and if it occurs. 

In contrast, interviewees during site visits named and demonstrated a host of
local benefits other than time savings from each of the various technologies.
Examples included higher apprehension rates due to wider and faster information
dissemination, safer officers when arrestees are arraigned in lockup by video
instead of being transported between jail and court, and better relations with
communities from such systems as Reverse 911, crime maps on agency Web
sites, and "Are You Okay?" systems to check electronically on homebound
citizens. Both productivity increases and local benefits from MORE-funded
technology will be reexamined in our Wave 4 survey, which is being fielded in
June 2000. 

The following subsections explain these Wave 3 findings in more detail.

Time savings. In June 1998, COPS MORE technology grantees in our Wave 3
sample were asked to report the numbers of FTEs of increased productivity
already being received from operational technology and, separately, the number
of FTEs expected from other technology when it does become operational.
Table 4-19 reports the results.

Overall, total FTEs already accruing from operational technology and
anticipated from future operational technology total 8,326, or 49 percent of the
16,870 projected FTEs reported in the COPS Office grants management
database.25 Of the 49 percent, 15 percent was estimated to accrue from
operational technology, while 34 percent was anticipated when the remaining
technology became operational. Grantees with mobile computers and the
mobile-desktop combinations report the least optimistic projections. Agencies
in these two categories anticipate only 31 percent and 38 percent, respectively,
of the FTEs they originally projected. This may indicate that agencies
exaggerated their expectations in the beginning or that, as the technology
becomes operational, they realized the FTE yield may not be as large as
originally thought.

Whether the remaining redeployment projections for MORE-funded technology
will be met and whether the redeployment will increase the level of policing in
communities are still in question. Few agencies have systems in place to
measure time savings and redeployment. Further, whether any time savings will
be applied to community policing depends on whether necessary management
changes occur.

The first stumbling block in measuring redeployment is that, in general, agencies
were not measuring the time savings as of June 1998. In Wave 3, only 48
percent of the local/county MORE agencies surveyed indicated they had at
least one measurement system in place. Among those, 55 percent had officers
keeping a log or the agency tracks information provided by the officer; 53
percent used informal estimates; 41 percent analyzed dispatch records; 39
percent analyze assignment sheets or duty rosters; 31 percent conducted
surveys; 23 percent had no specific record-keeping system; and 8 percent used
other methods. The COPS office has since mounted technical assistance on this
issue.

Agencies report great confidence that sworn officer time is being saved already
from operational technology and that further savings will accrue as the remaining
technology comes on line--albeit in smaller amounts than projected in
applications. As shown in table 4-20, 93 percent of MORE technology grantees
reported that time savings were accruing. This statement was made by 88
percent of respondents with a measurement system in place and 99 percent of
those without.

Even with a system in place, accurately assessing the time savings and
redeployment facilitated by mobile computer systems is difficult for at least two
reasons. One is that labor-intensive time analyses with rigorous designs would
be needed to measure time saved by writing reports in the field. Another is that
in many situations accurate redeployment estimates require that even very small
segments of officer time be accurately recorded throughout the day and
combined into a time block for community policing activities in both the records
and reality. Channeling saved officer time into proactive community policing will
require management decisions about the best use of officers' time as well as
training, supervision, and creative ways of allowing officers to set aside segments
of time for community policing (see Maxfield, 1998, for examples).

Additional costs and benefits from MORE-funded technology. Many MORE
technology grantees experienced unexpected technology-related costs beyond
the required match, benefits other than measurable productivity increases, or
both. These are discussed next.

In general, MORE technology grantees could not request COPS funding for a
number of unexpected costs related to the technology. Examples include
computer staff time, installation time, or training time. Many grants necessitated
hiring or redirecting staff for installation and maintenance of equipment. The staff
time needed for installation of the technology was often extensive. Some
agencies had officers fill these roles, while others hired civilian specialists. Some
agencies successfully used the MORE grant to fund consultants, or hired civilian
computer personnel through the MORE program. This required sophisticated
grant writing, however, as this time had to be shown as redeploying officers.
Some larger agencies included the time of new or existing staff in the entire
technology package. Staff or vendor time is also needed to maintain the new
equipment. For example, maintenance on computers includes setting them up,
fixing them or sending them for repair, backing up data when needed, upgrading
the software, conducting virus checks. This cost is one which is not addressed
in the COPS funding or the redeployment estimates.

Some agencies experienced significant unexpected implementation costs.
Depending on technology type, 23 percent to 27 percent of MORE technology
grantees implementing the five most common technology categories reported
unexpected implementation costs increased the local cost of their MORE grants
by at least 10 percent over the match they had originally planned (see table 4-
21 for details). Not surprisingly, the likelihood the grantee 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. That percentage 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.

During interviews and site visits, staff members in MORE grantee agencies
reported receiving benefits other than measurable increases in officer
productivity from their MORE-funded technologies. The precise nature
of these benefits depends on the type of technology.

As reported earlier in this chapter, mobile computers were expected to save
more time than any other technology, primarily by reducing travel time back and
forth to police stations to file reports. Completing reports in the field, for
example, from a public place such as a community policing substation in a mall
or restaurant, produces an additional benefit of keeping officers in the public eye.
By staying on their beats, officers can respond to calls for service more quickly. 
In addition, police officers can be more available for community policing
functions. However, unless wireless transmission is part of the package, officers
must either delay dissemination of the report (thereby, perhaps, delaying the
start of an investigation) or take time to travel to headquarters to submit the
report.

Other potential benefits of writing reports with mobile computers include
automated information retrieval, which is expected to save the time of reviewing
supervisors and detectives. For agencies that use the mobile computers to
bypass the dispatcher to do license and NCIC checks, the wait to receive this
information may be much shorter than it was in heavy volume situations when
the dispatcher or radio frequency is swamped. This produces an additional
benefit in terms of officer safety.

COPS MORE funded several different technologies intended to cut officers'
"down time" associated with booking and arraignments. Depending on their
implementation stage, several agencies expected or reported other benefits as
well.

One popular MORE-funded technology is a computerized fingerprint scanner.
The scanners are intended to save officers' time by eliminating the need to
complete multiple fingerprint cards. Because the scanner stores the image
digitally, it eliminates the need to roll prints on separate cards for local, State,
and FBI files, as well as disposition verification. Officers can also key in
alphabetic fields only once.

Grantees tended to choose scanners that were compatible with the Automated
Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), which was developed by the FBI and
is used by many State fingerprint repositories. Because AFIS stores and
indexes all 10 prints taken from an arrestee, it increases investigators' chances
of matching latent prints obtained at the scene of a crime. The Oak Park (Illinois)
Police Department, one of our study sites, anticipated other benefits. 
One is nearly instantaneous electronic fingerprint checks against repositories in
the FBI, State identification bureaus, and nearby localities--neighboring
Chicago in Oak Park's case. The computer also allows the agency to easily
enlarge and print the fingerprints for use in court displays and reduces the cost
of doing fingerprint searches for recruit applications, school employees, and cab
drivers.

Another type of booking/arraignment equipment is closed circuit television
between the lockup facility and the arraignment courtroom. Instead of
transporting prisoners back and forth between the jail and courthouse, the Des
Moines (Iowa) Police Department used MORE funding to purchase this
equipment. With it in place, initial court appearances are done by video from
within the lockup facility. This provides a time savings in transporting prisoners
and, in fact, has allowed the agency to reassign two officers back to patrol.
While it was not clear to our site team that the officers had been redeployed
into proactive community policing, the system produced other benefits: reduced
risk of injury to officers, reduced risk of prisoner escape from custody, and a
lessening of the indignity offenders may feel as they are physically transported in
public areas while handcuffed and in leg shackles. 

The Huntington Beach (California) Consortium was building an automated jail
booking system to link the eight member agencies that deliver prisoners to the
same jail. The Huntington Beach Police Department estimates that large time
savings will accrue because arresting officers will "drop off the prisoner and run"
instead of completing all six forms by hand at the station. Because the system has
scanning capability, officers will no longer deliver forms, fingerprints, and
photographs with the prisoner to the county jail. Additional benefits can accrue if
access to all that information is shared across the region.

COPS MORE funded two other technologies that can contribute directly to
community policing: Reverse 911 and Guardian Alert. Reverse 911 is a
telephone system that can be programmed to make broadcast calls to the
community, notifying large numbers of residents about upcoming community
meetings and providing them with crime prevention tips or warnings of incidents
in their areas. It can also be helpful in calling residents when trying to locate a
missing person.

To meet the cost-effectiveness criteria, one department projected time savings
from having the system rather than officers make calls to the community. This
savings, of course, is only potential unless such calls are already being made,
which was not observed on our field visit. The local benefits lie in enhancing the
department's partnership-building effort while reducing its cost, enlisting citizens
as "eyes and ears" in search of missing persons or criminals operating in an
area, and perhaps encouraging greater use of crime prevention tips. 

The Guardian Alert system, also known as the "Are You Okay?" program, calls
house-bound individuals to check on their well-being. It was in use in two of
our visited sites, the Fort Worth and North Charleston Police Departments. If a
participant fails to answer the phone, a police car is dispatched.

As with Reverse 911, the time savings projections are potential unless the
agency provided this service using officer calls before. But even in a setting
where no time savings would accrue, the technology provides a benefit in the
form of a new service to the community, which can be thought of as additional
community policing. It is likely also to enhance agencies' partnership-building
efforts.

MORE-supported civilians

As explained in chapter 2, agencies were allowed to request funding for up to
$25,000 per civilian per year through the COPS MORE program. These
civilians were to be hired specifically to redeploy sworn officers into community
policing activities. The application instructions noted that "examples of
permissible support resources include the replacement of sworn officers in
administrative or clerical positions with nonsworn employees, programs utilizing
volunteers in support of redeployment, additional administrative resources that
increase officer presence in communities, or other systems that serve the goals
of community policing." Each civilian COPS MORE grant was for 1 year, but
the awards for civilians could be renewed for up to an additional 2 years.

Dorothy Guyot (as quoted in Shernock, 1988) has categorized civilian positions
in police departments based on the relationships between the civilian position
and the sworn position that it replaces or, in our evaluation terms, redeploys.
The categories are as follows:

1. Shedding support tasks from sworn officers to specialized civilians (e.g.,
administrative/clerical functions).

2. Replacing sworn personnel in existing positions (e.g., dispatchers, property
room manager, or jail/corrections positions).

3. Placing civilians in specialist staff positions to improve officers' productivity
(e.g., computer technician, crime analyst, or grant manager).

4. Staffing new community policing positions (e.g., domestic violence specialist,
social worker, CPTED planner, community resource specialist, community
service officers, or volunteer coordinator).

Under the MORE civilian grant program, grantee agencies use civilians in all
four of these ways. Our findings about their use are based on five sources of
data: (1) grant databases from the COPS Office listing the numbers and
amounts of civilian grants, (2) project visits to 30 sites, conducted in 1997, (3)
short phone surveys conducted by U.I. staff in the summer of 1996; (4) 
a database of 1995 MORE grant applications coded and entered by the U.I.
staff; and (5) Wave 3 survey data from June 1998.

Civilian funding. By the end of 1995 MORE awards for civilians that had been
mailed or obligated totaled $144.6 million funding 6,506 FTEs. These
expenditures averaged $22,228 per civilian. As with the hiring programs,
agencies were required to pay a 25-percent match for the funding. The MORE
civilian funding was for 1 year only, but agencies were encouraged to request
supplemental grants to retain their civilians for up to 2 years after the first grant
expired. By the end of 1996, $51.1 million had been awarded as supplemental
grants for civilians, 28 percent of the MORE civilian funding. As of June 1998,
the amount of civilian funds had grown to $287,178,637, which was expected to
support 12,975 FTEs.

The New York City Police Department received $80.8 million, 56 percent of
the MORE civilian funds awarded by the end of 1996. The Los Angeles Police
Department and the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department were the next
highest civilian fund recipients with $6.1 million (4 percent) and $3.1 million (2
percent) in awarded grants by the end of 1996. The majority of agencies (73
percent) received funding for the FTE equivalent of one full- or part-time civilian. 
Nine agencies were awarded grants totaling 50 or more and these ranged up to
a grant and supplement for 1,560 civilians for the New York City Police
Department.

Hiring civilians. Hiring civilians to redeploy officers is, in part, based on the idea
that civilians are less expensive than sworn officers. Harring (1981) notes that
New York City estimates that civilians cost from one-third to one-half the cost
of a police officer, controlling for policing practices and other local conditions.
Training for civilians is generally shorter, liability insurance requirements are
fewer, and civilians don't necessarily wear uniforms, carry weapons, or require
vehicles. Those who are not professionals often receive lower pay than officers
and are not part of the police pension system.

MORE funding of civilians provides modest encouragement for a trend toward
civilianization of law enforcement that began more than two decades ago,
according to Heininger and Urbanek (1983). Between 1990 and 1993, the
number of full-time civilians employed by large municipal law enforcement
agencies grew at an average annual rate of 3 percent, from 52,191 to 56, 412
(Reaves, 1992; Reaves and Smith, 1995). Between 1993 and 1997, the
number of full-time civilians employed by large municipal law enforcement
agencies grew at an average annual rate of 4 percent, from 56,412 to 63,458.
According to the agencies sampled in June 1998, in the years from 1995 to
1998, from 40 to 50 percent of MORE-funded agencies reported they were
already hiring civilians by the year they reported first hiring MORE-funded
civilians, and more than half of the agencies reported they are currently recruiting
to fill at least one or two civilian positions.

Our site visits indicated that, in general, agencies progressed much faster in
hiring civilians than in implementing MORE-funded technology. As in the
technology projects, upon receiving notification of grant funding, many agencies
experienced delays in project startup due to local factors. Besides the potential
delays that affected all COPS programs, civil service tests were often required,
which were subject to local scheduling. Training length varied widely because
the positions varied widely. 

In June 1998, more than 80 percent of COPS MORE grantees funded for
civilians reported they had completed their civilian hiring. As shown in figure 4-
10, this figure was approximately the same regardless of the civilian position:
clerical, telephone reports, dispatch, and booking positions. All of the agencies
expected to have hired all of their MORE-funded civilians for those four
positions by the end of 1999.

Replacing sworn with civilian staff. The following are examples of
MORE-funded civilian assignments we found on our site visits, classified using
the Guyot categories. Under the category of shedding support tasks are
clerical/administrative and record maintenance positions. The most frequently
found positions were clerical and administrative civilians (65 percent). The
functions vary by agency, but common ones were typing, data entry, filing,
scheduling duty hours, taking phone messages, and maintaining criminal records. 

The Austin Police Department at one time was burdened with a record
maintenance backlog of 129,000 arrest sheets and 22,000 expungements that
needed to be filed. With civilianization, the backlogs of arrest sheets and
expungements were completely eliminated. The unit is much more efficient due
to the use of technology, specifically computers and photo imaging. Civilians
have become proficient at conducting a wide range of tasks (i.e., Brady Act
clearance letters, public fingerprinting, and general clearance letters). The
civilianization of the records department allowed a captain, lieutenant, and
sergeant to return to field operations.

Under the Guyot category of replacing sworn personnel in existing positions,
one of the more common uses of civilians is as desk officers. For example, a
small agency hired five civilian duty officers to staff the agency's front desk.
They take walk-in reports, payments for bond and vehicle tow fees, answer the
Crime Stoppers line, dispatch tow trucks, keep books on repossessed and
abandoned cars, enter stolen item reports into NCIC, and secure the building at
night. Plans were under way to train and use them to guard prisoners being held
before being taken to the booking facility. Civilian desk or duty officers are also
being deployed to new community policing stations or to substations. For
example, in Fort Worth, Texas, seven control officers were hired to staff the
front desks in the Neighborhood Patrol District stations.

Another civilian use is dispatch duty. Typically the dispatch function has been
one of the first to be transferred to civilians. In our sample of 1995 MORE
grantees funded for civilians, 13 percent of the applications requested funds for
civilian dispatchers. There has been some concern from the ranks of police
about this transition. Many officers believe dispatchers do not understand the
realities of the street experience and could therefore jeopardize the officers. The
dispatchers also can have quite a bit of control over situations and officers.
They can monitor a patrol officer throughout the shift, file reports on officers,
and control who responds to which calls.

One tactic large and small agencies alike are adopting is the use of alternative
call responses, or differential response. Agencies are finding ways to sort
incoming calls to selectively respond to calls in some less expensive way than
immediate dispatch of a patrol car. In Austin, Texas, 10 MORE-funded
civilians answer a phone line in which they take police reports on lower priority
calls--many of which do not require a police unit to respond to the scene. One
of the main uses for this system is to take reports over the telephone for crimes
in which the chance of arrest is small because the perpetrator is long gone.
Estimating that half of all calls can be handled by telephone at a savings of 78
officer minutes per call, the agency estimated that adding 10 civilian call
response employees could save 20.8 sworn FTEs per year.

The San Bernardino (California) Sheriff's Department has a similar program,
the Telephone Reporting Unit (TRU), which is staffed with civilians hired with a
COPS MORE grant. The sheriff's department did a followup analysis of deputy
time savings due to the TRU. They estimate that the TRU saved 6.37 sworn
FTEs in 1996, somewhat short of the 8.7 FTEs estimated in the application and
the cost-effectiveness threshold for MORE applications, but certainly closer to
the goal than some of the MORE-funded projects achieved at that time.

One agency reported a secondary problem with alternative response: getting
the information on the low-priority calls back to the precincts from which they
came. Without this feedback, disorder patterns may be missed, and staff cannot 
address these problems.

Civilians are also used as evidence technicians. COPS funding allowed the
Oregon State Police (OSP) to hire 26 civilian evidence technicians who collect
evidence, freeing up troopers to conduct investigations or work in the crime labs. 
In the crime labs, the evidence technician tasks generally include the processing
of evidence, records keeping, lab cleanup, maintaining evidence in storage, and,
when ordered by the court, destruction of evidence. This frees laboratory
("bench") technicians to do analysis.

Since OSP acquired AFIS technology, the agency has received an increasing
number of latent print "lift cards" from other agencies. The civilian evidence
technicians run an increased number of them through the AFIS system. After
attending an 80-hour evidence-handling training course developed by the
agency--compared with 4 to 8 hours for rookies in the training academy--the
evidence technicians began lifting fingerprints and collecting evidence at crime
scenes. By the time of our site visit in January 1997, OSP considered this
innovation a success that had freed up substantial, though unmeasured, sworn
officers' time.

Placement of civilians in specialist staff positions to improve officer's
productivity, another Guyot category, is exemplified by use of civilians as
computer specialists. Smaller agencies relied on inhouse sworn personnel with
almost no training to install mobile computers. This was also true to some
degree in the larger agencies, although training may have been more readily
available. In many cases the agencies relied almost exclusively on vendors to
plan and implement, leaving the agency in a vulnerable position. 

Some agencies used COPS funding effectively to get trained civilian personnel
to develop mobile computer systems. The MORE technology application did
not explicitly state that funding could be used for computer expertise, but some
agencies creatively incorporated this in the funding package. In the civilian
package, it was not easy to hire computer personnel unless redeployment was
projected to occur directly. One agency that did this was Pocatello (Idaho)
Police Department, which hired one crime analyst who also had computer
expertise. 

Under the category of new community policing functions is the civilian position
of community coordinator. A number of agencies created positions to assist
specifically with the community policing function. A listing of duties for positions
in this category include tasks such as: coordinate special community policing
projects, gather data on the effectiveness of the community policing program,
identify law enforcement problems and concerns and develop relationships with
the community, coordinate volunteers, and serve as community resource
specialists.

In Fort Worth, a civilian was hired part time with MORE funds to coordinate a
program called the Code Blue Neighborhood Watch. In Pocatello, a civilian
coordinates the Neighborhood Watch program and has successfully recruited
464 people (in a town of only 50,000) to volunteer for the police department or
to be Neighborhood Watch block captains.

Distribution of civilians by June 1998. Agencies that reported all their
MORE-funded civilians were assigned to a single position category were used
to compute the distribution of civilians in the positions described above as of
June 1998. The top three positions were clerical, dispatch, and telephone
response: 43 percent reported civilians were in clerical positions, 34 percent of
agencies reported civilians filled dispatch positions, and 26 percent reported
civilians filled telephone response positions.

Creating civilian positions. Civilians on COPS grants were intended to make
officers available for redeployment to community policing, but some also took
the opportunity to expand an activity by creating and filling a newly created
position or to increase the total number of people in an existing position. For the
top four positions with the highest frequencies of civilian assignment reported in
table 4-22 (clerical, telephone reports, dispatch, and booking positions), 50 to
73 percent of the agencies reported a new position was created. Nine to
twenty-three percent of the agencies reported civilians increased the total
number of a position that had previously existed. Overall, 73 to 80 percent of
the agencies indicated they had either created a new position or increased the
total number of people in each existing position.

Retention. As of the Wave 3 survey period in June 1998, 64 percent of MORE
civilian grantees reported that all of the original civilians hired were still with the
agency. Of the remaining 36 percent, 80 percent indicated that all of the hired
civilians who had left had been replaced.

Redeployment. Positions in the four Guyot categories raise different problems
for estimating and measuring redeployment. Simple replacements are usually the
easiest: redeployment occurs on a one-for-one basis (at lower hourly cost) if the
civilian simply does what the sworn officer was doing. Measuring the savings
from shedding routine tasks requires probability and time estimates for those
tasks--for example, in what percentage of cases is evidence collected at the
scene and, in those cases, how much time is spent on average. The situation is
less straightforward if the introduction of civilians is part of a change in the way
policing is done. For example, if 10-minute telephone call taken by civilians
replaces a 60-minute car response by officers, then redeployment occurs on a
six to one basis. 

Despite the range of ways in which civilians could allow officer redeployment,
agencies tended to project one-to-one redeployment. An analysis of the 1996
COPS MORE grantee database found that for the 2,100 FTEs requested
through civilian redeployment, approximately 2,085 civilian positions were
requested, indicating the average redeployment across all agencies was
approximately one-to-one. The redeployment estimates varied from 65 civilians
providing an estimated 203 sworn officer FTEs in Washington, D.C., to 200
civilians providing 150 sworn FTEs in New York City.

According to many sites, redeployment is planned to occur as civilians perform
tasks that previously took officers' time, saving small segments of time from
many officers. Ninety-six percent of all agencies in June 1998 reported that
civilians saved sworn officers' time. As shown in table 4-23, this percentage
was very high regardless of whether or not a measurement system was in place.

Implementation of grants for overtime

The MORE program awarded approximately $29.3 million in overtime grants
in 1995 and 1996, which was about 6 percent of the 1995 MORE application.
After 1995, MORE grants no longer funded overtime for three reasons: (1)
many funded agencies felt the $75,000 limit coupled with time-and-a-half raised
the implicit match too high, (2) some abuses were reported to the COPS Office
(for example, overtime to officers nearing retirement to raise the salary used in
pension calculations), and (3) overtime was not seen by the Justice Department
as leaving a legacy.

Redeployment from overtime. The requirement for agencies that wished to
request overtime under COPS MORE was straightforward; that is, "Only the
payment of overtime for officers actually engaging in increased levels of
community-oriented policing activities during the funded overtime period will be
funded." The difficulty in this approach for the COPS Office was it would only
result in a temporary redeployment of officers. Sites were not required to
indicate they would assume this cost after the grant funding expired.

Agencies used Federal funds for up to 75 percent of an officer's overtime wage
(including time-and-a-half). This overtime amount was not to include benefits.
Agencies were asked to pay the remaining 25 percent of the wage as a match. 

Overtime funds were typically used to have officers conduct new or expanded
community policing activities. Often the funds were for some period shorter than
a calendar year (e.g., a school year for a school resource officer, evenings during
a year for someone assigned to community meetings, or during the winter months
to check on vacation homes left vacant).

The 1995 COPS MORE database lists 323 overtime awards totaling $15.4
million, ranging from an award of $738 to the city of Lewisburg, West Virginia,
to $4.7 million to the Houston (Texas) Police Department. Most overtime
grants were small. Of the 323 awards listed, 219 (68 percent) estimated they
would redeploy the equivalent of one or fewer FTEs. (An FTE could be less
than one, because they are counted in terms of officer hours and could be a
portion of one officer's time.) In general, overtime funds were used to do typical
community policing tactics--conduct foot or bike patrols, attend community
meetings, and teach DARE programs, which occur during the school year or on
part of an average shift.

For the overtime program the mean number of hours accounted for by one
redeployed officer was 1,777, which is 47 hours short of the 1,824 hours that
serves as the COPS Office standard for the full-time equivalent of one officer.
However, theoretically overtime hours will more directly result in hours of
community policing because overtime hours are counted after vacation, sick
leave, and training hours.

Benefits of overtime. Overtime was considered by most agencies to have some
benefits in spreading community policing. In an Urban Institute survey of 21
randomly selected recipients of MORE grants for overtime, all agreed the
overtime enhanced their community policing efforts and provided additional time
to engage in community policing without interfering with 911 responses. All but
four agencies responded that the overtime funding gave supervisors an incentive
to encourage officers to engage in community policing, which allowed the agency
to experiment with community policing as an innovation.

Notes

1. The Wave 3 survey sampled only medium-sized and large local/county
agencies with hiring grants but all sizes of large local/county agencies with
MORE grants. However, some of these agencies also had hiring grants, and
they were questioned about those hiring grants. The Wave 3 hiring data from
these small MORE grantees are not used in this chapter because the results
may not be representative of all small agencies with hiring grants, but they are
used in chapter 5 to calculate national estimates of COPS officers hired by
small agencies.

2. The Wave 3 survey included only municipal and county agencies, which
received 77 percent of hiring awards through the end of 1997.

3. Wave 1 analyses indicated that although large agencies had greater numbers
of new officers to hire and train, the ratio of new officers to agency size was
greater for smaller agencies. To illustrate, 1995 AHEAD grantees were
awarded an average of eight officers through the program, while FAST
agencies were awarded one officer on average. Further, AHEAD agencies
received a range of 1 to 321 officers, while FAST agencies received a range of
only 1 to 10 officers. The number of officers awarded to FAST agencies
averaged 20 percent of the size of the existing sworn force and had a median
value of 10 percent of the size of the sworn force. Approximately 6 percent of
FAST agencies doubled their force. Officers awarded to AHEAD agencies, in
contrast, averaged 2 percent of the number of sworn officers (officers granted
to each AHEAD agency were limited to no more than 3 percent of the agency's
size at the time of application). If these patterns have held for post-1995 COPS
hiring grants, they suggest that the process of assimilating new officers has been
potentially more challenging for small agencies.

4. Unless otherwise noted, all tables and figures in this chapter based on survey
data report weighted counts, means, or percentages. The survey weights are
explained in the methodology appendix at the end of this report.

5. The sample of agencies consisted originally of 233 randomly selected FAST
agencies and 213 randomly selected AHEAD agencies. For these analyses, 1
(0.4 percent) of the FAST agencies and 18 (8.5 percent) of the AHEAD
agencies were excluded because at the time of the survey they no longer had
their COPS grant.

6. The Wave 3 sample of large agencies was stratified by COPS grant status as
of early 1996 (nongrantee, FAST/AHEAD, UHP, MORE). The estimates
presented in this section are weighted to reflect the agencies' differing
probabilities of selection (see the methodological appendix on the Wave 3
survey design).

7. Approximately 6 percent of both the FAST and AHEAD agencies had not
hired their officers. This small group of agencies, 13 of the sampled FAST
agencies and 11 of the sampled AHEAD agencies (1 AHEAD respondent did
not know whether the approved officers had been hired), experienced 
delays that were at least triple the average time-to-hiring for agencies that had
completed hiring. For the nonhiring FAST agencies, an average of 14.8 months
had elapsed from the time their funds were obligated by the Department of
Justice to the time of the interview. For nonhiring AHEAD agencies, this figure
was 16.6 months. Six of these thirteen FAST agencies indicated they were
waiting for approval of local matching funds. However, the remaining FAST
and AHEAD agencies that had not hired their officers did not identify any
predominant reasons for the delay; 1 of the 13 FAST agencies and 2 (18
percent) of the 11 AHEAD agencies indicated the process was moving on a
normal schedule. Agencies that had not hired their officers were asked why the
officers had not been hired. Interviewers and project staff characterized the
responses using categories such as moving on a normal schedule, pending
approval of local funds, and pending available space in training classes. The most
frequent characterization of the 13 nonhiring FAST agencies was they were
waiting for approval of local funds (46 percent). The most frequent
characterization of the 11 nonhiring AHEAD agencies was they were waiting to
complete their process of recruiting, selecting, and hiring officers (27 percent).

8. Suppose Agency A, a COPS grantee, hires an officer away from Agency B.
No net increase in total sworn force size occurs unless Agency B replaces that
officer with a new recruit not currently working at another agency. If Agency B
is not a COPS grantee, the replacement obviously requires expenditure of local
funds. Even if Agency B is a COPS grantee, the replacement would have to be
made with local funds to avoid supplanting.

9. Most of the hired FAST and AHEAD officers were in training by the time of
the Wave 1 survey (see table 4-1). Twelve percent of the FAST agencies that
had hired their officers had not begun training by the time of the interview.
However, 42 percent of the 26 agencies that had hired officers but had not
begun training stated explicitly they did not plan to train the officers, and another
nearly 12 percent indicated the officers were already trained. Thirty-one
percent of the FAST agencies that had not begun training indicated the process
was moving on a normal schedule (interviewers and project staff characterized
responses about training delays using categories such as moving on a normal
schedule, pending approval of local funds, and pending available space in
training classes). Only 1 percent of the AHEAD agencies that had hired officers
had not begun training them.

10. At Wave 1, interviewers questioned respondents about the date when
COPS officers did or were expected to "hit the streets" without explicitly
defining the phrase "hit the streets." Consequently, respondents could indicate
new officers were on the street even if the officers were still in field training. For
both FAST and AHEAD agencies, the modal response was officers hit the
street during the same month they were hired (53 percent for FAST agencies
and 16 percent for AHEAD agencies). These figures reflect a very fast
deployment process, though this might be expected in the case of the smaller
FAST agencies. However, the figures may indicate some respondents
considered field training to be "hitting the streets." In other cases, the results
may reflect respondent error.

The Wave 3 analyses of officer deployment are based on survey items asking if
COPS officers had begun their "first regular assignments as new officers."
Hence, the Wave 3 figures on officers deployed into the field should be less
likely to include officers in field training.

11. The Wave 1 and Wave 3 deployment questions were not completely
comparable. The Wave 1 survey required respondents to choose from direct
deployment, backfill, and "other" strategies; combination strategies were not
offered as an alternative.

12. Fifty-three percent of the FAST agencies reported they did community
policing prior to 1995.

13. Note that 80 percent of the backfill FAST agencies that had selected
officers for redeployment had also provided the officers with community
policing training and about 75 percent had redeployed the officers into
community policing.

14. Some agencies had only one COPS-funded officer.

15. We asked about both COPS-funded officers to be deployed directly to
community policing and more experienced officers to be redeployed from
routine patrol to community policing and backfilled by new COPS-funded
officers.

16. The fractions of time reported spent on each activity cannot be interpreted
literally because they add up to so much more than full time. This occurred
because we neglected to include a "soft check" to resolve such situations during
the telephone interview. Nevertheless, we believe the reports offer an
approximate guide to the relative importance of these activities in the routines of
the COPS-funded officers. 

17. "Specialists" include:

--Specialized units: community policing is done by specialized designated
community police officers or a community policing unit that normally does not
respond to calls; also there are traditional response units.

--Split-force units: within each sector or beat, both specially designated
community police officers and traditional response officers operate. 

"Generalists" include: 

--Temporal units: designated community police officers are assigned to shifts
where community policing is most needed and give that program highest priority
but also respond to calls as needed.

--Generalized units: instead of making special designations, all officers build
community policing into their normal routines.

--Mixture units: a mixture of community policing and traditional response
units; officers rotate between the two on a preset schedule.

18. Agencies were categorized into either a specialized or generalized group,
based on the respondents' self-definition. Respondents were asked to choose
the "approach to delivering community policing" that best describes their
agency's approach. Choices included definitions of specialized, temporal,
generalized, split force, and mixture structures. 

Two dominant groupings emerged from those groups. The community policing
structures were coded into two groups, based on the respondent's
self-definition. The specialized group consists of specialized unit and split force
definitions of community policing. The generalized group consists of temporal,
generalized, and mixture structures for community policing: 50.3 percent of
agencies reported using the generalized structure, and 47.6 percent of agencies
reported using the specialized structure.

19. Respondents were given a closed-end list of options and could choose as
many as needed. Options were:

--Larger felony caseloads.

--Larger misdemeanor caseloads.

--Smaller felony caseloads.

--Smaller misdemeanor caseloads but greater burdens on such agencies as
homeless shelters and detox units.

--Greater demands on agencies that deal with violence in the home.

--Greater demands on local agencies responsible for code enforcement,
sanitation, and the like.

--Greater demands on neighborhood or community associations, block
groups, and local businesses.

20. Almost 41 percent of respondents reported "other" (n=131), after
recoding; almost 34 percent of respondents stated other (n=107).

21. For all of the 1998 MORE analysis, agencies were included only if they
reported having a MORE grant and COPS Office records agreed. New
MORE awards for overtime were phased out after 1995, although a few 1995
overtime grants were renewed.

22. Under the $75,000, 3-year cap, the maximum hiring grant would cover the
Federal share of one officer for 3 years, an average of $25,000 per officer year.
This is the equivalent of 4 officer years per $100,000 of grant funds if the
officer's salary plus fringe benefits totaled at least $33,333 per year.

23. Types of technology included in the "other" category: digital photography,
citizen notification systems, tracking devices, automated fingerprint identification
system machines, telecommunications, scanning stations, records management,
auto vehicle locators, photo-imaging systems, micro-cassette recorders,
assorted software, in-car video recorders, digital-imaging systems, mugshot
systems, surveillance technologies, court-reporting systems, crime analysis
technology, transcription equipment, fax machines.

24. A decrease from 59 percent to 44 percent would occur if, for example,
between the two survey waves, about one-third of grantees received new
awards for mobile computers, and no grantees with old or new awards became
fully operational.

25. Projections were accumulated over all MORE technology grants awarded
between 1995 and 1998 to each member of our sample of 1995 MORE
technology grantees, weighted and summed within the mutually exclusive
categories of technology types awarded. 

References

Frank, J., S.G. Brandl, and R.C. Watkins. (1997). "The Content of Community
Policing: A Comparison of the Daily Activities of Community and 'Beat'
Officers." Policing: An International Journal of Police Strategy and Management
20:716-728.

Guyot, D. (1979). "Bending Granite: Attempts to Change the Rank Structure of
American Police Departments." Journal of Police Science and Administration 7
(3):253-284.

Harring, S. (1981). "Taylorization of Police Work--Prospects for the 1980s."
Insurgent Sociologist 11 (4):25-32.

Heininger, B.L., and J. Urbanek. (1983). "Civilianization of American Police:
1970-1980." Journal of Police Science and Administration 11 (2):200-205.

IACP. (1997). Community Policing Deployment Models and Strategies.
Unpublished paper prepared by the International Association of Chiefs of
Police on behalf of the Community Policing Consortium. Alexandria, Virginia.

Maxfield, M. (1998). Making Time: An Issues Brief from the National COPS
Evaluation. Washington, D.C.: Urban Institute.

National Institute of Justice. (1993). Toward the Paperless Police Department:
The Use of Laptop Computers. (NCJ 143291) Research in Brief. Washington,
D.C.: National Institute of Justice, U.S. Department of Justice.

Reaves, B. (1992). State and Local Police Departments, 1990. (NCJ
133284). Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of 
Justice.

Reaves, B., and P.Z. Smith. (1995). Law Enforcement Management and
Administrative Statistics, 1993: Data for Individual State and Local Agencies
with 100 or More Officers. (NCJ 148825). Washington, D.C.: Bureau of
Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice.

Reaves, B., and A. Goldberg. (2000). Local Police Departments, 1997. (NCJ
173429). Washington, D.C.: Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of
Justice.

Shernock, S.K. (1988). "The Differential Significance of Sworn Status and
Organizational Position in the Civilianization of the Police Communications
Division." Journal of Police Science and Administration 16:288-302.

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

Appendix 4-A. Implementing MORE-Funded Mobile Computing Technology

Elizabeth Langston

Mobile computing projects dominated the MORE technology grant program--
74 percent of agencies receiving MORE funding for technology in 1995
requested mobile computers. Because of this we made a special effort to
document the implementation of these projects through a survey of 185 agencies
that received 1995 MORE funds for mobile computing projects. This telephone
survey, conducted in the fall of 1997, asked agencies about their implementation
and redeployment status and to describe the lessons learned from the
experience. Other sources of information for this section include an analysis of
1995 MORE grant applications and visits to 10 sites that implemented mobile
computer systems with 1995 MORE funding.

This appendix addresses the following issues:

--What was the intended design and function of the mobile computer projects?

--What stage of implementation had the sites reached?

--What infrastructure was required to implement the mobile computer systems?

--Did implementation and redeployment proceed as expected?

Agency Uses of Mobile Computers

The term "mobile computing" here refers to computers in police vehicles or in
the community--uses outside of the normal desktop function. Many law
enforcement agencies install computer systems in vehicles, and others issue
stand-alone portable laptop computers to officers. The technology used to do
this varies. Laptop computers, mobile data terminals, mobile data computers,
and handheld computers (recently on the market) are constantly modified to
meet law enforcement needs. Mobile digital terminals have been available for
many years and perform some of the functions now done by mobile computers. 

Because these technologies can be used in similar ways, it is helpful to discuss
mobile computers in terms of the three main functions that they serve in law
enforcement. Automated field reporting allows officers to complete incident and
accident reports (as well as other administrative tasks) while in their
communities. This is expected to save officer time and lead to more legible,
accurate, and timely reports. Wireless access from the computer to the
station allows officers to bypass the dispatcher to automatically check vehicle
tags, driver's license numbers, NCIC, and State, as well as local criminal justice
information systems databases for wanted persons and warrants. Wireless
communication allows officers to send messages from car to car and car to
dispatch. With portable computers, which are used as standalone computers,
officers have access to e-mail and the Internet through modems or local area
networks (LANs).

Figure 4A-1 describes the planned functions of MORE-funded mobile
computer technology, as described in a fall 1997 telephone survey. The
majority of agencies (57 percent) plan to implement both field reporting and
wireless access functions. Another 37.8 percent of the agencies plan to do
reporting only, 1.4 percent plan to use the wireless access functions only, and
4.1 percent plan to do neither. In general, agencies plan to do both these
functions using the same computer equipment. We visited 10 sites receiving
1995 MORE funding for mobile computers. 

Of these sites, six planned to do both, two planned to do reports only, and one
was doing wireless access only. The tenth site, San Diego, had installed mobile
data terminals in vehicles before the MORE funding was available. The police
department used MORE funds to implement the report writing function.
However, the agency found the computers needed for the report writing
functions were not compatible with its existing MDT modems, so it
programmed the wireless functions as well and purchased AERONET
technology for report submission. In the other six sites which planned to do both,
most started with the wireless access function and planned to install report
writing in the future.

Implementation Status

Figure 4A-2 describes the planning and installation status of six common mobile
computing technologies that use wireless access. Most agencies plan to
eventually maintain a remote connection to the agency or a 911 center. In the
fall of 1997, 17 percent of the agencies had already installed wireless access,
and 39 percent had the incident/traffic report writing functions in the hands of
most or all of the end users. Functions such as geographic information systems
(mapping) and global positioning systems (which indicates vehicle and
destination locations) are expected to be available in the future but are a long
way from being universally implemented at this time. Many of the sites
mentioned they hope officers will eventually take fingerprints from the vehicle
and pull up mug shots to identify persons in the field.

Agencies have the option of mounting the equipment in the vehicle or issuing it
to the officer as a standalone computer to be used in the field. In our survey we
found 57.2 percent of the agencies plan to mount the computer in the car, 36.2
percent plan to issue it as a stand-alone computer and 6.6 percent plan some
other way of deploying the computer.

Infrastructure Needs

Wireless connectivity

To allow officers to have wireless access (to bypass the dispatcher to check
vehicle tags, driver's license numbers, etc.), a wireless link is required to connect
the computer remotely to the necessary databases. Of our 10 initial sites (1995)
and 3 additional sites (1996) receiving funding for mobile computing at the time
of our first visit, wireless access was being successfully pursued in four
sites--San Diego; Oregon State Police; Miami; and Racine, Wisconsin. 

Establishing the wireless link required extensive infrastructure and special
equipment for the laptops. Data transmission over the wireless link can be
accomplished in a variety of ways. If a department has an available frequency
on its police radio system, the terminal device can be connected to the radio
network via a separate mobile radio modem mounted in the vehicle, often in the
trunk. However, upgrades are typically required for wireless transmission of full
reports, mug shots, and other large electronic documents.

One upgrade option for wireless connectivity is Cellular Digital Packet Data
(CDPD) that uses a cellular modem to transmit data over the existing cellular
network. Although CDPD utilizes the same basic infrastructure as the standard
cellular phone network, it is based on an entirely different transmission protocol
and is not available in many areas. Fresno County Sheriff's Department, in
mid-California, selected CDPD for its data transmission system. This was
intended to avoid the capital expenses required to build an infrastructure of
transmitter sites and the accompanying maintenance costs. The department will
use a system put in place by AT&T for commercial service. Other agencies
considered this option but were concerned about the potential for price hikes
under an arrangement with a commercial provider.

In our mobile computer survey we found that the most commonly planned type
of wireless connectivity was by radio frequency (40 percent), CDPD (26
percent), analog cellular (13 percent), undecided (14 percent), and other (8
percent). ("Other" included CAD, modem at docking station, cable, "loosely"
and downloading at station, answers that suggest the question was not clear to
all respondents.)

We asked agencies that planned to connect their units to a central network if
they had to upgrade their existing communication system to accommodate data
transmission: 72 percent said yes, 26 percent said no, and 2 percent hadn't
decided. We then asked what sort of upgrades were needed. Table 4A-1
describes the most commonly mentioned upgrades.

"Some other way" included adding additional software or computer equipment,
radios or radio modems for vehicles, a new CAD system, or new telephone
equipment.

Transmitting reports

Agencies planning automated field reporting must find ways to transmit the
reports to a central location for further processing, such as a supervisor's
review or analysis. Automated field reporting is expected to save commuting
time because reports are sent from the field, eliminating an officer's trip back to
the station. However, a complete wireless/remote transfer of data in a paperless
organization was not found in any of the sites. At present, data is expected to
be downloaded mainly when officers return to their dispatch locations. At the
time of our survey, 24 percent of the agencies planning this had not yet decided
how to do this. Of those that had decided, multiple ways were planned
including downloading the files at the station (86 percent) or printing paper
copies (75 percent), as shown in table 4A-2.

Infrastructure required to implement the reporting systems

Some agencies are trying to integrate the new technology into a mature
infrastructure. The new mobile computers must interact with expensive and
extensive dispatch and records systems already in place and often years old.
However, many agencies awarded funds for technologies were in varying stages
of upgrading their records management and CAD systems. Our survey found in
59 percent of the agencies, the mobile computer project is part of a larger
technical upgrade. Of these, agencies reported technology projects shown in
table 4A-3.

As an example of a typical situation involving technological change, in the
Pocatello Police Department, a small municipal agency in Idaho, the records
system was designed years ago using proprietary software. This ensured that
the original vendor had to be called in to write programs to conduct crime
analysis. As the agency adopted community policing, they were interested in
conducting more sophisticated crime analysis and did not want to rely on the
vendor. Independent of its COPS MORE funding for mobile computers, the
agency purchased and installed a new records management system. The system
upgrade was expected to facilitate the data collection functions of the new
mobile computers, making it possible to download records from the new mobile
computers, which would not have been possible with the old system.

Implementation Status of the Mobile Computers

Given the installation intricacies, a rather lengthy period of time can be expected
to install the mobile computer systems, varying, of course, by the size and
scope of the system. As mentioned previously in the body of this chapter,
based on a telephone survey of agencies receiving 1995 MORE funding for
mobile computers, in September 1997 approximately 59 percent were
estimated to have the equipment in use by all or most of the end users. The
same survey found that agencies receiving MORE funding for mobile computers
estimated they would have their equipment in use by all or most of the end users
in a mean time of 10.8 months after receiving the grant award, with estimates
ranging from 0 to 32 months.

As a cautionary note for further research, the site teams found it was extremely
difficult to distinguish between efforts that had already been completed and
efforts in the planning or developmental stages. The interviewees tended to 
discuss the functionalities of the equipment as though it were already installed
and operational, perhaps out of enthusiasm for the vision of the finished project.
Actual observation of the equipment in use was required to understand the
implementation stage of the project, which often differed from the impressions
left by phone and even onsite conversations.

For our first round of site visits in January-March 1997, we visited 10 1995
MORE grantees that, based on a short phone survey, seemed to be ahead of
other sites in the implementation process. (We visited three additional agencies
with 1996 MORE funding in the second round of visits.) Of the 10 sites, only
Austin, Texas, and Racine had the majority of their equipment in use. Four of the
first round of agencies were conducting pilot tests or were in the installation
process, and four were in the procurement stage. 

As reported earlier in the body of this chapter, agencies applying for 1995
MORE funds estimated on average that mobile computers would save a mean
of 2.4 hours per officer per 8-hour shift. This estimate varies as time saved
depends upon the function of the portable computers. Activities where time
savings are expected are concentrated in three areas. The report writing function
is expected to decrease the amount of time officers need to complete reports (in
part due to fewer corrections, elimination of duplicate data entries, and the use
of "cut and paste" options). The relative speed of the two data entry methods
(handwritten and computer) has not yet been tested and would be an interesting
topic of study. 

One might expect that one of the most significant benefits of having officers
enter reports into the computer would be reduced clerical time needed to key
the data into the computer or file and process the paper reports. Because this
clerical time savings is not counted in the redeployment estimates, it was rarely
mentioned as a benefit, except in site visits.

Secondly, laptops and MDTs are expected to reduce travel time to and from
police stations. Most agencies plan to do reporting in the field. This can save
time in a variety of ways. Officers will be asked to complete reports in the field,
from the squad car or from a public place, such as a community policing
substation in a mall or in a restaurant. Agencies stated this has the advantage of
keeping the officer out in the public while completing reports. By staying within
their beats, officers can respond to calls for service more quickly and serve a
community policing function. In some agencies officers are asked to return to the
station periodically to turn in reports. Time is saved if officers return only at the
end of the shift with the reports already entered into the computer. In a few
agencies this data transfer can be done in real-time via radio frequency, but this
is not common.

The third timesaving effect was through modernized and automated information
retrieval. For agencies that use the laptops to bypass the dispatcher to do
license and NCIC checks, the officers' wait to receive this information may be
much shorter than it was in heavy volume situations when the dispatcher was
swamped. During onsite visit ride-alongs, officers complained that during peak
hours the wait for the dispatcher to return the calls could take up to 10 minutes.

Redeployment procedures

Once the time savings is realized, officers are expected to be deployed so they
will conduct more community policing functions. We asked the agencies how
the technology will cause redeployment. As shown in table 4A-4, 82 percent of
the agencies reported planning to have each of the officers using the new
technology spend their saved time doing community policing. This form of
individual-level redeployment is much harder to monitor and measure than
collective redeployment, in which small amounts of many officers' time saved
are pooled to free up a few officers entirely for community policing. Only 14.5
percent of agencies reported they planned collective redeployment, in which
assignments or patrolling structures are changed to free up specific officers for
community policing assignments.

Offsetting costs

While the mobile computing technology is intended to save officer's time over
the long run, there are a number of time costs to be expected during the
transition. One is the technical staff time needed to install and maintain the
computers. Another is the officer time required for training. In our survey, 52
percent of the agencies said they expected the system to take additional time
during transition. The ways in which they expect it to take additional time are:
training (46 percent), a learning curve/adjustment period (25.2 percent),
installation (8.4 percent), software and computer maintenance (9.9 percent), and
other (10 percent).

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

5. Putting 100,000 Officers on the Street: Progress as of 1998 and Preliminary 
Projections Through 2003

Christopher S. Koper and Jeffrey A. Roth, with Edward Maguire

In this chapter we report a first national approximation of the effect of COPS
grants on the level of policing resources hired and deployed throughout the
United States. These resources include: (1) sworn officers hired under COPS
hiring grants, and (2) productivity increases yielded by COPS MORE-funded
resources, measured in terms of sworn officer full-time equivalents (FTEs). To
estimate the effect on the national count of sworn officers, we combined our
own Wave 3 survey data on hiring and retention with police employment data
from the Uniform Crime Reports (UCR). To estimate the MORE-supported
productivity increases, we used COPS grant award data and Wave 3 survey
data. Our estimates were made for two points in time: June 1998, based on
grants funded (i.e., awards announced) through 1997; and the 2000-2003
period, based on grants funded through May 12, 1999, when the White House 
announced fulfillment of the goal of funding 100,000 officers.

Summary of Interim Estimates

It is important to stress that the interim estimates, which appear in table 5-1,
were prepared for early feedback to the U.S. Department of Justice, and the
post-1998 projections in particular should be treated with extreme caution. We
plan to update and revise them later in 2000.

Hiring grant impact--cautions, assumptions, and interim estimates

The hiring estimates are based primarily upon results from the Wave 3 survey
conducted in June 1998. For COPS hiring grantees, the Wave 3 sample is
representative only of municipal and county police agencies serving jurisdictions
of more than 50,000, although smaller municipal/county hiring grantees that also
received MORE grants were included in the sample as well. Therefore, the
extrapolations we made as a first approximation for smaller agencies and other
types of agencies are open to methodological question.

We first used the Wave 3 survey data to estimate the number of COPS-funded
officers who had been hired as of June 1998. By that time, the COPS Office
had awarded 41,000 officers through pre-1998 hiring awards, and our survey
results indicate that about 39,000 of these officers had been hired (table 5-1,
panel 1, columns 1-2).

As explained more fully in chapter 2, however, the net effect of COPS hiring
grants on the number of sworn officers depends on a number of factors largely
determined by local agencies' decisions; consequently, net effects may differ
notably from the number of officers awarded or hired at a given time. At grant
startup, these offsetting factors include agency delays in accepting awards, the
speed with which funded officers are recruited and hired, delays in filling
vacancies for non-COPS positions, and the extent of cross-hiring between
agencies.[1] Based on a time series analysis of UCR police employment data
through 1996, we estimate these startup factors generally prevent agencies from
fully implementing COPS-funded staffing increases until more than a year after
they receive the awards.

In the longer term, offsetting factors include certain cuts in sworn force size
approved by the COPS Office Legal Division as nonsupplanting and the rates
at which the hired officers are retained through and after the 3-year grant
period. We created preliminary estimates of such long-term factors based on
the Wave 3 survey. When we collected the data in the summer of 1998,
however, the required retention period had not been announced and relatively
few hiring grants had expired. Recognizing that under these conditions retention
expectations might be an imprecise predictor of future behavior, we used the
data to construct a "best case" scenario in which grantees would retain 91
percent of their new hires indefinitely and a "worst case" scenario of 64
percent.[2] In 2000, we will update our retention rate estimates based on a
Wave 4 survey, which emphasizes hiring and retention questions using a
nationally representative sample with up to 2 years' additional chance of having
experienced grant expiration after the duration of the retention requirement was
known.

The interim, net increase hiring estimates computed under these assumptions
and cautions are shown in table 5-1 (panel 1, columns 1-3). We estimate that
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 (panel 1, column 3). If we assume that the retention patterns
expected by Wave 3 respondents for pre-1998 COPS officers continue into
the future, then we can make tentative predictions about net increases that will
result from post-1997 hiring awards. By May 1999, the COPS Office had
awarded approximately 60,900 officers through hiring grants (panel 1, column
4). Under a maximum retention 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 (panel 1, column 5). A minimum retention scenario, in contrast,
suggests that the net impact of these awards will peak at 48,900 officers in the
year 2000 but then decline to a permanent level of 39,000 officers by the year
2003 (panel 1, column 5).

MORE grant impact--cautions, assumptions, and interim estimates

As explained in chapter 2, COPS MORE grants for technology and civilians
were intended to create time savings that enable agencies to keep existing
officers in the field for greater periods of time. Under the MORE program,
every 1,824-hour projected savings is treated as the FTE of one officer.
However, there has been little, if any, experience base to guide the applicants
or the COPS Office in making projections, and the actual MORE contribution
of FTEs depends on the percentage of projections actually achieved.

All 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 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 22,400 FTEs through
MORE grants for civilians and technology, and survey results indicate that
grantees had redeployed 6,400 FTEs with these grants (panel 2, columns 1-2).
At that time, however, many grantees had not fully implemented their grants. To
illustrate, 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 (see chapter 4).

Therefore, grantees were also asked to estimate future productivity increases
they expected to achieve once all grants were fully implemented. Agencies that
had greater experience with implementing their grants 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 agencies adjust their expected productivity gains
downward as they gain more experience with implementing their grants (results
from chapter 4 suggest this phenomenon is driven primarily by technology
grantees). While we used those figures to compute best case and worst case
interim estimates, we recognize that the worst case estimates are based on only
a partial subsample with 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.

Our interim estimates of COPS MORE effects on FTE officers appear in table
5-1 (panel 2, columns 1-3). 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 (panel 2, column 3). We
project that if these implementation patterns hold for post-1998 MORE grants,
the 39,600 FTEs awarded as of May 1999 (panel 2, column 4) will result in the
redeployment of between 23,800 and 28,500 FTEs by the year 2002 (panel 2,
column 5). These estimates should be treated cautiously, however, not only for
the reasons discussed above but also because the survey estimates of final
redeployment levels were subject to wide sampling variation.

Combined projections for the first 100,000 funded 

By May 1999, the COPS Office had awarded approximately 100,500 officers
and officer equivalents through hiring grants and MORE grants (table 5-1, panel
3, column 4). Upper bound projections based on June 1998 survey estimates
of maximum officer retention and maximum officer redeployment suggest these
awards will result in a peak national net increase of 84,600 officers by the year
2001 before declining somewhat and stabilizing at a permanent level of 83,900
officers by 2003 (panel 3, column 5). 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 only 69,000 officers in the year 2001
and decline to a permanent level of 62,700 by the year 2003 (panel 3, column
5).

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 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 optimistic 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 pessimistic assumptions are more accurate, the program may
require an additional 58,000 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 later this year.

In the sections that follow, we describe our methods for producing the interim
estimates in more detail.

Hiring Grants

In an unpublished interim report, we computed national 1996 end-of-year
estimates of gross and net additions of officers attributable to 1994 and 1995
COPS hiring grants. At that time, estimates based on our Wave 1 survey
indicated that nearly 10,000 officers awarded under 1995 FAST and AHEAD
grants had been hired as of the end of 1996. Furthermore, analysis of financial
data from the Office of the Comptroller suggested that another 4,300 officers
had been hired by that time with Police Hiring Supplement and COPS Phase I
(PHS/Phase I) grants awarded in 1994 and Universal Hiring (UHP) grants
awarded in 1995. A time series analysis utilizing COPS Office data on hiring
awards and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) data on police employment
suggested these gross additions of officers resulted in a real increase of
approximately 9,650 officers net of offsetting factors and preexisting
trends (we used the time series model to compute our updated estimates and
present it below).

This section updates our earlier findings by presenting gross and net estimates
of officers added to the Nation's police agencies as of June 1998 through
COPS hiring grants. In addition, we assess the longer term impact of these
grants by estimating the number of COPS-funded officers likely to be retained
after the expiration of their grants.

Data and methodological overview

Most of the hiring estimates are based on the Wave 3 survey of police
agencies, which was conducted in June 1998. As discussed in the
methodological appendix, the Wave 3 survey included a nationally
representative sample of all large municipal/county agencies and a nationally
representative sample of small municipal/county agencies that were 1995
MORE grantees. Respondents were asked about hiring, deployment, and
retention of all officers who had been awarded to their agencies under COPS
hiring grants as of the end of 1997, regardless of whether the agencies were
originally sampled as hiring grantees.

National estimates were generated by generalizing the survey results to the
country's total population of police agencies. Technically, however, the Wave 3
survey sample is not a representative sample of all police agencies. The
large-agency subsample represents county/municipal agencies in large and
medium jurisdictions (i.e., populations of more than 50,000), including agencies
that did not receive any COPS grants; however, the small-agency subsample
represents only small municipal/county 1995 MORE grantees. Therefore, the
small-agency component of our interim hiring estimates is based on the hiring
grants that many small MORE awardees also received, and their hiring behavior
may not be typical of all small agencies that received hiring grants.

Nonetheless, generalizing these results to the full population of police agencies
seems reasonable as a first approximation for several reasons. First, the
small-agency MORE grantees were sampled independently of whether they
had also received hiring grants. Consequently, both the large- and small-agency
samples contain agencies that received early hiring grants (i.e., Phase I, PHS,
and FAST/AHEAD grants) and/or later hiring grants (i.e., UHP grants), as well
as agencies that received no hiring grants. Second, generalizing results from
municipal/county agencies to all agencies seems reasonable since at least 
77 percent of awarded COPS officers went to municipal/county agencies
according to Cops Office records. Further, Wave 1 survey results from the fall
of 1996 showed that municipal/county agencies and other types of agencies
(e.g., State police agencies and public university police agencies) made very
similar progress in hiring and deploying officers awarded to them through the
FAST and AHEAD hiring programs.[3] Hence, we have no clear reasons for
expecting county/municipal agencies to differ from other agencies with regard to
their implementation of COPS hiring grants.[4]

The other primary data source used to examine police staffing is a national time
series database, which combines COPS Office hiring grant records with 8
years of data from the Police Employment Section of the FBI's UCR. This 
database was used to examine net changes in police staffing due to COPS hiring
grants and is discussed in further detail below.

Gross estimates of officers hired and on the street as of June 1998

Estimates of COPS officers hired and deployed to patrol duty as of June 1998
are based on the Wave 3 survey. Interviewers first asked respondents how
many of their COPS-funded officers had started their "first regular assignments
as new officers." Interviewers then questioned respondents about the status of
those officers not yet serving in their first regular assignments (e.g., not hired,
attending training academy). Because the survey questions covered hiring grants
extending back to 1994--frequently multiple grants--interviewers did not ask
respondents to provide specific numbers of officers hired and deployed.
Instead, the hiring questions offered response categories of none, some but less
than half, half, more than half but not all, and all of the awarded officers. For
projection purposes, we operationalized the response categories as follows:
none = zero; some but less than half = 25 percent of the officers; half = 50
percent of the officers; more than half but not all = 75 percent of the officers;
and all = 100 percent of the officers. To illustrate, if a respondent reported that
half of the agency's COPS officers were on assignment, then the number of
officers on assignment for that agency was estimated as the number of officers
awarded multiplied by 0.5.[5] If the respondent also indicated that half of the
remaining officers (i.e., those not on assignment) were still being recruited, then
the number of officers hired by the agency was calculated as the number
estimated to be on assignment plus the product of 0.5 multiplied by the
difference of the number awarded and the number estimated to be on
assignment. This general question format and estimation technique was used for
most of the hiring, deployment, and retention estimates highlighted throughout
this chapter.

We calculated national estimates of COPS officers hired by multiplying a
survey-based estimate of the proportion of all awarded officers who had been
hired by the known count of officers awarded according to COPS Office data
as of the end of 1997.[6] The proportion of COPS officers hired was defined as
the ratio of the mean estimated number of officers hired to the mean number of
officers awarded.[7] In addition, 95-percent confidence intervals were
constructed to show the most likely ranges for the true population estimates
(formulas for the confidence intervals are presented in appendix 5-A).

Using the method described in the preceding paragraph, we estimate that by
June 1998, 97 percent of the officers awarded to large agencies and 94 percent
of the officers awarded to small agencies had been hired (see table 5-2).
Because the proportion point estimates were close to 1, we computed
confidence intervals based on the logarithm of (1-p), where p is the proportion
of officers hired. This computation method ensured that the upper bound of the
confidence intervals did not exceed 1 (see appendix 5-A). By the end of 1997,
the COPS Office had awarded 21,026 officers to large agencies and 19,946
officers to small agencies according to its grants management information
system.[8] Combining these data with the hiring proportion estimates from the
large- and small-agency samples leads to an overall estimate that 39,069
COPS-funded officers were hired by June 1998, with a statistical confidence
interval of 38,634 to 40,000 officers.

Using the same methodology employed for the hiring estimates, we then
calculated that 81 percent of the officers awarded to large agencies and 85
percent of the officers awarded to small agencies were working in their first
regular assignments by June 1998 (see table 5-2). Overall, therefore, we
estimate that 34,131 new COPS-funded officers were on the street by June
1998, within a range of 33,380 to 36,104 officers.

From gross to net increases in officers

The estimate of 39,000 officers hired provides a measure of the gross impact of
COPS hiring grants awarded through 1997. However, this gross increase in
officers will be offset to some degree by a variety of factors. In the short term,
COPS-funded staffing increases can be partially offset by factors like delays in
the hiring of COPS-funded officers, delays in filling vacancies created by
normal year-to-year turnover, and cross-hiring of officers among agencies.[9]
An agency with n officers that receives a COPS grant for k officers, for
example, may take a few years to reach the full (n+k) officer mark, or it may
never reach the (n+k) staffing level. In the long term, staffing increases from
COPS hiring grants may be diminished by nonretention of COPS-funded
positions following the expiration of the 3-year hiring grants or certain sworn
force cutbacks certified by the COPS Office Legal Division to be
nonsupplanting. In other words, some of the growth in staffing achieved with
COPS hiring grants may be temporary. Further, national data discussed below
show that police agencies in general were growing in the years prior to the
COPS program. Indeed, agencies sampled at Wave 3 grew on average from
1993 to 1997 whether or not they had COPS hiring grants.[10] Consequently,
some of the growth in COPS-funded agencies might have occurred in the
absence of the COPS program.

In the following subsections, we assess the short-term impact of COPS hiring
grants on police staffing after taking into account other factors and trends
influencing police staffing throughout the country. We also take a special look at
the issue of cross-hiring. In the next section, we examine long-term retention of
COPS-funded positions using data from the Wave 3 survey. We then combine
the results of these analyses to form preliminary projections of the net impact of
all COPS hiring grants awarded through May 1999. All of these estimates will
be updated in the future report on the Wave 4 survey.

Time series analysis of COPS and net changes in police staffing, 1989-96. To
analyze short-term net changes in police staffing through the early years of the
COPS program, we combined data from 8 years of the police employment
section of the FBI's annual UCR.[11] 

The UCR contains agency-level data on the number of employees serving in
law enforcement functions with police agencies throughout the Nation. We
divided the agencies into six types (e.g., local police, sheriffs), which were
adopted from agency-type coding schemes used by both the Bureau of Justice
Statistics and the COPS Office. The agency codes were used to exclude
agencies that were ineligible for COPS grants.

A preliminary analysis based on approximately 14,000 agencies that reported
having at least one full-time officer for each year of the analysis revealed that
these agencies expanded by 14.5 percent between 1989 and 1996 (see tables
5-3 through 5-5).[12] Although these agencies grew throughout the period, the
largest year-to-year change was from 1994 to 1995, when they grew by 4.4
percent. These figures suggest that although police agencies grew in general
during this period, early COPS hiring grants (PHS/Phase I and FAST/AHEAD)
may have accelerated police growth.

To examine this issue more rigorously, we estimated multiple time series models
to determine whether recent changes in police employment could be causally
attributed to COPS hiring grants net of other forces affecting police staffing
levels during this time period. The data were organized by agency and year, so
that each data point represents a single agency during a single year. We created
the database using 11,809 agencies that were eligible for COPS funding and
reported both officer counts (agencies had to report at least one full-time officer
for each year) and counts of population served for each year from 1989
through 1996. Because we use lagged variables in our model (to be described
below), our analysis focuses on staffing changes from 1991 through 1996.

Our model predicts yearly changes in police staffing as a function of previous
year COPS hiring grants and a number of other factors. The basic form of the
model is:

FTS i, t - FTS i, t -1 = a + b* X i, t + b2 * COPS award i, t-1 + e i, t

where FTS i,t - FTS i,t-1 is the change in the number of full-time sworn officers
for agency i from year t-1 to year t; b * X i,t represents the impact of a number
of independent variables to be described below; b2 * COPS award i,t-1
represents the impact of COPS officers obligated to agency i at year t-1; a is a
constant term; and e is an error term with standard properties.[13] 

There is an extensive literature on the determinants of police strength and police
expenditures. Based on data available in the UCR, we incorporated a number
of these determinants into our model. We hypothesized that changes in crime
and population would impact local government decisions about police staffing
levels with about a 1-year lag. Therefore, changes in both violent and property
crime from t-2 to t-1 were computed and entered into the model, as were
changes in population from t-2 to t-1.[14] In addition, indicator variables were
developed to represent the nine regions of the country as defined by the
FBI.[15] The level of urbanization of each jurisdiction was measured with one
indicator variable showing if the jurisdiction was within a Metropolitan Statistical
Area (MSA) and another indicating whether the jurisdiction was a central city
within an MSA. Indicator variables were also developed for the agency types
shown in the previous tables. However, tribal police agencies were dropped due
to the small number reporting to the FBI, and both special and State police
agencies had to be dropped from analysis because estimates of the populations
they serve are not available in the UCR.[16] Finally, a series of yearly indicator
variables were developed to capture unmeasured factors that may have
impacted police staffing throughout the Nation during particular years of the
study (the 1994 variable was omitted from the equation, so all the yearly
indicators in the model are interpreted relative to 1994).[17]

Table 5-6 presents the results of estimating our primary model. Holding other
factors constant, we estimated that each COPS officer obligated to an agency
in year t led to an increase of 0.73 officers on the force from year t to year
t+1.[18] Inferences from this model should be considered preliminary, however,
for a number of reasons. As shown in table 5-6, the models explained little of
the variation in police staffing changes. Some of the predictors proved
insignificant, and there are several other important determinants of police
staffing that we have neglected here but may incorporate in future analyses.
Further, we could only examine very short-term impacts from COPS grants
with the available data.[19,20]

Nonetheless, the results suggest that while COPS hiring grants produced
meaningful short-term increases in police staffing, these effects were offset
somewhat by other factors, such as delays in hiring the new officers, attrition of
officers already on the force, and cross-hiring among agencies. However, it is
not clear whether the "attrition" implied by the model represents permanent
attrition, delays in the hiring process (i.e., implementation delays), or both. Our
results suggest, for example, that a hypothetical 100-officer agency receiving a
COPS grant for 10 officers in year t will, on average, increase its force to 107
by year t+1. Whether the agency will reach the intended 110 officer mark at
some point after t+1 cannot be inferred from our time series because it extends
only 1 year after the COPS program began. The agency may hire all of its
COPS-funded officers but fail to replace other departing officers, in which case
the agency will stay below the 110 officer target. On the other hand, an agency
adding COPS-funded officer positions may be temporarily unable to keep pace
with both COPS hiring and normal year-to-year attrition (e.g., because of
training academy capacity constraints), in which case the agency may reach the
110 officer mark only after some further delay. At any rate, the currently
available data suggest that even if COPS grants produce net staffing increases
equal to 100 percent of their value, it takes more than 1 year on average for this
full impact to be realized. Our future Wave 4 report will add post-1996 UCR
data to examine this issue more closely.

In the meantime, our existing survey data provide a preliminary basis for
projecting the longer term impact of COPS hiring grants, and the projection is
reported later in this chapter. In a later section, we combine the results from this
time series analysis and the long-term retention analyses to produce national
estimates of the short- and long-term effects on police staffing of all COPS
hiring grants awarded through May 1999.

Cross-hiring. The time series analyses presented in the previous section suggest
that various forms of attrition and/or hiring delays partially offset gross additions
of COPS officers. One form of officer attrition, which the COPS program may
have accelerated unintentionally, is cross-hiring. As noted in chapter 4,
cross-hiring occurs when an agency recruits officers directly from other
agencies. Sixteen percent of the Wave 3 large agencies with hiring grants and
15 percent of the Wave 3 small agencies with hiring grants indicated they had
or would recruit at least some of their officers directly from other agencies. This
suggests some agencies, with or without COPS grants, lost officers to other
agencies with COPS grants. Although cross-hiring was a common practice well
before the COPS program, it may have accelerated as agencies recruited
experienced officers to deploy their new COPS-funded hires to duty as quickly
as possible. Regardless, cross-hiring reduces COPS' additions to the Nation's
overall stock of police officers at least temporarily, and it may be a permanent
offsetting factor if agencies losing officers to cross-hiring do not replace them.

To illustrate the impact of cross-hiring with a very simple example, assume the
universe of police agencies consists of two agencies, A and B, each having 100
officers. A COPS grant for 5 officers to agency A is intended to increase the
national stock of police officers from 200 to 205. If, however, agency A recruits
those 5 officers from agency B, then the total stock of police officers will remain
at 200 until agency B replaces the 5 officers it lost. If agency B does not replace
those 5 officers, then the total stock of police officers will remain at 200 and thus
be no higher than before the COPS grant.[21] However, Wave 3 survey results
suggest the number of cross-hires attributable to COPS grants has been
relatively small. At the agency level, cross-hires were estimated by asking
respondents how many of their COPS-funded positions had been or would be
used to hire former sworn officers. Interviewers then asked how many of the
former sworn officers were recruited from other agencies.[22]

National estimates of cross-hired officers were computed by estimating the
ratio of the mean number of estimated cross-hires to the mean number of
awarded officers across all sampled agencies. Because the estimated cross-hire
proportions were small, the 95-percent confidence intervals were calculated
based on the log of p, where p is the proportion of awarded officers who were
cross-hired. This ensured that the lower bound estimates were bounded at
zero.

Table 5-7 shows that cross-hires accounted for only 2 percent of the officers
awarded to large agencies, leading to an estimate of approximately 400
cross-hirees for large COPS grantees. Although cross-hiring was somewhat
greater among small agencies, we estimate that cross-hirees numbered less than
1,200 officers (about 6 percent of those awarded) for small COPS grantees.

Long-term retention of COPS officers

The time series model presented in table 5-6 examined the impact of COPS
hiring awards made in 1994 and 1995 on police staffing through 1996. Because
the data covered a period before any COPS hiring grants expired, the COPS
effect estimated from that model should be viewed as an estimate of the
short-term impact of COPS. As described earlier, the model may
underestimate the temporary expansion of police officers caused by COPS
hiring grants. In the long term, nonetheless, findings presented in chapter 4
indicate some COPS-funded positions will not be retained after the expiration
of their grants, and this will reduce the permanent impact of COPS.

At the outset of the COPS program, the COPS Office awarded grants on the
condition that grantees plan a "good faith" effort to retain COPS-funded officers
after the expiration of the grants. In April 1998, the COPS Office changed its
procedures to require that applicants submit a written retention plan with their
applications. Finally, in August 1998, the office developed a more specific
criterion for the retention requirement by requiring grantees to retain COPS
officers for at least one full budget cycle after the one in which the grant expires.

Further, COPS-funded positions are meant to supplement, and not supplant,
preexisting officer positions. In other words, a grantee is not to use COPS
funds to replace local funds the grantee would otherwise have used for law
enforcement. For instance, grantees should not use COPS funds to replace
losses from normal year-to-year attrition. Nor should grantees cut existing
positions to retain COPS-funded officers. If, for instance, an agency with a
budgeted force of 100 officers receives a COPS grant for 5 officers, then the
agency is expected to maintain a force of 105 officers. If this agency losses
three officers to retirement after receiving the grant, the COPS Office expects
the agency to replace those three officers as well as retain the five
COPS-funded officers for at least a year, until completion of the following
budget cycle.

The Wave 3 survey instrument included a number of items to assess prospects
for long-term retention of COPS positions. As explained in chapter 4,
interviewers first inquired about COPS-funded officers who had already left the
agency and found that agencies had begun and, in most cases, replaced nearly
all officers who left before their grants expired.[23] Interviewers then asked
respondents to agree or disagree with each of the following three statements,
which were designed to measure nonretention, the retention of officers but not
positions, and supplanting, respectively.

--Despite a good-faith effort, unforeseen circumstances are likely to keep us
from retaining all the positions. (Nonretention.)

--We plan to retain all or most of the COPS-funded officers using slots that
open up when other officers retire or leave the agency. (Retention of persons
not levels.)

--We plan to maintain all the community policing positions funded by the 1995
COPS grants, though we may have to cut some positions elsewhere to do it.
(Supplanting.)

Agreement with any of these statements suggests the respondent's agency will
lose at least some of its COPS-funded staffing increase following the expiration
of its grant(s). Because few surveyed agencies had expired grants at the time of
the Wave 3 survey, their responses to the retention/supplanting items largely
reflected expectations rather than actual experience. For this reason we did not
require respondents to quantify the number or fraction of positions to be lost.

We derived two sets of preliminary retention estimates from these items. We
computed maximum retention (i.e., best case) estimates by assuming that any
agency whose respondent agreed with one or more of the
nonretention/supplanting items would lose "at least some but less than half" (i.e.,
25 percent) of its COPS-funded staffing increase. In other words, we assumed
that 25 percent of the COPS positions in such agencies would not be retained
or would be retained only through attrition or cuts of other positions (we used
25 percent to be consistent with the operationalization of the other hiring survey
items described earlier). We also computed a set of minimum (i.e., worst case)
retention estimates by assuming that agencies providing indications of
nonretention and/or supplanting would lose all their COPS-funded staffing
increases. For both the minimum and maximum retention scenarios, we
computed national estimates of the proportion of COPS officers likely to be
retained by calculating the ratio of the mean number of officers estimated to be
retained to the mean number of officers approved.[24]

Table 5-8 presents the estimates of long-term retention for large and small
agencies. Note that the upper and lower bound estimates in this table are not
confidence intervals; rather, they reflect a range of estimates based on different
assumptions about retention. Although the estimates are not very precise, it
appears that small agencies overall may retain as few as 59 percent of their
COPS-funded positions or as many as 89 percent. Large agencies are
projected to keep between 70 and 92 percent of their COPS-funded positions.
Combining the estimates from both groups of agencies suggests that grantees
will retain between 64 and 91 positions for every 100 positions funded through
COPS hiring grants. Overall, therefore, we estimate that COPS grantees will
retain somewhere between 26,400 and 37,200 of the 40,972 officers awarded
prior to 1998.

However, two further qualifications should be added to these estimates. First,
36 percent of the large COPS agencies that appeared to be keeping all of their
COPS-funded positions and 47 percent of corresponding small COPS
agencies indicated some uncertainty about the long-term future of their COPS
positions.[25] Consequently, these agencies may fulfill the COPS Office
short-term retention requirement but not sustain their staffing increases
permanently. In this respect, our retention estimates may overstate long-term
retention. Second, we should note the survey data give us a basis for judging
only whether COPS-funded officers will be retained by their original agencies. It
is possible that some officers not retained by their original agencies will be hired
by other agencies, in which case long-term additions to the Nation's stock of
police may be greater than that estimated above.

Projections for all hiring awards through May 1999

Based on the preceding analyses, we developed a model to produce upper and
lower bound estimates of the temporary and permanent effects of each yearly
cohort of COPS hiring awards on national police staffing levels. We used this
model to estimate the net increase in police staffing caused by COPS through
the end of 1998 and to project the eventual impact of COPS hiring awards
made through May 1999, when the White House announced success in
reaching the milestone of 100,000 funded officers and officer equivalents (the
latter were funded through MORE grants, which are discussed later in this
chapter).

Based on the time series analysis presented earlier in this chapter, the model
assumes that officers awarded in year t lead to a net increase of officers
awarded multiplied by 73 percent (i.e., .73) in year t+1. Currently, we lack
data for making clear predictions for years t+2 and t+3. Therefore, we
computed our interim projections by assuming a best case scenario in which the
first-year "attrition" represents only temporary factors of the sorts mentioned
earlier, and staffing increases in years t+2 and t+3 reach a value equal to 100
percent of COPS-funded officers. Note that the t+2 and t+3 estimates are
likely to decline when our time series analysis is updated for the Wave 4 report.

Projections for years t+4 and beyond depend upon different assumptions about
long-term retention. These assumptions are based upon the retention estimates
presented in the preceding section. Under the maximum retention scenario, the
number of COPS positions retained after year t+3 declines modestly to 91
percent of the number awarded.[26] Under the minimum retention scenario, the
number of positions retained after year t+3 drops to 64 percent of the number
awarded.

Because the survey and time series data used in the hiring analyses were
collected during or before 1998, the model's most accurate projections are
likely to be those through the end of 1998. Accordingly, the model implies that
the 41,000 COPS officers awarded through the end of 1997 produced a net
increase of between 34,000 and 35,300 officers by the end of 1998.

Figure 5-1 presents the model's projections for all 60,900 COPS officers
awarded with hiring grants through May 1999.[27] These estimates must be
qualified by noting that applying our hiring projection model to post-1997 hiring
grants requires the assumption that the patterns of implementation and retention
observed and/or expected for pre-1998 hiring grants will continue for
subsequent hiring grants. This assumption may be problematic, particularly in
light of the Attorney General's determination that retention requirements are
satisfied if grantees keep COPS positions for just one budget cycle following
the expiration of COPS grants (note that this decision came after the Wave 3
survey was conducted). On the other hand, retention rates may be boosted, at
least for a few years, by COPS Office monitoring and education efforts, the
1998 requirement for a written retention plan, and the results of grantee audits
by the Office of the Inspector General.

Having noted this caveat, figure 5-1 presents estimates of net officers added and
retained for each year from 1995 through 2003. Attrition from hiring grants
began in 1998, and from that year forward, the graph shows two sets of
projections based on the different attrition estimates presented in the last section.
For each year after 1997, the bottom segment of the bar reflects a minimum
estimate of officers added and retained (based on the assumption of
100-percent attrition of COPS positions in the fraction of grantee agencies that
we predict will not retain all of their COPS positions), while the upper portion of
the bar represents a maximum estimate of officers added and retained (based on
the assumption of 25-percent attrition of COPS positions in the fraction of
grantee agencies that we predict will not retain all of their COPS positions).

Estimates produced for the minimum retention scenario suggest that officers
added by COPS hiring grants made through May 1999 will peak at
approximately 48,900 officers in the year 2000 but then decline to less than
39,000 by 2003. Under the maximum retention scenario, in contrast, officer
additions will climb to a peak of about 57,200 in the year 2001 and then
decline somewhat until 2003, at which time they will level off indefinitely at
approximately 55,400 officers.

MORE Grants

In addition to the hiring grants examined earlier in this chapter, the COPS
Office has also sought to increase police strength through MORE (Making
Officer Redeployment Effective) grants for technology and civilians. The
rationale for these grants was that utilization of new technologies and greater
use of civilian support staff would increase the productivity of existing sworn
officers, increasing the share of their time that could be redeployed. Grantees
could thereby increase the presence of officers in the field without hiring new
staff. In this section, we utilize the Wave 3 survey data to estimate officer
redeployments achieved as of June 1998 and to project maximum
redeployments that will be achieved with MORE grants awarded through May
1999.

Data and methodological overview

Our estimates of officer redeployments from MORE grants are based upon the
municipal and county MORE agencies in a nationally representative sample
selected from the population of 1995 MORE grantees (see methodological
appendix). For the Wave 3 survey in June 1998, these agencies were
interviewed about the implementation of their 1995 MORE grants and all
subsequent MORE grants they had received. Among other issues, the
interviews included questions about current and future projected time savings
from the agencies' technology and civilian grants.

Although the MORE program also included overtime grants during its first year,
these awards were 1 year, nonrenewable grants and have generally expired.
Since officer redeployments are no longer being achieved through those grants,
we have not included them in our estimates of officer redeployments. However,
it is fair to note that those grants did result in the delivery of additional police
service to communities for a limited time.

A few caveats should also be noted about generalizing the results of the Wave
3 survey to the full population of MORE grantees. Because the sampled
agencies were first-year MORE grantees, they have had more time for
implementation than have later cohorts of MORE grantees. If they have
therefore made greater implementation progress, the results presented here may
overestimate MORE redeployments as of June 1998 for the full universe of
grantees. This bias will be offset somewhat by the fact that survey respondents
were questioned about all of their MORE grants from 1995 through June 1998.
Further, COPS Office records show that 77 percent of all FTEs awarded
under MORE as of June 1998 were awarded to agencies that were among the
1995 MORE grantees. Finally, the redeployment estimates presented below
are modest. Hence, even if they are overestimates, they do not greatly inflate
our final combined estimates of officers hired and redeployed.[28]

As in the hiring analyses, we must also generalize from municipal and county
MORE grantees to the full population of agencies with MORE grants. This
seems reasonable, given that more than 80 percent of MORE FTEs awarded in
1995 were awarded to municipal and county police agencies. Further, we do
not have any clear grounds for believing that MORE implementation progress
has been different for different types of agencies.

FTE redeployment

Time savings from MORE grants are measured in full time equivalent units.
Each FTE is equal to 1,824 hours, which is the COPS Office estimate of the
amount of time that a typical patrol officer works each year. Every 1,824 hours
saved per agency per year is counted like the addition of another police officer.
Thus, if an agency receives a MORE grant enabling one or more of its officers to
spend a combined, additional 1,824 hours on the street each year, then that is
considered to be the equivalent of the agency hiring a new officer.

The basis for FTEs awarded was provided in the agencies' MORE
applications, which required applicants to estimate the full redeployment that
could be achieved with the requested grant. Hypothetically, for example, an
agency might have requested 10 mobile data terminals to install in patrol cars.
Using the mobile data terminals, officers would write reports in their patrol cars,
thereby allowing them to spend more time in the field. If the department
estimated that each data terminal would save 1 hour of officers' time each day,
then the department would save a total of 10 hours every day. Multiplying that
by 365 days leads to an estimated total of 3,650 hours saved per year by the
agency. This is the equivalent of 2 FTEs (i.e., 3,650/1,824). While time-savings
projections from civilian grants were often straightforward, applicants had little,
if any, data with which to judge the validity of their time- savings projections
from technology grants (see the discussion in chapter 4). COPS Office staff
often adjusted applicants' projected FTEs downward to reflect the minimum
FTE redeployment necessary to make the grant as cost effective as a hiring
grant for the same dollar amount, particularly for awards made after 1995. The
estimates revised by the COPS Office are used here as the measure of
awarded FTEs. However, even this adjusted measure of FTEs awarded is
speculative and, for reasons discussed in chapter 4, may overstate the number
of FTEs that will ultimately be redeployed by grantees, particularly with respect
to technology grants. This point is further illustrated later in this chapter.

In our Wave 3 survey, interviewers asked respondents to estimate the number
of FTEs that the respondents' agencies were currently saving from operational
MORE-funded technology and/or civilians.[29] A caveat to these estimates is
that a substantial fraction of MORE grantees did not have monitoring systems in
place to measure time savings from MORE grants. Among agencies with
operational technology, only 46 percent of small agencies and 57 percent of
large agencies reported the use of monitoring systems. Monitoring systems
were somewhat more common for measuring time saved by civilians.
Approximately two-thirds of small agencies with civilians and three-quarters of
large agencies with civilians reported the use of monitoring systems. Although
many agencies did not use monitoring systems, the reported time savings are
modest and do not suggest gross overestimation by respondents. Further, we
did not find any consistent tendency for agencies without monitoring systems to
report more or less redeployment than agencies with monitoring systems.[30]

In addition, some respondents who indicated their officers saved time from
MORE grants could not estimate the specific amount of time being saved. For
these cases, we estimated current FTE redeployment based on the average 
ratio of redeployed to awarded FTEs reported by agencies that both indicated
they were saving time and provided specific time-savings estimates.[31]

For both small and large agencies, we used the sample data to estimate the
ratio of the mean number of redeployed FTEs to the mean number of awarded
FTEs. (Because FTEs redeployed can theoretically be higher than FTEs
awarded, the ratio of FTEs redeployed to FTEs awarded is not a proportion
measure with an upper bound of one.)[32] The estimated ratios were then
multiplied by the known universe of FTEs awarded to small and large agencies
to obtain national estimates of redeployed FTEs.

By June 1998, the COPS Office had awarded 22,437 FTEs through MORE
grants for technology and civilians. The COPS Office awarded 16,184 of these
FTEs to large agencies and awarded the remaining 6,253 to small agencies.[33]
Survey estimates presented in table 5-9 indicate that small agencies had
redeployed 46 percent of their awarded FTEs by that time. Larger agencies
made slower progress with redeployment in relative terms, having redeployed
only 22 percent of their awarded FTEs. Combining the estimates from the small
and large agencies suggests that MORE grantees overall had redeployed 6,427
FTEs by the summer of 1998 within a range of plus or minus roughly 2,100
FTEs.

We also attempted to assess the relative contributions of technology and civilian
grants to FTE redeployment by estimating the fraction of redeployed FTEs
attributable to technology grants. As a point of reference, COPS Office records 
indicate 75 percent of FTEs awarded as of June 1998 were associated with
technology grants.[34] In contrast, survey results show that both small and large
agencies achieved only about 55 percent of their redeployment with technology
grants. Although the 95-percent confidence intervals (36 percent to 76 percent
for large agencies and 40 percent to 69 percent for small agencies) were too
wide to clearly determine whether technology or civilian grants generated more
FTEs, the results suggest that technology grants are not yet producing FTE
redeployment in numbers proportional to their share of awarded FTEs. This
pattern seems to be consistent with findings reported in chapter 4 that
technology grants often take longer to implement than do civilian grants, and
that some agencies appear to have overestimated the time that officers could
save from technology grants.[35]

Projected future FTE redeployment from MORE grants awarded through June
1998

The preceding estimates of FTE redeployment are conditional on the progress
that grantees had made in implementing their grants as of June 1998. As
described in chapter 4, not all agencies had fully implemented their
MORE-funded technology and/or hired all their MORE-funded civilians. For
these agencies, full implementation of their MORE grants should produce higher
numbers of FTE redeployment, though analyses presented in chapter 4 also
suggest that many agencies, particularly technology grantees, will not redeploy
as many FTEs as originally envisioned. It is also possible that some agencies
will lose FTEs, particularly in cases where agencies do not retain their
MORE-funded civilians. As with hiring grants, the COPS Office requires that
MORE grantees make a good-faith effort to retain funded civilians after the
expiration of the civilian grants. In August 1998, the COPS Office modified this
policy to require that agencies keep MORE-funded civilians for one budget
cycle after the civilians' funding expires.

The Wave 3 survey contained a number of items to estimate future
redeployment from awarded MORE grants. First, interviewers questioned
agencies with less than fully implemented technology grants about additional
redeployment that the agencies expected to achieve when all MORE-funded
technology was operational. We added these expected redeployment to the
agencies' current redeployment to project future redeployment from technology
grants.

Interviewers also questioned respondents about current and future retention of
MORE-funded civilians. Employing response categories like those discussed
earlier for hiring questions (none, less than half, half, more than half, all),
interviewers first asked how many of the agency's currently funded civilian
positions were "on the agency's base budget." Interviewers then asked
respondents to estimate how many of the civilians not on the base budget would
be part of the agency base budget in the next fiscal year. Using the same
approximation methods discussed in the hiring analyses, we used the preceding
questions to estimate the number of civilians who were either on the base
budget or expected to be on the base budget in the future. For each agency, we
then multiplied the number of civilian FTEs ever awarded to the agency by the
ratio of "on budget" civilians to total civilians ever awarded to the agency to
estimate future redeployment from civilian grants.[36]

After calculating each agency's total expected redeployment, we estimated the
ratio of the mean number of expected FTEs to the mean number of awarded
FTEs. Our initial estimates are presented in the first two rows of table 5-10.
The results suggest that small and large MORE grantees will eventually achieve
permanent redeployment of approximately 70 percent of their awarded FTEs.
However, there is substantial sampling variation in these estimates, due in part
to sample attrition, and the confidence intervals suggest the overall
redeployment ratio may be as low as 50 percent or as high as 94 percent.[37]

We attempted to refine this analysis further by examining only those agencies
that had some experience implementing MORE grants at the time of the survey.
We took this step because a number of agencies estimating future FTEs had not
yet fully implemented any technology and/or hired any civilians. Results
presented in chapter 4 suggest that, on average, grantees, particularly those
receiving technology grants, tended to adjust their anticipated redeployment
downward based on implementation experience.[38] We could not conduct this
type of inquiry, however, for small agencies because the remaining sample of
small agencies with implementation experience had a distribution of awarded
technology and civilian FTEs that was not representative of the universe of FTEs
awarded to small agencies.[39]

The results for large MORE grantees with implementation experience are
presented in the last row of table 5-10. Although the sample size for this
investigation was quite small, the confidence intervals improved relative to the
analysis with all large agencies. The redeployment estimates also became more
modest. Experienced agencies anticipated that their full redeployment would
amount to 58 percent of their awarded FTEs, within a 95-percent confidence
range of 43 percent to 73 percent. This implies that the 16,184 FTEs awarded
to large agencies by June 1998 will result in a permanent redeployment of
9,381 FTEs within a likely range of 6,960 to 11,801 FTEs.

Although it is not clear that these refined redeployment estimates can be
generalized to small agencies, the similarity of the full sample ratio estimates for
small and large agencies in the first two rows of table 5-10 suggests that
redeployment ratios are probably similar for the two groups. Accordingly, the
redeployment estimates provided by large operational agencies may serve as a
reasonable benchmark for future redeployment by small MORE grantees.
Extrapolations (not shown in table 5-10) of the refined estimates to all MORE
grantees suggest that the 22,467 FTEs awarded by the COPS Office as of
June 1998 will result in the eventual permanent redeployment of about 13,005
FTEs, within a likely range of 9,649 to 16,360 FTEs.

Projected FTE redeployment from MORE grants awarded through May 1999

As noted earlier, it was announced in May 1999 that the COPS Office had
reached the milestone of funding 100,000 officers and officer equivalents. Of
the total, approximately 39,600 FTEs had been awarded through MORE
grants. In this section, we provide preliminary projections of the actual FTE
redeployment that will be achieved with all of these MORE-funded resources.

Figure 5-2 presents projections of MORE redeployment for the years 1996
through 2002. These projections are based on the assumption that each yearly
cohort of MORE grantees achieve and redeploy their full projection of
awarded FTEs within 3 years. The 3-year time frame is a rough estimate of
implementation time based on Wave 3 survey results indicating that grantees
expected to reach full implementation of all technology and civilian grants by
June 2000 (see chapter 4). Because approximately 97 percent of the FTEs
awarded by the time of the Wave 3 survey (June 1998) were awarded prior to
1998, it seems reasonable to assume that most of the agencies reaching full
implementation in the year 2000 will deploy FTEs awarded in 1997 or earlier.
This suggests a maximum time frame of approximately 3 years for full
implementation. Based on chapter 4 analyses of actual and expected dates for
implementation, we also assumed implementation and deployment occur evenly
over this 3-year period. These assumptions yielded projections consistent with
our Wave 3 estimate of MORE redeployment achieved as of June 1998, thus
lending some support to their validity.[40]

Each bar in figure 5-2 has a lower portion that reflects a worst case estimate of
redeployment and an upper edge that reflects a best case estimate. The worst
case estimates are based on the expectation that maximum achievable
redeployment is approximately 60 percent of awarded FTEs (the 58-percent
figure in the bottom row of table 5-10 was rounded to 60 percent for ease of
calculation). Under this scenario, we assumed that 20 percent of FTEs
awarded in year t are redeployed in year t+1, 40 percent are redeployed by
year t+2, and the maximum redeployment of 60 percent is reached in year t+3.

The best case redeployment projections assume that full redeployment reaches
approximately 72 percent of awarded FTEs (see the first two rows of table 5-
10). Accordingly, these projections assume that 24 percent of FTEs awarded
in year t are redeployed in year t+1, 48 percent are redeployed by year t+2,
and a full redeployment of 72 percent is reached in year t+3. 

Under these assumptions, we project that the 6,400 FTEs redeployed by the
summer of 1998 grew to between roughly 9,100 and 10,900 FTEs by the end
of 1998. Looking ahead, the projections suggest that MORE grantees will
redeploy between 23,800 FTEs and 28,500 FTEs by the year 2002. As with
the hiring projections, these MORE projections should be qualified by noting
they are contingent on the assumption that the implementation patterns
observed for MORE grants awarded through June 1998 will continue for
subsequent MORE grants. Yet, Wave 3 estimates of final redeployment levels
may not generalize to later MORE grants. As discussed earlier in this chapter
and in chapter 4, the COPS Office often adjusts awarded FTEs downward from
applicants' initial projections to reflect the minimum FTEs necessary to make
the grant as cost effective as a hiring grant (generally, one FTE for every
$25,000 awarded). We have learned from COPS Office staff, however, that
this was not always done for 1995 grants. Consequently, the ratio of
redeployed to awarded FTEs achieved after full implementation may be lower
for early MORE grants. This potential bias is mitigated by the fact that our
survey estimates are based on all awards made through June 1998.
Nonetheless, full redeployment from post-June 1998 MORE grants could be
higher than 60 to 72 percent of awarded FTEs, in which case our projections
will understate future MORE redeployment. It is also worth emphasizing again
that the survey estimates of future productivity increases (i.e., full FTE
redeployment) were subject to wide variation. Hence, final redeployment levels
for all MORE grants may differ notably (upward or downward) from the range
used for these projections.

Projecting the Course of the First 100,000 Officers Awarded Through COPS

In this section, we combine the models of hiring and retention and MORE
redeployment developed in the previous sections to project the course of all
officers and officer equivalents (referred to collectively in this section as FTEs)
awarded by the COPS Office through May 12, 1999--i.e., the first 100,000
FTEs awarded through the COPS program.

Figure 5-3 combines the projections for hiring and MORE grants to estimate
total FTEs added to the Nation's police agencies by year for the period 1995
through 2003. The estimates reflecting both minimum officer retention estimates
and minimum redeployment estimates (shown in the bottom portion of each bar)
imply that FTEs will peak at approximately 69,000 in the year 2001 before
declining to a permanent level of 62,700 FTEs by the year 2003. Projections
based on estimates of maximum officer retention and redeployment (shown
above the upper portion of each bar) suggest that FTEs produced by COPS
grants will reach a high of 84,600 FTEs by the year 2001, after which FTEs
retained will decline slightly to 83,900 by the year 2003. Based on currently
available data, therefore, we estimate that the first 100,000 FTEs awarded by
the Federal Government will produce a permanent net increase between 62,700
and 83,900 FTEs. In other words, every 100 FTEs awarded will result in a
permanent increase of between roughly 63 and 84 FTEs.

It is also worth noting, however, that 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 pessimistic 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. To illustrate, we estimate
that COPS awards made through May 1999 will result in the temporary or
permanent hiring of 60,900 officers and the redeployment of between 23,800
and 28,500 FTEs, thereby adding between 84,700 and 89,400 FTEs to the
Nation's police agencies on at least a temporary basis. Due to the pace of
implementation and nonretention of officers, however, there will not be a single
year during which all of these FTEs are available for service. This difference will
be relatively small if our best case projections of officer retention and
redeployment are accurate; that scenario predicts a peak increase of 84,600
FTEs and an indefinite increase of 83,900 FTEs. Our worst case projections, in
contrast, predict peak and permanent effects of 69,000 and 62,700,
respectively. Under a worst case scenario, therefore, the permanent effect of
COPS would be equivalent to only 74 percent of the FTEs who were available
for service at some point during this period.[41] 

Finally, the COPS Office has continued to award FTEs since May 1999, and,
as of this writing, has received additional funding for the year 2000. If the
COPS Office continues to award hiring and MORE funds in roughly the same
proportions and our best case retention and redeployment models are correct,
then the COPS Office may eventually reach the milestone of putting 100,000
FTEs on the street indefinitely by awarding as few as 19,000 post-May 1999
FTEs. If our worst case retention and redeployment projections are more
accurate, then creating a permanent increase of 100,000 FTEs may require an
additional 59,000 FTEs awarded (again, assuming that hiring and MORE
awards continue in the same proportions).42 We plan to revise these estimates
later this year using data collected in Wave 4 of the national survey, which
includes a special focus on police hiring and retention practices.

Notes

1. Our counts of awarded officers omit award withdrawals.

2. As explained in chapter 4, when asked about their retention plans for
COPS-funded officers, a number of agencies provided indications of possible
nonretention by agreeing with at least one of a series of statements that defined
nonretention, retention of persons not levels, or supplanting. We computed best
case retention estimates by assuming that each of these agencies will lose at
least some but less than half its COPS-funded positions, which we
operationalized as 25-percent attrition. We computed worst case retention
estimates by assuming such agencies will lose all of their COPS-funded new
positions.

3. Among small-hiring grantees surveyed at Wave 1, 94 percent of both
municipal/county agencies and other types of agencies reported having hired
their officers. Among large-hiring grantees surveyed at Wave 1, 95 percent of
the municipal/county agencies and 89 percent of the other types of agencies
reported having hired their officers. This difference was not statistically
significant. Further, nearly identical percentages of the large municipal/county
grantees and the other large grantees reported that their COPS officers were on
the street (84 percent for the former group and 86 percent for the latter group).

4. As discussed in the methodological appendix, the full large agency sample
was drawn from several strata (nongrantees, AHEAD grantees, UHP grantees,
and MORE grantees). The large agency hiring analyses were conducted using
all sampled large agencies, and the data were weighted to reflect the different
selection probabilities of agencies in the different strata (see the methodological
appendix). Weighting was not necessary for the small-agency sample.

5. The number of officers awarded to each agency was determined from the
COPS Office records. In some cases, however, the number of officers
awarded to an agency could have changed during the time that elapsed
between the construction of the survey instrument and the fielding of the survey.
If, therefore, a respondent agreed that the agency had one or more COPS
hiring grants but disagreed with the total number of funded officers known to
the interviewer, then the number of officers funded was set to the respondent's
report of the number of officers funded.

6. We corrected for withdrawals recorded in COPS Office data and assumed
that survey respondents omitted withdrawals from their reference point in
answering the hiring questions.

7. For these and all other hiring estimates presented in this chapter, agencies
without COPS hiring grants were given zeros for all COPS officer measures.

8. Approximately 7 percent of the officers awarded to small agencies were
part-time officers. Part-time officers accounted for less than 1 percent of the
officers awarded to large agencies.

9. To illustrate, all surveyed agencies were asked to provide the exact number
of officers lost in 1996 and 1997. Large agencies receiving COPS hiring grants
were awarded 31 officers on average over the course of 1994 through 1997.
However, these same inter-viewees reported losing an average of 42 officers
during just 1996 and 1997. Wave 3 small agencies with COPS hiring grants
were awarded an average of almost four officers during 1994-97 and lost an
average of four officers during 1996 and 1997 combined. Although COPS
grantees were expected to use COPS funds to create new positions rather than
fill preexisting positions, officer losses from existing actual sworn forces could at
least temporarily offset the addition of new COPS officers. (Slightly more than 3
percent of the weighted sample of large agencies with COPS grants did not
report agency losses for 1996 and 1997. Less than 1 percent of the small
agencies had missing responses.)

10. To illustrate this point, Wave 3 large COPS grantees had a 19-percent
increase in their full-time sworn staff from 1993 to 1997 (average increase = 48
officers), and Wave 3 small agencies with COPS grants had a 23-percent
increase in full-time sworn staff during the same period (average increase = 4
officers). At the same time, however, Wave 3 large agencies without COPS
grants grew 32 percent (average increase = 27 officers), and Wave 3 small
agencies without COPS grants expanded by 13 percent (average increase of
less than 1 officer). (The difference in growth between large COPS and large
non-COPS agencies was not statistically significant. However, the growth in
small COPS agencies was significantly greater than that in small nongrantees.)
These crude change comparisons are illustrative but not definitive because they
do not control for factors other than COPS hiring grants, which may have
influenced police growth during this time. Nonetheless, they show that
non-COPS agencies also grew during this time, thereby reinforcing the point that
some of the growth in COPS-funded agencies may have occurred in the
absence of COPS hiring grants.

11. There are currently two primary agency-level sources for data on police
employment in the United States: the UCR and the Law Enforcement Directory
Survey compiled by the Bureau of Justice Statistics and the Census Bureau
every 6 years. There is some further discussion of these sources in the
methodological appendix.

12. We used only these agencies to control for changes in the number of police
resulting from the creation of new agencies, the dismantling of old agencies, and
nonreporting by law enforcement agencies.

13. The models presented here assume homoskedastic error terms with no
autocorrelation of error terms over time. Though we intend to examine these
issues more carefully in future analyses, estimated regression coefficients remain
unbiased and consistent when either of these conditions is not satisfied (Kmenta
1986).

14. The effects of population on social phenomena are often controlled by
expressing all continuous variables as rates per population rather than by adding
population as a control variable. We experimented with models in which the
population change variable was removed and all continuous variables (e.g., the
police and crime variables) were expressed as population rates. The COPS
officers awarded rate variable was insignificant in these models. We believe,
however, that the impact of COPS on the ratio of police officers to population
is a separate theoretical issue from the impact of COPS on the actual number of
police across the country.

15. Numerous studies have confirmed a relationship between regions of the
United States and a number of variables relating to government structure,
political culture, employee bargaining organizations, and police agency style.

16. Data for State police agencies are typically reported for subunits (e.g., by
barrack), and there are no estimates of the populations served by these 
subunits. 

17. Our approach is similar to that known as the least squares with dummy
variables (LSDV) approach (e.g., see Sayrs 1989). Typically, this approach
involves the use of dummy variables for each time period and each
cross-sectional unit. The cross-sectional indicator variables capture stable
differences between the cross-sections over time. We did not utilize
cross-sectional indicator variables due to the extremely large number of
agencies used in this analysis. However, our use of other indicator variables
representing agency type, region, and level of urbanization is intended to
capture variance unique to theoretically meaningful groups of agencies (see
Sayrs 1989, p. 25) and should thus control for stable differences among these
groups of agencies.

18. The yearly indicator variables suggest that for reasons unrelated to COPS
grants, police staffing grew more during 1994 and 1995 than in other years.
However, removing the yearly indicators from the models had virtually no effect
on the estimated net effect of COPS awards.

19. We also experimented with a number of other model specifications. In
some specifications, we included a control variable for the number of officers in
the agency at t-1, based on the notion that the number of officers in the agency
at t-1 may have a bounding effect on the amount by which staffing levels are
likely to change (i.e., larger agencies are likely to have larger year-to-year
changes than are smaller agencies). More generally, the incorporation of a
lagged Y into a model of change is an important consideration that can have
substantial effects on the results (e.g., see Allison 1990). However, we found
that the incorporation of the lagged Y had little impact on our COPS-awarded
effect. We also specified models with all continuous variables in levels (as
opposed to changes). The levels models tended to suffer from high collinearity
among some variables. Further, the national police staffing figures presented in
table 5-3 suggest (particularly when examined graphically) that police staffing
has been trending upward over the study period and is thus nonstationary.
Differencing the variables serves to detrend the staffing level variable.

20. Due to the yearly aggregation of the data, there may be some imprecision in
the lag structure of the COPS-award effect. For example, some officers
obligated at year t may be hired during year t. COPS officers awarded at year t
might also affect changes in staffing beyond year t+1, a possibility that was
difficult for us to investigate with so few post-COPS years in the database. At
any rate, these factors may cause some bias (most likely a downward bias) in
our COPS impact estimate.

21. If the loss of five officers reduced agency B below its budgeted level, it
would normally have to replace them with local funds before receiving a COPS
grant for additional officers to avoid supplanting.

22. Cross-hires for each agency were estimated to be zero unless the agency
provided an affirmative indication of recruitment from other agencies (i.e.,
agencies that provided don't know responses were treated as having zero
cross-hires). The cross-hiring questions utilized the same response categories
discussed earlier (all, more than half but not all, half, etc.). If, for example, an
agency indicated that more than half but not all of its COPS-funded officers
were former sworn officers and that half of these officers were recruited from
another agency, then the agency's estimated cross-hires would be the product
of the number of awarded officers multiplied by 0.75 multiplied by 0.5.

23. As noted in chapter 4, a substantial percentage of hiring grantees have
reported officer turnover in some of their COPS-funded positions. For this
analysis, however, the retention of COPS-funded positions is more important
than the tenure of individual officers filling those positions. COPS positions were
considered to have been retained unless the grantee indicated the original COPS
officers were no longer with the agency, had not been replaced, and were not
going to be replaced. Only a very small fraction of agencies indicated they had
lost officers who had not been and would not be replaced.

24. We made the working assumption that officers would be retained unless the
agency offered a definite indication of nonretention or supplanting. In other
words, we assumed that agencies whose respondents answered don't know to
retention items would retain their officers unless they gave nonre-tention
responses on other items. This seems to be a reasonable assumption in light of
the strong impact that organizational inertia has on police staffing; that is, prior
staffing is a very strong predictor of future staffing (Nalla, Lynch, and Leiber
1997). 

25. These numbers are based on respondents' agreement with the following
statement: "We expect to be able to retain all the [COPS] positions for at least
awhile after the grant expires, but we don't know yet about the long term."

26. We assume indefinite retention because our survey data were collected
before the COPS Office announcement that 1 year of postgrant retention was
sufficient to comply with the retention requirement.

27. To estimate officers and FTEs awarded through May 1999, we utilized the
most recent COPS Office databases available to us (October 1998 for hiring
grants and June 1998 for MORE grants) and supplemented these data with
information from the COPS Office press releases available on the COPS Office
Web site (www.usdoj.gov/cops/).

28. In addition, a preliminary analysis of current redeployment comparing large
1995 MORE grantees to the full Wave 3 large-agency sample (which forms a
representative sample of all large municipal and county agencies, including early
and later MORE grantees) suggested that results would change little with a
sample chosen from all MORE grantees.

29. Interviewers asked respondents to provide specific numbers of FTEs
redeployed. Agencies having multiple technology grants and/or multiple civilian
grants were not asked to provide separate time savings estimates for each
grant. Instead, interviewers asked respondents to provide one overall estimate
of time savings from the respondents' technology grants and/or one overall
estimate of time savings from the respondents' civilian grants. Some
respondents provided estimates of hours saved rather than FTEs saved. In
these cases, the hourly estimates were converted into FTEs. Any agency with
an expired civilian grant(s) was given a zero for current time savings if the
original civilian hires were no longer with the agency and had not been
replaced.

30. To provide a rough assessment of this issue, we calculated the ratio of
technology FTE redeployment to technology FTEs awarded for each agency
(which both had operational technology) and provided an estimate of time
savings (including reports of zero time savings) from technology. Similarly, we
computed the ratio of civilian FTE redeployment to civilian FTEs currently
funded for each agency that both had civilians and provided an estimate of time
savings (including reports of zero time savings) from civilians. We divided the
agencies into groups based upon whether they had time savings measurement
systems and contrasted the ratios of redeployed to awarded FTEs between the
groups.

The sample sizes for these comparisons were too small for rigorous analysis,
ranging from 36 to 66 in different comparisons. Nonetheless, the comparisons
did not show consistent differences between agencies with and without
measurement systems. Large agencies with technology grants and no
measurement systems tended to report higher time savings ratios than did large
technology grantees with measurement systems. In contrast, small technology
grantees without measurement systems tended to report smaller time savings
ratios than did small technology grantees with measurement systems. Civilian
grantees without measurement systems tended to report time savings ratios that
were roughly equal to or less than those reported by agencies with
measurement systems (in the case of large civilian grantees, agencies without
measurement systems reported significantly lower time savings ratios).

An additional caveat to these comparisons, however, is they could be
confounded by implementation progress. To illustrate, an agency with one
operational technology grant and another nonoperational grant would likely
have a lower redeployment ratio than an agency with just one operational
technology grant, all other things being equal. Another potentially confounding
factor is the mix of different technology and civilian types among grantees. That
is, certain types of technologies and civilian workers may tend to produce FTEs
more efficiently.

31. Based on preliminary analyses, we excluded four small agencies that had
unusually high values of FTEs awarded or redeployed that caused the
confidence intervals to be extremely wide. Preliminary analyses also revealed a
substantial fraction of cases in which respondents either did not agree with the
COPS Office information about their agencies' MORE grants (i.e., whether the
agency had any MORE grants and whether the agency had technology and/or
civilian grants in particular) or could not estimate the amount of time their
agencies were saving. Our initial strategy was to drop these agencies from
analysis. However, this resulted in the loss of more than 20 percent of the cases
in both the large-and small-agency samples. To avoid losing such a high fraction
of cases, we employed the following approach.

First, we assumed that the COPS Office data represented the most accurate
measure of agency grants. If, for example, an agency had a civilian grant for
three FTEs according to the COPS Office records but had no MORE grant
according to the respondent, then we assumed that the agency had three FTEs
awarded and zero FTEs redeployed. (Cases involving discrepancies between
the COPS Office records and respondent reports were examined closely for
the Wave 1 survey. Most commonly, these discrepancies involved
circumstances in which respondents were not aware of recently awarded
grants, agencies had not yet accepted grants, or agencies had withdrawn from
the program between the time we received the COPS Office data and the
interviews were conducted. Project staff found no cases where recording errors
caused the discrepancies.)

Second, we assumed that each agency had not redeployed any FTEs unless the
respondent gave an affirmative indication that his/her agency was saving time
(i.e., we gave an agency zero redeployment if the respondent did not know
whether the agency was saving time). Finally, as noted in the main text, we
estimated redeployment for agencies whose respondents indicated that the
agency was saving an unknown amount of time by multiplying the agencies'
awarded FTEs by the average ratio of redeployed to awarded FTEs provided
by those agencies that reported specific time savings. We did these calculations
separately for technology and civilian grants. Although the overall approach
outlined here enabled us to retain many more cases, we found that our
estimates and confidence intervals were quite similar with both the high- and
low-attrition methods.

32. A number of respondents provided redeployment estimates greater than
their awarded FTEs. In some cases, the redeployment values were substantially
greater than the awarded FTEs in relative or absolute terms. We did not make
any adjustments for these cases because it is possible for agencies to achieve
more redeployment than expected, especially given our use of the COPS Office
minimum FTE awarded value. Further, making adjustments for these cases may
introduce bias into the estimates because it is likely that other respondents
underestimated their FTE redeployment (for example, agencies were assumed
to have zero redeployment if respondents were not aware of their agencies'
MORE grants). Our approach assumes that the potential overestimates and
underestimates of redeployment offset one another.

33. As noted earlier in this report, civilian grants are 1-year grants that can be
renewed for a second and third year. Our counts of FTEs awarded are
adjusted so that renewals of civilian grants are not counted as new FTEs. We
feel this is appropriate, given the renewal awards do not result in any new
redeployment.

34. This calculation is based on FTEs awarded through civilian and technology
grants. Overtime grants were excluded from analysis.

35. In preliminary analyses, we attempted to create separate estimates for
redeployment from civilian and technology grants. Those analyses tended to
produce wide confidence intervals and also left uncertainty as to whether more
FTEs were being generated by technology or civilian grants. However, the
analyses also suggested that the ratio of redeployed FTEs to awarded FTEs
was higher for civilian grants.

36. Civilian FTEs are often counted on a one-for-one basis. That is, each
civilian awarded is considered to count for one FTE. However, the COPS
Office estimates of awarded FTEs used for these analyses count some civilians
on a less than one-for-one basis. In some of these cases, the civilians may be
part-time workers. In other cases, the less than one-to-one ratio may reflect the
minimum FTEs that the COPS Office expects the grantee to redeploy.
Therefore, we did not use the estimated number of "on budget" (i.e., retained)
civilians as a direct estimate of "on budget" FTEs. Our method of estimating
retained civilian FTEs assumes that the ratio of retained civilians to all civilians
ever awarded to each agency is proportional to the true ratio of retained civilian
FTEs to civilian FTEs ever awarded. Note, however, that this method constrains
retained FTEs to be less than or equal to awarded FTEs. If the retained civilians
produce more FTEs than anticipated by the COPS Office, this method may
result in some underestimation of future civilian FTEs.

37. We excluded agencies whose respondents did not agree with the COPS
Office information about their agencies' MORE grants (i.e., whether the agency
had any MORE grants and whether the agency had technology and/or civilian
grants in particular) or could not provide estimates of current or future time
savings.

38. A caveat to this strategy is the results may be confounded somewhat by
differential progress in the implementation of different types of technology and
civilian positions. In other words, technologies and civilian positions which take
longer to implement may prove to be more or less efficient than those
implemented more quickly. If this bias exists, it will be mitigated to some degree
by the fact that the Wave 3 survey covered MORE grants awarded over the
course of more than 3 years.

39. The COPS Office records indicate 78 percent of FTEs awarded to small
agencies as of June 1998 were associated with technology grants. In contrast,
the sample of Wave 3 small agencies with implementation experience had only
56 percent of their FTEs awarded through technology grants. This discrepancy
is likely due to the greater ease of implementing civilian grants relative to
implementing technology grants.

40. The Wave 3 estimate of overall redeployment achieved by June 1998 falls
between the 1997 and 1998 end-of-year redeployment estimates shown in
figure 5-2.

41. This calculation assumes a permanent addition of 62,700 FTEs and a
temporary addition of 84,700 FTEs.

42. The optimistic projection is based on the assumption that 19,000 additional
FTEs will result in a permanent increase of 19,000 x .84 = 15,960 FTEs.
Added to the optimistic projection of 84,000 permanent FTEs from awards
through May 1999, this brings the tally of permanent FTEs to approximately
100,000. The pessimistic projection is based on the assumption that
approximately 37,000 additional, permanent FTEs will be needed to produce a
permanent FTE increase of 100,000. The pessimistic model projections suggest
this would require approximately 59,000 additional FTEs to be awarded
(59,000 x .63 = 37,170).

References

Allison, P.D. (1990). "Change Scores as Dependent Variables in Regression
Analysis." In Sociological Methodology, Vol. 20, C.C. Clogg (ed.),
Washington, D.C.: American Sociological Association: 93-114.

Kmenta, J. (1986). Elements of Econometrics, 2nd ed., New York: MacMillan
Publishing Company.

Nalla, M.K., M.J. Lynch, and M.J. Leiber (1997). "Determinants of Police
Growth in Phoenix, 1950-1988." Justice Quarterly 14: 115-143.

Sayrs, L.W. (1989). Pooled Time Series Analysis, Newbury Park, CA: Sage
Publications, Inc.

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

Appendix 5-A. Variances and Confidence Intervals for Estimated Ratios and
Proportions

John Marcotte with Christopher Koper

(This appendix contains mathematical formulas that cannot be represented in an
ASCII format.) 

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

6. COPS and the Nature of Policing

Janice A. Roehl, Calvin C. Johnson, Michael E. Buerger, Stephen J. Gaffigan, 

Elizabeth A. Langston, Jeffrey A. Roth

Title I of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994
provided the legislative basis for the creation of the Office of Community
Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office) and authorized grant funds to
increase the number and presence of officers on the street. Explicit in the
authorizing legislation and consistently promoted by the COPS Office was the
message that these grant funds were to facilitate the adoption of community
policing. Exactly how community policing was to be operationalized was not
specified; rather, details were left up to the individual grantee agencies to decide
and state in their grant applications. 

In this chapter, we look at the status and nature of community policing in law
enforcement agencies from two sources of information: (1) surveys conducted
with COPS grantees and nongrantees, in which the community policing tactics
were specified by evaluation staff, and (2) interviews with key personnel and
reviews of departmental materials obtained during site visits to 30 selected
grantees. These two sources provide quantitative assessments by law
enforcement agencies of their adoption or expansion of community policing
tactics over several years and qualitative assessments of what constitutes their
community policing approach. These diverse information sources enabled us
to compare and contrast different agencies' adoption of specific tactics, describe
what community policing is in the eyes of COPS grantees, and examine how
grantees' current views of community policing fit with definitions of key
components of community policing promulgated by leading practitioners and
researchers.

The information presented in this chapter on the status and nature of community
policing in COPS-funded law enforcement agencies dates from 1997-98[1] and
encompasses whether and how the COPS funds have assisted grantees to
move forward in implementing community policing as they define it. Our
information is based on the experiences of law enforcement agencies receiving
COPS money for: (1) hiring more officers and placing them in community
policing positions, placing new officers in patrol to redeploy more experienced
officers to community policing functions (i.e., backfilling), or simply hiring
additional officers to enable all officers to devote more time to community
policing activities; and/or (2) obtaining new technology and/or hiring civilians to
provide more time for sworn officers to spend on community policing.

Our focus in this chapter is primarily programmatic, describing the adoption of
tactics and organizational changes commonly associated with the goals of
community policing and assessing the nature of their implementation. We also
address the philosophy underlying community policing and how different
departmental philosophies, deployment models, and community characteristics
combine to produce substantially different policing strategies labeled as
community policing. Chapter 7 focuses on slightly different questions--how
agency leaders created an organizational climate for community policing
innovations, used COPS funds to facilitate change, and attempted to ensure that
the innovations would be sustained.

Data Sources and Samples

The information presented in this chapter is drawn from two primary sources:
(1) telephone surveys conducted[2] in the fall of 1996 with 267 large local or
county law enforcement agencies funded by COPS in 1995 and a comparison
group of 149 nonfunded large local or county law enforcement agencies[3] and
repeated in 1998 and (2) site visits made to 30 funded agencies by teams of
police practitioners and senior researchers in 1997 and 1998. The survey data
provide quantitative, self-reported information from a large number of grantees,
while the site visit data provide a rich source of more qualitative data from
which to draw deeper insights and useful examples. Throughout the chapter, we
summarize the nature of community policing across the 30 visited sites, use
practices in particular agencies as examples, and link the qualitative, site
visit-based information to the more quantitative survey data and indepth case
study assessments of an additional 10 cities. For detailed information on the 30
sites visited, see the site reports.[4]

The agency survey

As explained in chapter 2, the COPS Office operationalized its concept of
community policing in terms of four objectives: building community partnerships,
adopting problem solving as a policing mode, engaging in prevention, and
increasing organizational support for the three programmatic objectives. We
measured progress toward all four objectives by surveying representative
samples of COPS grantee and nongrantee agencies about their implementation
status for each of 47 policing tactics in 1995 and 1998, then measuring changes
over time in implementation status (see tactics list in appendix 6-A). For the
most part, the tactics were common among agencies implementing one of the
varieties of community policing introduced in chapter 2. Other tactics were
selected because they arose more or less frequently in presentations and
literature on community policing at the time we designed the survey. 

The agencies surveyed by telephone were selected to be representative of the
population of law enforcement agencies in the United States as of April 1996
but were stratified to permit oversampling of grantee agencies and large
agencies. The sample design is explained in the methodological appendix.
Among other questions, respondents (i.e., the chief executive or someone
explicitly designated to speak on his or her behalf) were asked to specify the
pre- and post-1995 implementation status of tactics for pursuing the objectives
of community policing. We asked each agency that reported using a tactic as of
1995 or starting or expanding its use of a tactic between 1995 and 1998 to
describe the role COPS funding played in the use of that tactic: to start or
expand its use, sustain its use through a budget cut, or have no effect. Given our
data collection procedure, the responses should be interpreted as official
agency statements regarding implementation status rather than validated reports
of actual conditions. We used the survey responses to answer five questions:

1. Did the number of agencies using community policing tactics grow between
1995 and 1998? We hypothesized that the forces described in chapter 2, as
well as COPS grants, would encourage agencies to adopt community policing
tactics during that period. We tested that hypothesis by comparing the 1995
and 1998 fractions of agencies nationwide that reported using each tactic.

2. Were early COPS grantees more likely than nongrantees to use community
policing tactics before 1995, when the COPS program began? We
hypothesized that the early COPS grantees would tend to have previously
advanced farther than nongrantees in adopting community policing tactics. This
could reflect greater motivation to pursue community policing support, greater
facility in writing the required community policing plans for COPS grant
applications, or both. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the 1995
fractions of grantees and nongrantees that reported using each tactic.

3. Between 1995 and 1998, did COPS grantees expand their use of
community policing tactics more rapidly than nongrantees? We hypothesized
that COPS grants would encourage agencies to adopt community policing
tactics between 1995 and 1998, by providing a financial incentive to do so, by
providing resources that would make it easier to implement existing local
community policing plans without cutting back other services, or both. We
tested this hypothesis in two ways: first, by comparing the fractions of grantee
and nongrantee agencies that reported using each tactic as of 1998; and
second, by comparing 1995-98 net changes in the fractions of grantee and
nongrantee agencies that reported using each tactic. We tested the statistical
significance of grantee/nongrantee differences using a
"differences-in-differences" model described in appendix 6-B.

4. Did COPS grantees attribute their increased or sustained use of "old" (i.e.,
pre-1995) community policing tactics to their grants? Instead of crediting
COPS grants with all 1995-98 continuation of community policing tactics
adopted before 1995, we computed the fractions of COPS grantees reporting
the grant started or expanded the use of each old tactic, sustained its use
despite budget cuts, or had no effect. 

5. Did COPS grantees attribute their adoption of new community policing
tactics between 1995 and 1998 to their COPS grants? Similarly, instead of
crediting COPS grants with all 1995-98 adoption of new community policing
tactics, we computed the fractions of COPS grantees reporting the grant
started or expanded the use of each "new" tactic it adopted between 1995 and
1998, sustained its use despite budget cuts, or had no effect.

One limitation of this method is that we cannot measure the extent to which
COPS program activities may have accelerated nongrantees' transitions to
community policing indirectly. Such indirect effects could have occurred, for
example, if Community Policing Consortium materials informed skeptical
agencies about implementation successes, regional or State training academies
added or improved community policing modules in their curriculums at the
behest of grantee agencies, or media coverage of COPS-funded community
policing initiatives in some jurisdictions increased public demand for changes in
policing styles elsewhere. We did not believe it was feasible to sort out effects
such as these from other influences on the national conversation about
innovations in policing.

Another limitation of a telephone survey approach is that it cannot provide the
basis for a national picture of the extent to which agencies have embedded
signature tactics of community policing into jurisdictionwide community policing
philosophies or strategies. To explore that question, we relied on 30
programmatic site assessments discussed in this chapter and 10 case studies
that provided the basis for chapter 7. 

Programmatic site assessments

From the grantee survey sample, 30 agencies were selected, in 3 groups, for
the programmatic site assessments that underlie much of this chapter. A pretest
group of four agencies was selected and visited in early 1996 to provide a range
of agency types and jurisdiction sizes. Fifteen "Group A" agencies were selected
from 1995 COPS MORE grantees for visits in early 1997. The Group A sites
were selected as examples of agencies that had made the greatest progress in
implementing a diverse array of technologies, but site teams were asked to
observe their community policing program as well as their technology
implementation. Eleven Group B sites were selected for visits during the summer
of 1997 from among agencies that reported to survey interviewers that (a) they
were implementing many of the surveyed tactics and (b) COPS funds were
instrumental in their implementation. Among agencies that met our selection
criteria, we attempted to achieve diversity of agency type, jurisdiction
size, and geographic distribution. In late 1997 and early 1998, second site visits
were made to 15 sites. Revisit priorities were set primarily on site visitors'
assessments of the importance of technological or community policing initiatives
in process, the project team's awareness of major transitions in agencies since
the first visit, and applicability of lessons to be learned from a second site visit.

The 30 law enforcement agencies visited ranged in size from a handful of sworn
officers to close to 10,000, serving areas from a small Native American Indian
reservation with a population of 150 to the city of Los Angeles, population 3.6
million. These law enforcement agencies, grouped by the size of the population
they serve, are listed in table 6-1.

As shown, the majority of agencies visited are local police departments serving
jurisdictions with populations between 50,000 and 150,000. The others include
five large city police departments, five sheriff's departments serving counties,
and three law enforcement agencies serving atypical jurisdictions. Although only
Mascoutah, Illinois, and the Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Police technically fit the
COPS FAST jurisdictional limit of less than 50,000 population, both Oak
Park, Illinois, and Pocatello, Idaho, come very close. Within several of the
counties (San Bernardino, for example), the sheriff's department provides
contractual law enforcement services for small incorporated cities, some of
which have received COPS FAST grants. As a group, the agencies visited
reflect the range of law enforcement agencies in the United States but
underrepresent agencies serving jurisdictions of less than 50,000 population,
which constitute the majority of law enforcement agencies in the United States.
This underrepresentation reflects our Group B priority on agencies with
broad-gauge community policing programs, as measured by our tactics list.

Defining Community Policing

To measure progress toward the goals of having more officers dedicated to
community policing and giving officers more time to devote to community
policing, we must address the difficult problem of developing yardsticks for
community policing both nationally and locally. Just what are officers doing
when they are "doing community policing?"

In the past 15 years, community policing has become the generally accepted
standard for policing in the United States (Eck and Rosenbaum, 1994). Yet, as
explained in chapter 2, what community policing encompasses remains a matter
of debate (see, for example, Goldstein, 1994; Ryan, 1994a), and the nature of
activities defined as part of community policing continues to change. The broad
general principles set out by Goldstein (1979) and Trojanowicz and Bucqueroux
(1989), however, are accepted by most practitioners as the basic building
blocks of community policing (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 1994; Roberg,
1994). These two dominant characteristics are (1) an emphasis on problem
solving, also known as problem-oriented policing (Goldstein, 1990; Eck and
Spelman, 1987), and (2) community involvement and the building of partnerships
among police, citizens, city agencies, and others, which first gained prominence
through the "fear of crime" studies (Pate et al., 1986).

Community policing has been called "a philosophy not a program" so many
times that the original reference has been lost. Trojanowicz, Kappeler, Gaines,
and Bucqueroux (1998) call it "both a philosophy and organizational strategy"
(p. xi)--a philosophy that allows the police and residents to work together in
new ways to solve problems and an organizational strategy encompassing
decentralization and individual autonomy that supports the philosophy. Skogan
and Hartnett (1997) concur that community policing is "not something one can
easily characterize" and "a process rather than a product" (p. 5). They identify
its four general principles as (1) organizational decentralization and patrol
reorientation to facilitate communication between the police and public, (2) a
commitment to broadly focused, problem-oriented policing, (3) responsiveness
to the public in setting priorities and developing tactics, and (4) a commitment
to helping neighborhoods solve problems on their own.

The point we are belaboring here is that community policing remains a
philosophy, an approach, not a clearly defined program or set of strategies a
department must implement to say it does community policing. Community
policing should look different from city to city and within a city, from
neighborhood to neighborhood, as police respond to local needs and desires.

A broad and diverse array of strategies is described as community policing by
local law enforcement agencies. Uniform measurements and standards were
needed to fulfill the purpose of this chapter: assessing the impact of COPS on
the style and character of American policing. To provide such a standard, we
began with the literature briefly alluded to above and the four Title I community
policing objectives discussed in chapter 2: (1) partnership building, (2) problem
solving, (3) prevention, and (4) organizational change in support of the
programmatic objectives. The four objectives were operationalized in the
telephone survey through lists of selected tactics appropriate to each objective.
Most of these were selected from tactics mentioned in chapter 2 as having been
associated with one of the predecessors to community policing; others were
added because they arose commonly in literature and discussions of community
policing around the time the survey instrument was designed.

Although the survey-based measures have advantages for analyzing national
patterns and trends in reported implementation status, these measures are
subject to well-known validation questions. Moreover, they provide no
indication of how any given tactic may be adapted to local conditions. Therefore,
we also measured implementation status using a semistructured case study
approach (Baltzell, 1980).

Onsite interviews were guided by qualitative questions about selected tactics,
referred to as the "ground truth inventory" (for example, where citizen advisory
councils are included under building partnerships, ground truth questions
explore who is on the council, how they are selected, how often they meet, who
dominates decisionmaking, the topics discussed and how, the role of police,
etc.). Through this process, the COPS grantees themselves defined what
community policing meant to their agency. Their views indicated just how
generously proportioned the community policing umbrella is, as it ranges from
primary prevention efforts such as D.A.R.E.[Registered trademark] to intense
crackdowns in target areas.

Thus, our assessment of how the COPS funds have influenced community
policing is based on both individual agency definitions of community policing
and a common scheme based on the COPS objectives, which enables
comparisons to be made within agencies over time and across categories of
agencies in the evaluation samples.

Beginning community policing

The impact of the COPS funds on community policing in local law enforcement
agencies is determined by many factors. One of them, certainly, is the agency's
history of community policing and the current status of its implementation. Three
categories have been used to group the agencies visited, based on their starting
times for agency implementation of community policing:

--The "early pioneers" began implementing community policing principles
between 1985 and 1989, coinciding with the first practice and study of
problem-oriented policing and problem solving (Goldstein, 1979; Eck and
Spelman, 1987) and the "fear of crime" studies that were the harbingers of
community policing (Skolnick and Bayley, 1986; Pate et al., 1986).

--The "mainstreamers" began community policing in 1990-94, as community
policing began to receive substantial national attention and law enforcement
agencies across the Nation adopted problem solving and other community
policing principles, accompanied by much experimentation, research, and
critical review (Rosenbaum, 1994; Greene and Mastrofski, 1988).

--The "latecomers" began their experiments in community policing in 1995 or
later, around the start of the COPS program.

As shown in table 6-2, a handful of the agencies visited reported they had
started community policing prior to 1990. Several of them are special forces
(the Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Police and Oregon State Police) and a sheriff's
department that reported "we've always done community policing." The cities of
Fort Worth and San Diego are counted among the early pioneers. San Diego is
well known for its early, successful experiments in problem-oriented policing.
Fort Worth began neighborhood policing in the mid- to late-1980s, in the form
of regular meetings with citizens, the formation of citizen advisory committees,
and territorial policing (rather than temporal), with supervisors given autonomy to
work in concert with the local community as well as full responsibility for both
patrol and investigative functions.

Those who say "we've always done community policing" stress their long-term
emphasis on community service and an indepth knowledge of the areas served.
The Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Police, for example, believes its approach is 
"inherently" community policing because its service area is so small. More than a
few sheriffs say community policing has always been their agency's mode of
operation, since (a) sheriffs are elected, and thus they see themselves and their
philosophies as intrinsically directed by the community; (b) deputies generally
live in the county (many even grew up there), and although distances are vast,
they know their territory and many residents well; (c) distances are vast and their
backups may be 20-30 minutes away, so deputies are more apt to approach
situations with tact and conversation rather than bravado and force; and (d) the
problems their communities face tend to be minor crime and quality-of-life issues
rather than "big city" crime.

More than half of the law enforcement agencies visited may be called
mainstreamers because they reported they implemented community policing in
the early 1990s. During these years, community policing was heralded as the
latest in a long tradition of police reform, promoted by the U.S. Department of
Justice, its State-level counterparts, and police executive associations.

A small number of agencies, most of them mainstreamers, trace the roots of
community policing in their departments back to various experiments and
policies in the 1970s and 1980s--even the 1960s. Flint, Michigan, for example,
was the site of the original foot patrol experiments (Trojanowicz, 1982). The
Los Angeles Police Department first established its basic beat structure and the
principles of beat integrity and territorial imperative in the 1960s. Fort Worth's
police department and Fresno County sheriff's department also point to
long-established geo-based deployment practices that reportedly paved the way
for community policing. While the Nashville Police Department is in an early
stage of transition to community policing, it also points to its walk-and-talk
patrols in the 1970s as evidence of early community policing. Some of these
early efforts disappeared in the wake of the arrival of crack cocaine in the
mid-1980s or simply withered on the vine as new practices and local needs
arose. Others have left legacies, particularly the geo- or area-based deployment
schemes, that embrace community policing strategies.

A half dozen of the agencies visited reported that community policing began
with their first COPS award, in contrast to those from the "we've always done
community policing" school and the mainstreamers. These "latecomers" include
three sheriff's departments, a school district police department that acquired a
new chief almost simultaneously with its first COPS MORE grant, and the Las
Vegas Metropolitan Police Department, which created its first Problem-Solving
Unit shortly after receiving its first COPS grant. In most of these agencies, the
COPS grants were used to form a specialized community policing unit or to
deploy officers dedicated to community policing.

Impetus behind community policing in local agencies

The catalyst for community policing may be internal or external. Most law
enforcement agencies adopt community policing principles due to internal
desires, led by the chief or other command staff, to improve policing service.
Major changes in the nature of community policing also often coincide with the
placement of a new chief executive in an agency. Los Angeles Police
Department (LAPD) is an excellent example of chief-driven change; LAPD
employed a split-force style of community policing under Chief Willie Williams,
with senior patrol officers (known as senior lead officers) serving as the main
community police officers in all beats. Chief Bernard Parks, within a few
months of his appointment, returned the senior lead officers to patrol as field
training officers and promulgated a generalist form of community policing. Other
examples of fairly dramatic changes in policing style due to turnover at the top
include the Milwaukee Police Department, where a new chief turned the
agency away from partnership building and toward zero tolerance, and the
Lakeland, Florida, Police Department, where the new chief did just the
opposite.

Several agencies among those visited, however, adopted community policing
concepts and tactics due to external political forces. In several cities, crisis was
the impetus for community policing. In Los Angeles, for example, the catalyst
was the Rodney King beating and the civil disorders following the acquittals of
four officers. More mundane external pressure was exerted by the city council
in Oakland, which passed a resolution making community policing the operating
philosophy of the Oakland Police Department and recruited a police chief to
make it happen. In Oak Park, as well, the impetus for community policing
emanated from the city council. In Buffalo, a new mayor and police
commissioner led the movement for police reform. In other cities, community
policing resulted from more generalized accusations of poor police service or
from very strained police-community relations, particularly with minority
communities.

Several departments appear to have changed direction away from particular
forms of community policing of the recent past. In Maricopa County (Arizona),
for example, the sheriff's department reports it moved beyond what it called its
SARA (Scanning, Analysis, Response, and Assessment) phase in 1991-92.
Headed by "America's toughest sheriff," known for his use of chain gangs and
pink underwear for unruly prisoners, the department follows the generalist form
of community policing said to be inherent to sheriffs. In Newark, neighborhood
policing efforts of the early 1990s appear to be on the wane at a time when
New York's accountability approach and a new emphasis on patrol are being
implemented in an effort to improve response time and return to a basic level of
service. In Milwaukee, community policing that emphasized partnerships with
diverse segments of the community gave way to zero tolerance policies,
championed by a new chief who took over in the wake of the controversy over
police handling of the Jeffrey Dahmer case.

Structures for delivering community police services

Several deployment models for structuring community policing are useful for
looking at how COPS-funded agencies have implemented their community
policing efforts (International Association of Chiefs of Police, 1997). These
models are:

1. The single officer--found primarily in small law enforcement agencies. This
model refers literally to having one dedicated community police officer.

2. The specialized unit--a model in which two or more police officers are
dedicated to jurisdictionwide community policing and problem solving and
usually do not answer calls for service.

3. Split force--in this model, a community police officer is assigned to each area
serviced by one patrol unit (i.e., a beat, or perhaps called a precinct, sector,
zone, or district). Community police officers are typically charged with
developing partnerships and engaging in problem solving with the community and
are separate from patrol officers assigned to handle radio calls.

4. Temporal model--in this model, community police officers are assigned to
work the times when their services are needed most. They are not separated
from the patrol function and therefore answer calls for service while remaining
responsible for developing partnerships and problem solving.

5. Total community policing model--this model is also often referred to as the
generalist model. All personnel in the department are involved in or support the
community policing philosophy. All patrol officers respond to radio calls and
engage in community policing.

6. Geographic model--this model reflects the differences between geographic
(also known as areal) command and watch command. Traditionally, law
enforcement agencies divide responsibility by watch, or work shift--supervisors
and personnel assigned to shifts have responsibility for those things that occur
during their particular watch. In the geographic command model, supervisors
are held accountable for what happens in their area 24 hours a day; the model
aims to improve response and build connections to the community. Geographic
command structures may coexist with other community policing models.

Categorizing the 30 sites visited into these structural models is easier said than
done. The distinctions are not as clear as the categories above suggest,
particularly in regard to whether officers doing community policing are "freed
from the tyranny of the radio" or not and the extent to which they are assigned
to a geographical area. Later in this chapter, additional information is provided
on the three deployment structures common to most problem-solving strategies.

It appears that about a third of the 30 sites visited have implemented a
specialized form of community policing and about a third have adopted a split
force version. One example of a deployment structure difficult to categorize is
the Huntington Beach Police Department, where two community liaison officers
are each assigned to half the city to concentrate on problem solving. While each
officer is dedicated to an area, this area consists of multiple patrol beats and
half a city of 190,000; this site has been labeled a split force model.

Approximately a half-dozen agencies appear to have a generalist structure of
deployment, although at times this is difficult to separate from traditional policing
(several of these sites are those who say "we've always done community
policing"). With the exceptions of the Austin and San Diego police departments,
all these agencies serve very small areas or are countywide sheriff's
departments. In these agencies where "every officer is a community police
officer," patrol officers are to find opportunities to interact with the community
and identify and resolve specific problems, while conducting their regular patrol
activities as well. Most officers report difficulty finding time for proactive
community policing; this is reflected in the data presented in chapter 4, where
about a third of the departments report officers spend a substantial amount of
time doing routine patrol and "squeezing in" proactive work as time allows.
Departments with generalist structures reported spending more time patrolling
than those with specialized or split force models; while those with specialized or
split force models spend more time on partnerships, prevention, and
problem-solving approaches reflecting zero tolerance policies.

No agencies visited had the single community police officer deployment
structure. The Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Police has the fewest number of officers
(seven), but embraces a generalist model. The smallest municipal police
department, Mascoutah, has 11 officers, all of whom patrol as generalists but
also have a specialty area linked to community policing, such as
D.A.R.E.[Registered trademark] or Neighborhood Watch.

Racine Police Department is the only department visited that has a temporal
deployment structure. The department has a small specialized unit of seven
officers, a sergeant, and a lieutenant, who work out of six community-based
police offices. The department also has a "fourth" patrol shift--officers with a
special task assignment from 7 p.m. to 3 a.m. who are partially freed from calls
for service in order to concentrate on problem solving.

Although we did not visit a department with a geographic model of community
policing, departments have adopted geographic commands as part of an
organizational change in support of community policing. We will return to this
subject later in this chapter in the section on organizational change.

Measuring change in community policing

As the preceding discussion suggests, agencies differ not only in the
organizational structures they use to deliver community policing but also in the
substance of what they deliver under that label. As Moore (1994: 289-290)
has noted, the ambiguity of the label is a virtue for encouraging innovation
because it leaves a domain of uncertainty or "wiggle room" within which a
department can test new approaches with confidence it will not be accused of
deviating from "true" community policing. Further, the ambiguity is a necessity if
one agrees with Manning (1998) that "reducing social distance between the
police and the policed" is a fundamental objective of community policing. The
determinants of social distance, and therefore the most appropriate ways to
reduce it, vary from one neighborhood to another even within a single
geographic jurisdiction.

Though a virtue or necessity for some purposes, ambiguity presents problems
for measuring change over time in the nature of policing. To base change
measures on agencies' statements that they are "doing community policing" risks
combining one agency's apples with another agency's oranges, especially if both
agencies are in fact following locally developed community policing strategies to
the letter. But basing change measures on some arbitrary standard carries risks,
too. The standard may become a sort of litmus test that is inappropriate for
many agencies. A rigid standard may discourage innovation, and attempts to
implement the standard where it is inappropriate may perversely increase the
social distance that community policing is intended to decrease.

Fortunately, our goal in this chapter is less ambitious than a definition of
community policing. We intend to assess the effectiveness of the COPS
program in furthering the four objectives that the COPS Office announced early
in its life: problem solving, partnership building, prevention, and supportive
organizational change. Our quantitative measuring device for each objective
was a survey-based scale based on agencies' statements about the
implementation status of selected tactics for pursuing the objective and about
the role of COPS grants in the adoption or expansion of these tactics. Table 6-
3 was the scale to summarize COPS grantees' pre-1995 use and post-1995
adoption of community policing tactics.

Our qualitative devices for measuring implementation were 30 programmatic
site assessments that included interviews and observations of local programs.
This chapter draws on both information sources to describe changes in local
partnership building, problem solving, prevention, and organizational functioning
since the COPS program began. Our qualitative device for assessing how
grantees' chief executives used COPS grants and other resources in adopting or
expanding innovative strategies and tactics was a series of 10 case studies (see
chapter 7).

Partnerships

One principle of community policing that sets it apart from most past policing
reforms is the emphasis on creating and sustaining working partnerships with
communities and other entities within local jurisdictions. Any review of
community policing literature and the practices and experiences of most of the
early pioneering police agencies dating back over the past 20 years exhibits this
prominence. In 1983, Feins stressed the value of forming and sustaining
collaborative working partnerships between the community and local police for
crime prevention and control (Feins, 1983).

Today, partnerships are at the center of not just community policing but of
many strategies to tackle crime, drug, and social problems. In recent years,
partnerships have been the crux of multijurisdictional drug law enforcement
efforts (Chaiken, Chaiken, and Karchmer, 1990); drug prevention programs
(Center for Substance Abuse Prevention, 1994); the enforcement, community
policing, prevention, and revitalization strategies of the federally funded Weed
and Seed program (Roehl et al., 1996; Dunworth et al., 1999); the
Comprehensive Communities program (Kelling et al., 1998); and myriad
community-based anticrime and antidrug strategies. Researcher-practitioner
partnerships are a key component of the newest wave of partnership-based
crime reduction strategies, which include NIJ's Locally Initiated Research
Partnerships between research and police organizations (McEwen, 1999),
Boston's Cease Fire project (Kennedy, 1997), and the five-site Strategic 
Approaches to Community Safety Initiative. These initiatives have produced
valuable information on the dynamics and evolution of partnerships but limited
information on how to measure their strength or impact.

The U.S. Department of Justice has demonstrated a strong commitment to
encourage local jurisdictions to form meaningful and sustainable partnerships
among police, communities, and other service providers that will facilitate
shared responsibility for dealing with local problems of crime and violence. The
COPS Office mission statement places partnerships squarely within its definition
of community policing: "Community policing is a policing philosophy that
promotes and supports organizational strategies to address the causes and
reduce the fear of crime and social disorder through problem-solving tactics
and community-police partnerships." The COPS Office has further exhibited
and reinforced this commitment to partnerships in its nonhiring grant awards.
More than 300 domestic violence grants have been awarded to support local
partnerships among police, victims' advocates, and other organizations to deal
with this critical problem. The Innovative Community Oriented Policing
program grants require local police, community, and other partners to
collaborate on the selection of particular problems and development of
response strategies. In June 1997, the COPS Office awarded approximately
35 grants to establish Regional Community Policing Institutes (RCPIs)
throughout the country. The RCPIs involve working partnerships among law
enforcement agencies, community organizations, and a teaching institution in the
design and delivery of comprehensive community policing training.

At the crux of the partnerships is the belief that the prevention and reduction of
crime and disorder problems require the coordinated, concentrated effort of
individuals and agencies affected by and concerned with the problems. Because
crime has multiple causes, solutions must be equally multifaceted and cannot be
reached by the police acting alone.

Among the COPS-funded law enforcement agencies, there are many variations
in the nature and strength of partnerships. We first present survey data to
examine how COPS grants are related to partnership-building activities, then use
reports from the field to explore the nature of working partnerships in different
law enforcement agencies.

COPS and community partnership building: Survey findings

In the Wave 3 survey conducted in the summer of 1998, we measured
agencies' community partnership-building activities using a list of eight tactics.[5]
These tactics had a moderate interitem reliability (KR alpha=0.76), providing
reasonable assurance that our community partnership-building construct had
internal consistency. To measure tactic-specific implementation status around the
time the COPS program was launched, we computed the percentage of all large
local/county agencies claiming pre-1995 implementation of each tactic. To
measure the 1998 tactic-specific implementation status, we added the pre-1995
figure to the percentage of agencies responding that they started using the tactic
between 1995 and 1998. Because the 1998 Wave 3 survey covered only local
and county agencies serving jurisdictions of more than 50,000, our findings are
limited to that agency category.

Spread of partnership-building tactics. To describe the extent of growth in the
use of partnership-building tactics, table 6-4 reports the 1995 and 1998 means
of agencies' reports of tactics implemented, as both a count and a percentage of
all tactics listed. The table indicates use of the partnership-building activities in
our list grew between 1995 and 1998. On average, our combined sample of
COPS grantees and nongrantees reported pre-1995 implementation of nearly
58 percent (i.e., 4.6) of the partnership-building tactics. By the summer of
1998, agencies reported a moderate net increase, to 80 percent or 6.4. The
change was statistically significant at the p-level of 0.001.

The tactic-specific percentages in table 6-4 make clear that in 1998, agencies
continued to favor the same tactics that were most popular before 1995. At
both points in time, the five most common partnership-building tactics were
joint crime prevention programs such as Neighborhood Watch, regular
community meetings, joint projects with businesses, projects with residents to
reduce disorder, and citizen surveys. The lower rankings were also nearly
stable.

Pre-1995 grantee/nongrantee comparison. In the aggregate, column A of table
6-5 suggests that COPS grantees and nongrantees began the COPS era at
nearly the same point in partnership building. Grantees reported using an
average of 58.9 percent of the tactics as of 1995, slightly exceeding the 54.6
percent reported by nongrantees.

Tactic-by-tactic analyses suggest, however, that grantees were significantly
more likely than nongrantees to have activities in place that involve face-to-face
small-group interactions with residents of their respective jurisdictions. The
largest differences (all statistically significant) were grantees' greater pre-1995
implementation of cleanup projects (52.8 percent compared with 39.7 percent)
and citizen action/advisory boards (40.4 percent compared with 27.1 percent).
In contrast, nonfunded agencies were more likely to report having implemented
joint projects with businesses (74.0 percent compared with 62.5 percent).

Comparative adoption of partnership-building tactics, 1995-98. Between 1995
and 1998, grantees adopted a mean of 1.9 additional tactics, compared with
1.5 by nongrantees (see table 6-5, column C). The overall difference between
grantees' and nongrantees' rates of adoption was not statistically significant.
However, grantees were significantly more likely than nongrantees to begin joint
projects with businesses (27.6 percent compared with 9.8 percent).
Additionally, grantees were more likely than nongrantees to begin citizen
surveys (26.4 percent compared with 15.0 percent).

Comparing 1998 implementation status (i.e., regardless of whether a tactic was
adopted before or after 1995), grantees had implemented a mean of 6.6 tactics
by 1998, compared with 5.9 for nongrantees (see table 6-5, column B). By
1998, grantees were significantly more likely than nongrantees to have
implemented community meetings (95.0 percent compared with 89.6 percent),
joint projects with residents to remove signs of disorder (92.2 percent
compared with 79.7 percent), resident surveys (80.3 percent compared with
65.2 percent), cleanup projects (78.1 percent compared with 58.6 percent),
and citizen action/advisory boards (59.9 percent compared with 47.9 percent).
Although grantees had lagged behind nongrantees in joint projects with
businesses as of 1995, grantees were more likely than nongrantees to use this
tactic by 1998 (90.1 percent compared with 83.8 percent).

COPS grant effects on post-1995 adoption of partnership-building tactics. We
asked COPS grantees who reported adopting new partnership-building tactics
between 1995 and 1998 how their COPS grants affected their innovations. As
table 6-6 indicates, 65 percent to 75 percent of agencies that adopted each
tactic described the funds as "instrumental" in starting or expanding its use,
fewer than 10 percent reported the grants allowed the agency to sustain its use
through a budget cut, and the remaining 15 percent to 35 percent reported the
grants had no effect. There were exceptions. Only 53 percent of the agencies
that began citizen police academies during the period described COPS funds as
instrumental. In contrast, 77 percent to 80 percent considered the funds
instrumental in their launches of community meetings, cleanup projects, and
citizen action or advisory boards. Some 18 percent of agencies said the funds
enabled them to sustain joint crime prevention programs despite budget cuts.
Finally, 40 percent of the agencies that began citizen police academies reported
their COPS grants had no effect on the startup.

COPS grant effects on continuation of pre-1995 partnership-building tactics.
COPS grantees were asked how the new funds affected their use of old
partnership-building tactics that were already in place when the COPS program
began. To describe the overall COPS grant effect, we computed the
percentage of all pre-1995 tactics that were described as being expanded as a
result of COPS funding. Overall, agencies reported the COPS program
positively affected 70 percent of their old partnership-building tactics. For most
tactics, 50 percent to 60 percent of agencies reported their COPS grants were
"instrumental in starting or expanding" use of the tactic; another 5 percent to 10
percent stated the COPS funds helped them sustain use of the tactic despite
budget cuts; and the remaining 25 percent to 45 percent reported COPS funds
had no effect on their use of the tactic (see table 6-7).

A few tactics were exceptions to this general pattern. Approximately 70
percent of agencies stated their COPS grants were instrumental in starting or
expanding their projects with residents to remove signs of disorder. Between
10 percent and 12 percent of grantees doing joint crime prevention projects
with the community, disorder-reduction projects, or community meetings stated
the COPS funds helped them sustain those activities through budget cuts. In
contrast, 42 percent to 67 percent stated the COPS funds had no effect on
their continuation of citizen surveys, action/advisory boards, or police
academies. For their most common old tactics, the percentages that reported a
positive COPS impact (i.e., starting, expanding, or sustaining) were 80 percent
for joint disorder-reduction projects, 73 percent for regular community
meetings, and 66 percent for joint crime prevention projects, both with
residents and with businesses.

Partnerships: Reports from the field

Partnerships in community policing initiatives may be placed on a continuum
with two distinct endpoints: 

1. Partnerships that involve true collaboration in all phases of the work among
police, community residents and organizations, local service providers, and
other criminal justice system agencies.

2. Partnerships that include the mere involvement of such parties.

The fundamental difference between these two categories concerns the roles of
the key players. In a collaborative effort, all participants work as partners in
setting priorities, defining problems, developing and implementing responses,
and measuring effects and performance. In a true collaboration, all partners, not
just the police, drive the effort. Partnerships that merely involve the participation
of others working with the police tend to be police driven, more traditional in
nature, and narrow in scope. These partnerships are characterized by the police
retaining the "expert" role, the community relegated to passive participants or
serving as the "eyes and ears" of police, and local agencies providing their
services where directed. We believe the philosophy of partnerships in
community policing refers to partnerships that are true collaborations.
Partnerships that simply involve nonpolice agencies and citizens in problem
solving or other police work, drawn from the pages of traditional crime
prevention and police-community relations programs, are a starting point for
community policing, not an end point.[6]

Community crime prevention and community policing have always included
processes in which law enforcement agencies provide information to citizens
through newsletters (and now Web sites), door-to-door contacts by officers,
presentations at community meetings, and so forth. In contrast to community
meetings and formal councils in which citizens and law enforcement
representatives exchange views, set priorities, and develop problem-solving
strategies jointly, these communication vehicles are one way and citizens are
passive recipients. While they are important, have benefits, and signal the police
department's desire to reach out to the community, they, too, are not
partnerships but initial steps toward citizen-police collaboration.

Success in building partnerships depends on recognition that the community is
not a monolithic entity. The community consists of individuals, agencies, and
organizations from A to Z--from Alcoholics Anonymous groups, businesses,
and community-based organizations to xenophobic residents, youth groups, and
zoning officials--each with interests that coincide or compete with those of other
potential partners at different times. Police agencies may form partnerships with
the various members of their communities, as a whole or group by group, which
vary in their intensity and duration depending on problems to be addressed.

Partnership types in the sites visited. In the 30 sites visited, partnerships came in
all shapes, sizes, and ages. Partnerships evolve over time and may move from
involvement to collaboration with or without an external incentive such as
COPS funding. In the funded sites, some partnerships are new and have no
history of working together; some of these were convened in response to the
Federal grant solicitations discussed at the beginning of this section. Others
have grown out of years of police-community collaborations.

Two types of partnerships have grown to be commonplace in law enforcement
in the past decade or so, independent of efforts to implement community
policing. Task forces, or enforcement partnerships, are one type and are
formed among police officers, probation and parole officers, prosecutors,
Federal agents, and other criminal justice system actors to bring additional law
enforcement resources to bear on a particular crime problem (often drugs,
gangs, or youth violence). The second traditional type of partnership may be
called programmatic or tactical partnerships, in which police and nonpolice
groups or individuals are engaged in joint service delivery such as
D.A.R.E.[Registered trademark], Neighborhood Watch, Citizens on Patrol, and
other specialized crime prevention programs (i.e., that focus on youth crime,
domestic violence, street gangs, and drugs).

Two types of partnerships closely related to community policing principles were
found in the COPS sites we visited. The first is problem-solving partnerships
formed with other service providers and the community that enable the 
police to work in concert with others to identify, analyze, and solve problems,
often using collective resources (staff, equipment, etc.). Local city and county
agencies are arguably the most common partners in problem-solving activities,
particularly tactics involving civil abatement processes, cleanups and
revitalization, and environmental changes. Typical local partners include the
departments responsible for code enforcement, housing, zoning, public works,
social services, and parks and recreation. Problem-solving partnerships may
also include elected officials, school officials, business representatives, and
private organizations. They may or may not include community representatives
who provide input as to how resources should be utilized and toward which
problems they should be directed.

Examples of problem-solving partnerships abound in the COPS-funded sites.
Some are quite formal, such as the Oakland Police Department's Beat Health
Unit, in which the police and inspectors from code enforcement, sewers and
sidewalks, and vector control (the agency that controls "rodent and roach"
problems) work together to abate crime, drug, and disorder problems. Other
problem-solving partnerships change members and tactics, depending on the
problem at hand. For example, a problem-solving partnership may be
neighborhood based and focused on a specific hot spot or may be formed to
address a citywide crime problem.

One trend of note is physically locating the problem-solving partners under one
roof. In Miami, "mini city halls" are located in each of the 12 neighborhoods
served by Neighborhood Enhancement Teams (NETs). In addition to the
community policing officers and civilian staff, the mini city halls are staffed by
zoning inspectors, sanitation inspectors, and other city and community workers.
In Huntington Beach, a code enforcement officer is permanently assigned to a
neighborhood substation. In two sites, community policing and social services
are combined in a "one-stop shopping center." In Cobb County, Georgia, a
neighborhood-based Community Service Center houses law enforcement,
youth programs, counseling services, and English as a Second Language
classes. In Nashville, centers in enterprise zones contain community police
officers, social services (Family and Children's Services, welfare
representatives, and job training programs), and small businesses (hair braiding,
nail salon, and thrift store).

The second common type of partnership seen involving the COPS grantees is
community partnerships formed among the police and residents of
neighborhoods and representatives from community and business groups. They
have multiple purposes and may, at times, be equivalent to problem-solving
partnerships at the neighborhood level. Community partnerships, at their best,
involve community influence in how the police "do business" in areas such as
developing and revising internal policies, setting performance and hiring criteria,
and reviewing officer accountability.

Community partnerships in the sites visited include those at the neighborhood
level and those that represent the full jurisdiction (city or county). At the
neighborhood level, the partnership may be informal, with community police
officers regularly attending meetings of neighborhood organizations to exchange
information, identify and prioritize problems, develop solutions, and so forth.
These neighborhood-level community partnerships may also be more formal,
such as Oakland's Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils, New Bedford's
(Massachusetts) Neighborhood Councils, San Bernardino County's (California)
Station Advisory Boards, Los Angeles' Citizen-Police Advisory Boards, and
Fort Worth's advisory committees in Neighborhood Policing Offices.

Many law enforcement agencies have created advisory committees (made up of
community representatives) that typically report to the chief law enforcement
executive, concern themselves with public safety matters that cover the entire
jurisdiction, and address agencywide issues. These include Austin's Chief's
Forum, Pocatello's Citizens Advisory Board, Mascoutah's Police Advisory
Committee, and Oakland's Community Policing Advisory Board.

The key word in most of these community partnerships is the word "advisory."
Although police departments are opening up to community input and influence,
most police executives remain reluctant to give the community real authority and
responsibilities. The underlying reasons for this are many and complex. Legal
issues, such as accountability requirements on the chief as outlined in local laws
or administrative regulations, must be considered. Some resistance probably
reflects beliefs that trained and experienced police officers know best about
certain issues, coupled with an abiding sense of responsibility to ensure that
police resources are used efficiently, ethically, and legally. It is not uncommon
for citizens upset about a crime problem to demand a police response that is, in
a word, illegal. Community partnership falling short of true collaboration is
evident even in Oak Park, where the police and community engage in an
innovative collaborative process to identify a crime problem and then sign a
contract describing the responsibilities and activities of both parties. 
Yet the typical citizen commitments are traditional--to form neighborhood
watch groups, call 911 to report suspicious activity, and make crime prevention
a way of life, for example. 

As shown in the subsequent sections, there is ample evidence that the police
field has accepted the viability of partnership-based problem solving and
prevention strategies as relevant and useful to its mission of crime fighting. Initial
evidence from various COPS sites suggests a lesser degree of comfort when it
comes to developing and appreciating community partnerships. The police have
always been inclined to establish partnerships or alliances that enable them to
tackle a job with shared resources. Involving other agencies in specific aspects
of problem solving has not been a difficult leap for police departments to make.
Establishing community partnerships, however, is more difficult because they
must involve sharing some level of power with the community.

Each of the partnership types cited above may vary on the true
collaboration-mere involvement continuum. Programmatic partnerships, for
example, involving Neighborhood Watch may keep the community at arm's
length; they may be driven by police expertise, requiring communities to be
nothing more than an extension of the police or their "eyes and ears." Or the
Neighborhood Watch group may be a true collaborator, working intimately
with the police to analyze problems and develop and implement joint
problem-solving efforts. Neither model is inherently better than the other, and
this debate in no way is intended to demean the efforts based on simple
involvement. Under the community policing philosophy, however, close police
and community collaboration is paramount.

One measure of success in developing partnerships may be the extent to which
partnership building has devolved from formal partner groups to commonplace,
one-to-one police-citizen partnerships. For example, between the first and
second site visits to the San Diego School Police, the concept and practice of
partnerships moved beyond formal partnership agreements between the police
and organizations to routine projects involving individual officers, parents, and
staff.

Organizational support for collaborative community partnerships. The majority
of the sites visited have made substantial organizational changes that support
partnership building, although they were rarely motivated by that specific
objective. These changes include revising and promulgating mission and value
statements, developing long-term strategic plans, training officers and
community members, and changing procedures to improve beat integrity.

Mission and value statements developed by police organizations are intended to
communicate their core beliefs and principles that will drive the delivery of
services to their communities. In the Fresno County Sheriff's Department, one
value statement reads in part to "work collaboratively with neighborhoods to
understand the true nature of crime and develop cooperative strategies." In
Buffalo, the mission statement includes a commitment to help facilitate input into
the police decisionmak- ing process, and in Austin, the mission statement
includes the language "to protect and serve through community partnerships." 

The challenge, of course, is to create a tangible connection between the words
of such statements and the actual way the organization behaves within its
community. It is possible for mission and value statements to be mere words on
paper inserted into frames and hung on walls in offices throughout the
organization. Under these circumstances, many people in the organization may
not know of these statements, and mechanisms are not in place to ensure
accountability for units and individuals to perform consistently with them. In a
few other organizations, even a 3-day site visit was long enough to hear a
casual reference to the mission statement as a reason for some decision--
evidence that officers are aware of it.

Some police organizations have developed strategic plans that present in some
detail the vision of the chief executive and/or political leadership of the
jurisdiction for the future style and substance of policing. These plans typically
cover 3 to 5 years, and they describe not only what kind of policing goals are
to be achieved but also how the organization plans to get there. They offer clear
evidence as to the nature of the police department's commitment to partnerships
both as a process (i.e., Did partners or stakeholders have a role in the
preparation of the plan?) and outcome (i.e., To what extent do partners or
stakeholders play an active role in the implementation of the plan's goals?). In a
number of sites visited, the move toward a community policing philosophy
includes the development of an appropriate strategic plan. Brief discussions of
three sites with strong commitments to community partnerships as evidenced by
their words and actions illustrate the latter course of events.

The San Diego Police Department hired an outside consultant to help develop
the department's "Vision, Values, and Mission Statements" (VVM). The former
police chief, Jerry Sanders, believed the VVM statements could play a crucial
and visible role in effecting organizational change to support community
policing. VVM statements are posted conspicuously in all departmental
facilities, and all officers are given them on pocket-sized laminated cards.

The former chief also believed the development of meaningful VVM statements
was an ongoing process required constant revisiting. Therefore, the department
later hired a second consultant to examine the relevance of its first statement.
That consultant's recommendation, based on interviews with representatives at
all levels of the organization and with involved community members, was the
existing statement was still relevant to current operating strategies.

In Austin, the department made a significant commitment to alter policing in the
city to focus its efforts on building "self-reliant neighborhoods." This
commitment was evident in the department's mission and value statements and
its strategic plan, which was revised in 1993 and entitled: "Achieving
Self-Reliant Neighborhoods through Community Policing." During the tenure of
the former chief in Austin, from the preparation of the first plan in 1991 to the
recent end of her administration, there was extensive planning, self-assessment,
and development of action goals and objectives that were supportive of and
consistent with the stated intent of the "policing vision." Representatives from
the community and other governmental and private sector organizations were
involved in the process. The hub of this particular strategic wheel was the
neighborhoods of the city. The entire police organization underwent major
internal changes to more effectively build and sustain the capacity of the
neighborhoods to deal with crime and violence.

Next, consider the Oakland experience. Unlike Austin, where the driving force
behind the change was the chief, in Oakland the shift to community policing and
community partnership was mandated by the city council. The Public Safety
Committee of that council spent a considerable amount of time examining the
community policing experiences of other jurisdictions, including Portland
(Oregon), San Diego, and New York City. The council appointed two
successive community policing task forces consisting primarily of community
representatives; the second task force developed the community policing
strategic plan for the city. A new chief was hired, and he and the city manager
were directed by the council to fully implement community policing in the police
department. The council passed a resolution which specified elements of
Oakland's community policing model including beat reconfiguration, community
policing training, dedicated community police officers, and the creation of
Neighborhood Crime Prevention Councils (the base for the police-community
partnerships) and a community policing advisory board.

Beyond strategic plans and mission statements, there are many organizational
changes that directly support the establishment and maintenance of community
partnerships as "evidence" of a department's commitment to this core principle
of community policing. At one end of this spectrum of changes are Austin and
Oakland, both of which have made substantial internal changes that mirror their
commitment to fully implement community policing in their jurisdictions. Internal
systems, policies, and practices have undergone varying degrees of
transformation in recent years as part of this process. Community residents
there are prominently involved at all levels of these organizations, and the
"expert" crime fighting and problem-solving teams consist of police, citizens,
and other service providers in the cities. The language of their efforts clearly
acknowledge that ensuring a safer city with a higher quality of life must be the
collective responsibility of all partners.

At the other end of this spectrum are a few departments that have made little to
no change in how the organization is structured, how it defines its mission, and
how it delivers its services. In law enforcement agencies such as the sheriff's
departments in Maricopa County, Arizona, and Sarpy County, Nebraska, there
was no evidence at the time of our visits of any systemic shift in philosophy or
practice to problem-solving collaborations. At that time, partnerships were
limited to packaged programs such as D.A.R.E. and Neighborhood Watch.
More recently, the Sarpy County Sheriff's Office reported having made a
number of organizational changes--substations, permanent assignments of
deputies to patrol districts, a community survey used as input for planning--that
lay the groundwork for partnership building. 

In the middle lie the majority of the departments visited. The changes instituted
are many and diverse. In Huntington Beach, an anticrime coalition was
organized, and it participated with the chief in the development of the police
mission and 5-year implementation plan for the city. Area task forces involving
police officers, community and business representatives, and other service
providers work as problem-solving teams. In Fort Worth, the chief has
reorganized the department into 12 neighborhood policing districts. The
commanders of these districts are expected to work with their communities on
problem identification and solving initiatives.

Another indicator of support for collaborative partnerships is training, the extent
to which community policing and partnership principles have been incorporated
into training for all police personnel. A few departments train community
residents to assume their roles in community policing, such as the Community
Policing 101 course offered to hundreds of citizens in Oakland.

The bottom line in this discussion of community partnerships comes down to
power sharing. The rhetoric of community policing clearly suggests the police
have acknowledged the need to share power with their "clients"--communities.
But the implementation of concrete steps to facilitate this sharing is a critical
area of scrutiny. San Diego, one of the prominent "pioneering departments" in
the community policing movement, has only recently taken major steps to bring
community residents into its decisionmaking processes. Partnerships dominated
by police expertise do not recognize the expertise and legitimacy of
communities to act on their own behalf. In the final analysis, the presence or
absence of meaningful and effective partnerships among police, communities,
and other key stakeholders in jurisdictions bears a direct relationship to the
presence or absence of community policing.

Temporary problem-solving partnerships focused on specific neighborhood
crime and disorder problems are abundant, found in the vast majority of the 30
sites visited. Programmatic partnerships, such as D.A.R.E. and Neighborhood
Watch, are nearly as commonplace.

Their effectiveness in the sites we visited in solving and preventing long-term
problems is unknown. At best, findings on this question from large-scale
evaluations of such programs are mixed. Their effectiveness in reaching
partnership goals--broadening information sources when assessing problems,
coordinating activities, defining and adopting joint agendas--is also largely
unknown at the local level. We believe we observed very wide variations on
this score across the sites we studied, but adequate measures are yet to be
developed.

Community partnerships in which residents share power and decisionmaking
responsibilities with police were rare at the time we visited the 30 sites. Again,
the effectiveness of such sharing in solving or preventing problems is largely
untested at the local level. Yet the simple facts of their existence and processes
demonstrate an advanced stage of participatory community policing.

Problem Solving: Background

Problem solving is the most well known and accepted component of community
policing. Problem solving has evolved from the much broader concept of
problem-oriented policing, developed by Herman Goldstein and introduced to
the police field first in his article titled Improving the Police: A
Problem-Oriented Approach (1979) and expanded upon in a later book,
Problem-Oriented Policing (1990). As the field's awareness of
problem-oriented policing occurred simultaneously with the advent of
community policing, much early debate focused on which should be the
dominant form of policing (Capowich and Roehl, 1994). Today, problem
solving--the centerpiece of problem-oriented policing (although Goldstein
advocated solving widespread substantive problems such as commercial
robberies downtown rather than location-specific problems)--is widely
considered an essential element of community policing (Cordner, 1998). (As
discussed in chapter 2, community policing has suffered from accusations of not
being "real" police work and representing positions that are "soft on crime." 
Problem-oriented policing suffered a similar backlash when its fluffy acronym
"problem-oriented policing" became widely used.)

Many law enforcement agencies find problem solving a practical and palatable
first step in their transition to community policing. While some problem solving,
such as boarding up abandoned property, continues to be criticized as not real
police work, problem solving can also be sold to the troops as "working
smarter" to end the need to respond endlessly to the same location. As shown
below, however, perhaps in efforts to avoid the soft-on-crime criticism,
traditional enforcement tactics such as undercover buys, surveillance, saturation
patrols, and arrest are increasingly being included in the arsenal of
problem-solving tactics.

These assertions find support in all components of the national evaluation. As
shown in the survey data that follow, COPS-funded law enforcement agencies
reported implementing more problem-solving tactics than the other two
identifiable elements of community policing, partnerships and prevention. And in
the summary of site observations in later sections, the dominance of problem
solving as the centerpiece of community policing as practiced by COPS
grantees becomes apparent. Yet as explained further below, it is frequently the
rhetoric of problem solving that dominates, not Goldstein's concept.

Development of problem solving

In articulating the need for problem-oriented policing, Goldstein (1979) began
by criticizing the police for having a "means over ends" focus, being obsessed
with tactical, equipment, and deployment issues without substantial regard for
what those things actually accomplished. Drawing upon themes he sounded in his
earlier work, Policing A Democratic Society (1977), Goldstein argued that the
traditional "law enforcement" emphasis of the police is but one facet of police
work and but one tool available to curb crime and disorder. 

Goldstein noted that the traditional crime categories of the Uniform Crime
Reports--the only national "scorecard" of police effectiveness despite
widespread recognition of its limitations--in fact consists of lumpish aggregate
categories that mask widely different types of problems under a single legal
heading. Arson, for example, is defined legally as the unlawful burning of the
property of another, but within that single category are found multiple reasons
for setting fires: revenge, pyromania, intimidation, insurance fraud, children
playing with matches, attempts to conceal other crimes, and so on. Each
requires a fundamentally different response from the police, as the investigation
and prevention techniques that are effective against one form of arson may be
utterly ineffective against others.

Goldstein's third criticism of the police "means over ends syndrome" related to
the tendency of police officers to focus on individual events and overlook
patterns that link calls and establish patterns. Although police investigators have
often done pattern analysis with a limited range of crimes (determining an M.O.
or modus operandi (method of operation) is one form of pattern analysis, as are
the pin maps of yore), they have failed to look for links between lesser forms of
offending and public disorder. The original conceptualization of
problem-oriented policing proposed that the entire range of police operations
be organized not around responding to individual events but identifying
problems and working to eradicate the underlying causes of those problems.

Working with the Madison, Wisconsin, Police Department, Goldstein and
Charles B. Susmilch conducted some preliminary investigations into the
possibilities inherent in a problem-oriented approach. They examined the full
range of impacts of a certain problem and the full range of social and
community resources available and needed to craft a more permanent solution
to the problem. The Madison project was largely an exploration of resources,
conducted by the scholarly investigators with input from the police. The
researchers chose the sexual offender in the community as a salient problem;
the police officers elected the drinking driver, somewhat perplexing the scholars
who considered it a fairly pedestrian concern (Goldstein and Susmilch, 1981,
1982a). Though exploring large-scale problems, the authors also
acknowledged that a problem-oriented approach could be applied to smaller,
localized problems (i.e., the focus of most problem-solving efforts) as well.

Although the Baltimore County COPE (Citizen Oriented Police Enforcement)
unit was the first to adopt Goldstein's approach (Cordner, 1985), the first full
test of problem-oriented policing was conducted in Newport News, Virginia,
during the tenure of Chief Darrel Stephens. "Problems" in that venue were
largely defined by traditional crime analysis and senior command staff, although
some were identified by police officers (most notably the prostitution-related
robberies in the downtown area). The Newport News experiment was
conducted with the participation of the Police Executive Research Forum
(PERF) and published in a volume titled Problem Solving (Eck and Spelman,
1987). The Newport News projects were partly crime-specific (prostitute
robberies, thefts from vehicles in the shipyard parking lots, assaults in the Glenn
Gardens community, burglaries in the Briarfield Apartments) and partly matters
of disorder and community fear (dirt bikes in Newmarket Creek, hooliganism in
the Village District, hangers-on at the 7-Eleven).

At the same time, in Minneapolis, the Crime Control Institute conducted a
randomized, controlled field experiment in problem solving which employed
computerized analysis of calls for police service at individual addresses as its
problem identification method (Sherman, 1986). Repeat Call Analysis Policing
(RECAP) applied problem- solving techniques to 250 addresses of the 500
most prolific consumers of police service in the entire city. Where Newport
News problems were high profile, sufficiently nettlesome to either the police or
the citizenry to be visible, RECAP culled less dramatic problems. Included in the
RECAP caseload were disorderly apartments, tippling houses, troublesome
bars, and repeated domestic conflicts, which do not carry the high visibility of
robberies or burglaries.

It was the Newport News project that developed the standard operational
definition of "problems" as "[a] group of incidents occurring in a community, that
are similar in one or more ways, and that are of concern to the police and the
public" (Eck and Spelman, 1987:42). Newport News also introduced the
acronym SARA for problem solving's four components: Scanning, Analysis,
Response, and Assessment. SARA has made problem solving the operational
face of community policing because, unlike the nebulous "philosophy," which
can be talked about but is extremely difficult to train for in the traditional sense
of training, SARA gives line officers something they can do. It lends itself to
classroom overheads and dynamic examples for the classroom and speaks
directly to the police culture's orientation to action.

SARA need not contribute to the development of community partnerships. It is
entirely possible for police officers to conduct SARA-type problem solving
without ever involving the community in problem identification, priority setting,
or analysis. Until fairly recently the San Diego Police Department, a nationally
recognized leader in police problem solving, defined its commitment to
problem-oriented policing over community policing because it avoided the
"touchy feely" connotations that make community policing anathema to some
police officers committed to the "professional" model, and it allowed the
department to retain direction over its own operations (see also Ryan, 1994).
More recently, however, SDPD has combined COPS with local funds to
replicate its neighborhood policing teams, which place more emphasis on
community collaboration. In other departments, notably Buffalo,
problem-oriented policing was emphasized in the community policing training
because it did not carry the stigma of "social work." And in Huntington Beach,
neither term is in favor; special efforts mounted under what we would recognize
as problem-solving efforts are referred to as directed enforcement to avoid
both community policing and problem-oriented policing associations.

Problem-solving models other than SARA are beginning to emerge. The
Maryland State Police are adapting the CAPRA model developed by the Royal
Canadian Mounted Police. CAPRA incorporates Client identification before
Acquiring/Analyzing information, developing Partnerships, and conducting a
Response and Assessment (Himelfarb, 1998). CAPRA is being incorporated
into some of the RCPIs funded by the COPS Office and may well comprise the
next wave of integrating problem solving into community policing. Indeed, the
partnership aspect of CAPRA is at the root of collaborative problem solving,
which focuses on problem solving and information-driven multiagency action.
Collaborative problem solving underlies Boston's Cease Fire project, which has
slashed juvenile homicides (Kennedy, 1997) and is currently being field tested
in the National Institute of Justice's Strategic Approaches to Community Safety
Initiative. Local researchers are integral members of these problem-solving
partnerships.

SARA, however, remains the problem-solving model most familiar to most
police officers. It is intended to work as follows:

--Scanning is conducted primarily by patrol officers familiar with the conditions,
activities, and players on their beats. Though problems may also be brought to
police attention through standard crime analysis, a simple review of aggregated
calls for service, or by community members, the line patrol officer is assumed to
have the best understanding of both the events and what connects them,
including personal connections which might be invisible to other forms of
analysis.

--Analysis should involve a thorough examination of the incidents and the
background factors that lead to the repeat calls. When done in the spirit
originally envisioned by Goldstein, Sherman, Spelman, and Eck, the analysis
phase will take officers beyond a quick analysis of the characteristics of a
problem to an indepth investigation of causal factors, potential alternative
responses, community and governmental resources outside the police
department, and possible measures to prevent recurrence. In practice, this is
one of the weaker facets of unguided police problem solving: many scholars
and observers of the police have noted the tendency of police officers to move
quickly from scanning to conventional response.

--Response should spring from analysis because a careful analysis of causal
factors and facilitating conditions should direct the actions taken. Fundamental
to the original notion of problem solving was the largely tacit assumption that the
causal factors and the solution to the problem may well lie outside the
boundaries of traditional police response. Frequently, however, in the sites
visited, responses characterized as problem solving consisted only of traditional
police activities such as arrest, high visibility patrol, and the aggressive order
maintenance activity now popularized as zero tolerance.

--Assessment is the often neglected step of problem solving, a reexamination of
the original set of conditions and factors that gave rise to the problem to see
what changes have been wrought by the response action, whether any
unanticipated problems arose as a result of it, and whether the problem had
indeed been abated. Though most assessment phases declare the
problem-solving response to have been successful, many are short-term looks
at an area in the immediate aftermath of fairly intensive police action (in effect, a
crackdown). Since the patterns of activity following crackdowns are fairly well
documented (Sherman, 1990), assessment should be done in stages, looking
for both displacement and resurgence. In many police agencies, however, once
the police have declared a problem "abated," resources are directed elsewhere
to new areas of need. The short-term impacts of police action generally are
positive, but the longer-term effects are generally not studied. In many sites,
assessment--or monitoring of the problem--is left in the hands of the
community; if the community ceases to complain about the problem (or call
911), the problem is considered solved.

Since the Newport News and Minneapolis RECAP projects introduced
problem solving as a police operational technique, some form of problem
solving has been adopted by numerous police agencies. Below, we draw on the
national survey and site visits to report how COPS grantee and other
departments define problem solving in terms of their operations. 

Problem solving: Survey findings

We measured an agency's problem-solving activities using a list of 11 tactics.[7]
These tactics had a moderately better interitem reliability (KR alpha=0.87) than
the items used to measure community partnership-building activities (KR
alpha=0.76). To measure tactic-specific implementation status around the time
the COPS program was launched, we computed the percentage of all large
local/county agencies claiming pre-1995 implementation of each tactic. To
measure the 1998 tactic-specific implementation status, we added the
pre-1995 figure to the percentage of agencies responding that they started using
the tactic between 1995 and 1998.

Spread of problem-solving tactics. To describe the extent of growth in the use
of problem-solving tactics, table 6-8 reports the 1995 and 1998 means of
agencies' reports of tactics implemented, as both a count and a percentage of
all tactics listed. The table indicates use of the problem-solving activities in our
list grew between 1995 and 1998 among large local and county policing
agencies, even more so than the previously discussed growth for
partnership-building activities. On average, our combined sample of
COPS grantees and nongrantees reported pre-1995 implementation of 55
percent (i.e., 6.1) of the problem-solving tactics. By the summer of 1998,
agencies reported a net increase to 86 percent or 9.4. The change was 
statistically significant at the p-level of 0.001.

The tactic-specific percentages in table 6-8 show that in 1998, designating
crime patterns for nontraditional response swapped places with using agency
data to measure response effects to become the second most commonly
reported problem-solving tactic. Despite shifting in the popularity of these two
tactics, the most common problem-solving tactics at both times were analysis of
problems with the community, systematic monitoring of the problem, and using
residents' comments to identify recurring patterns. The lower rankings were
stable.

Pre-1995 grantee/nongrantee comparison. COPS grantees and nongrantees
began the COPS era at nearly the same point in terms of the percentage and
number of pre-1995 implemented problem-solving tactics (see table 6-9,
column A). Grantees reported having an average of 55.8 percent of the tactics
in use as of 1995, just slightly exceeding the 54.0 percent reported by
nongrantees. Tactic-by-tactic analyses suggest that grantees and nongrantees
implemented each tactic at about the same level.

Comparative adoption of problem-solving tactics, 1995-98. Between 1995
and 1998, grantees adopted a mean of 3.5 additional tactics, compared with
2.7 for nongrantees (see table 6-9, column C). The overall difference between
grantees' and nongrantees' rates of adoption was statistically significant at the
0.10 level. Specifically, grantees' adoption rates exceeded the rates for
nongrantees on 3 of 11 tactics. Compared with nongrantees, grantees were
significantly more likely to begin analyzing residents' comments to identify
recurring patterns (33.9 percent compared with 20.5 percent) and considering
neighborhood values (31.1 percent compared with 20.5 percent). Additionally,
grantees were more likely than nongrantees to begin analyzing problems with
probation/parole officers (31.7 percent compared with 22.7 percent).

Comparing 1998 implementation status (i.e., regardless of whether a tactic was
adopted before or after 1995), grantees had implemented a mean of 9.7 tactics
by 1998, compared with 8.7 for nongrantees (see table 6-9, column B). By
1998, grantees were significantly more likely than nongrantees to have
implemented all but two of the problem-solving tactics (i.e., systematic
monitoring of the problem and analyzing crime data to identify recurring
patterns).

COPS grant effects on post-1995 adoption of problem-solving tactics. We
asked COPS grantees who reported adopting new problem-solving tactics
between 1995 and 1998 how their COPS grants affected their innovations.
Overall, COPS grantees attributed 75 percent of their post-1995 adoptions of
problem-solving tactics to their COPS grants. For the most part, 65 percent to
75 percent of agencies that adopted each tactic described the funds as
"instrumental" in starting or expanding its use; fewer than 6 percent reported the
grants allowed the agency to sustain its use through a budget cut; and the
remaining 20 percent to 30 percent reported the grants had no effect (see table
6-10). There were a couple of exceptions. Only 62 percent of the agencies that
began analyzing problems with parole/probation officers and 60 percent of the
agencies that began analyzing crime patterns with GIS during this period
described COPS funds as instrumental. In contrast, 75 percent to 80 percent
considered the funds instrumental in starting the following activities: designating
patterns for nontraditional response, analyzing problems with the community,
using residents' input to measure response effect, and considering neighborhood
values.

COPS grant effects on continuation of pre-1995 problem-solving tactics.
Overall, grantee agencies reported that the COPS program positively affected
82 percent of old problem-solving tactics. For most tactics, 50 percent to 70
percent of agencies reported their COPS grants were "instrumental in starting
or expanding" use of the tactic; less than 10 percent stated the COPS funds
helped them sustain use of the tactic despite budget cuts; and the remaining 25
percent to 40 percent reported that COPS funds had no effect on their use of
the tactic (see table 6-11).

A few tactics were exceptions to this general pattern. About 72 percent of
agencies stated their COPS grants were instrumental in their starting or
expanding the designation of patterns for nontraditional response.
Approximately 9 percent of grantees that systematically monitored problems or
analyzed problems with the community stated the COPS funds helped them
sustain those activities through budget cuts. In contrast, 47 percent to 53
percent stated the COPS funds had no effect on their continuation of analysis of
crime patterns with GIS or analysis of problems with parole/probation officers.
For their most common old tactics, the percentages that reported a positive
COPS impact (i.e., starting, expanding, or sustaining) were 78 percent for
analysis of problems with the community, 74 percent for systematic monitoring
of the problem, and 58 percent for using agency data to measure the response
effect.

Problem solving: Reports from the field

As the survey results suggested, we found a commitment to the term problem
solving in the majority of the sites visited. However, the level and form varied
substantially from agency to agency. Among the smaller agencies, several
neither used the technique formally nor were even conversant with the
terminology. In this section, we review the types of approaches called problem
solving in the sites visited, the organizational supports for problem solving, and
the level of community participation.

Types of problem-solving approaches. In the 30 sites, we identified 5 separate
manifestations of problem solving by local definition. Only the first type of
problem solving listed, however, closely resembles the traditional concept of
problem solving promulgated by Goldstein, PERF, and others. We also found
individual departments demonstrating more than one version of problem solving.
The five manifestations of problem solving described to our site teams by
COPS grantees are:

1. Problem solving that fits the established operational definition represented
by the SARA model and supported by documentation and incorporation into
training and strategic planning functions. At least 15 of the sites visited
demonstrated advanced use of traditional problem solving. Included are
departments such as San Diego, which has long been a leader in
problem-oriented policing; Fort Worth and Miami, where neighborhood police
officers concentrate on beat-specific problem solving and prevention efforts;
and Los Angeles, where senior lead officers dedicated to beats placed a strong
emphasis on problem solving following the SARA model at the time of our first
visit.

--We found many sites considered enforcement one of their primary
problem-solving tools, even the most common one. The "response" step of
SARA may well include traditional enforcement tactics, including surveillance,
undercover work, buy-busts, and arrest. Yet the elemental principle of problem
solving, focusing on resolving the underlying causes of problems, is predicated
on the belief that enforcement tactics have been or will be unsuccessful in
resolving the problem in the long term. Arrest was repeatedly cited during site
visits as a common tool pulled from the problem-solving toolbox. Traditional
law enforcement folded into the problem-solving paradigm is exemplified by the
Buffalo Police Department, where the three elements of problem solving are
described as strict enforcement, high visibility, and increased communication,
and in North Charleston, South Carolina, where problem solving is conducted
by police teams with no community participation and team responses are
characterized as "tactical" (i.e., enforcement-oriented).

2. Problem solving as purely a matter of local definition, which does not
comport with any of the professionally agreed upon definitions. Cobb County's
inclusion of off-duty work and a new county radio system is one example of
this. In another jurisdiction the problem-solving response to a repeat burglary
problem in a specific neighborhood was to drive around looking for the
suspects' car.

3. Problem solving as primarily an area-based crime attack strategy under the
rubric of zero tolerance or some other local definition: Austin's Crime NET,
Fresno's CRASH and Goldstar components; Huntington Beach's directed
enforcement actions and task forces; Milwaukee's knock-and-talk and
zero tolerance policing; Newark's crime enforcement zones; the joint actions of
North Charleston's SPEED Team; and to a lesser degree, Racine's special
assignment shift all fit this definition. Although Oak Park has formal
police-community contracts for neighborhood problems, the primary police
activity is that of additional police presence.

4. Problem solving that is all but invisible to the observer seeking documentation
or hard evidence but appears to be incorporated into the approach of generalist
or split force officers: Flint, Fort Worth, New Bedford, Maricopa County and,
reportedly, the enterprise zone community policing initiatives in Nashville 
fit this model.

5. Problem solving as long-range prevention activities, interspersed with small
tactical efforts that meet the standard definitions: Sandy City, New Bedford's
school-based activities, and Cobb County's COPE seem to fit this model.

In a few departments, problem solving is either nonexistent or was in the
rudimentary stages when the site teams visited. Small agencies like the
7-member Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Police, the 11-officer Mascoutah Police
Department, the San Diego School District Police, and the Sarpy County
Sheriff's Department were all in this mode at the time of site visits, but major
departments such as Metropolitan Nashville are also included. Despite some
individual efforts and neighborhood initiatives, problem solving was described
as "being insinuated into" the Buffalo department.

Our teams occasionally observed two or more types in a single agency because
problem solving evolved between site visits, multiple types coexisted
simultaneously, or both. At the time of our visit to the Des Moines (Iowa)
Police Department, its Neighborhood Area Resource Coordinator (NARC)
unit blended undercover drug market operations with rudimentary problem
solving; simultaneously, a lone officer and the River Bend Community
Association added to its extraordinary track record of successes achieved with
problem solving fitting the established "Type 1" definition. 

The Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department was at the early stages of
preventive problem solving (type 5) during our first site visit, with prevention
activities being planned under a multiagency Partnership Against Violence and
its Effects (PAVE) and effective if informal problem-oriented policing projects
being done by a new utility squad, whose sergeant had renamed it the
Problem-Solving Unit. By the second visit, PAVE was long forgotten.
However, the agency had clearly evolved to type 1, with problem-solving units
in all districts, SARA formalized in departmental orders, an inservice training
program in problem solving, and problem- solving training for officers and
residents from all districts being conducted by the COPS-funded Western
Community Policing Center.

Street and residential drug dealing remain the most common targets of type 1
problem-solving efforts; signs of social disorder (i.e., loitering teens, gangs,
public drinkers, and prostitution) and physical disorder (trash, blight, graffiti,
and so forth) are probably next. In low crime areas, the problems include such
"mundane" crimes as thefts from garages and motor vehicles.

Organizational support for problem solving. We observed substantial variation
in the nature and extent of grantees' support for their officers' problem-solving
efforts through changes in organizational structure, training, supervision,
documentation of problem solving, and community participation.

Organizational structure. The first set of distinctions among the grantees relates
to how the agency assigns officers to problem-solving tasks. The deployment
models for problem solving mirror those for community policing generally, as
described earlier. The split-force model for problem solving was most common
in the 30 visited sites, followed closely by the generalist model. The specialized
unit was least common, present in half a dozen sites.

In the split-force model, a select group of individual officers is trained in the
problem-solving techniques, then assigned to individual beats throughout the
city or county. Frequently, these individuals are also the community policing
officers for the department, under whatever title that agency uses. Patrol
officers assigned to the same beats may or may not also participate in
problem-solving activities. 

Usually detached from the 911 call queue or given specific exemptions from
regular patrol duties, these problem-solving officers serve as the primary
resource (and often the only practitioner) of problem solving in that beat or
district. Although they often undertake problem-oriented policing projects alone
or are the sole police participant in community-initiated actions, they also work
in conjunction with other police units, city or county agencies, and business and
community representatives.

Under the split-force model, problem-solving specialists sometimes work
together to conduct an intensified enforcement action in one of their areas when
other local resources are insufficient. This situation occurs in Oakland, where, in
response to community priority-setting identifying drug dealing as the major
local problem, five or six officers assigned to separate beats band together to
launch a traditional drug enforcement action in one beat. During the intensified
action, the officers are supposed to "keep in touch" with what happens on their
regular beat; after the special action is completed, the officers return to their
individual beat assignments. Examples of the split-force model of problem
solving are:

--Flint's 36 neighborhood policing officers comprise a completely separate
precinct under the command of a lieutenant, but each officer has responsibility
for a specific beat; NPOs rarely work in concert except with an NPO of an
adjacent beat.

--Fort Worth has committed 89 neighborhood policing officers to individual
beats.

--Lakeland has 27 neighborhood liaison officers supervised by 4 sergeants
under the coordination of a lieutenant. The NLOs are assigned to 1 of 15
neighborhood-based substations, which have been established in the past 8
years, with individual officers working with the community to identify a location
and a means of support for the police substation.

--The Miami Police Neighborhood Enhancement Teams (NET units) typically
comprise 2 or 3 officers working together under a lieutenant in each of the 12
NET neighborhoods.

--New Bedford's Neighborhood Policing Unit grew from 5 officers and 2
supervisors to 22 officers working beats in and around public housing units,
occasionally working in concert on local problems.

--The 10 officers of North Charleston work 10 different beats but once a
week will work together as a unit on a particular problem.

--Oakland's community police officers are each assigned to 1 of 57 beats, with
a Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council formed to work with them in each
beat. Nineteen civilian neighborhood service coordinators are assigned to 3
beats each to organize the councils and assist the community police officers.

--In Sandy City, community police officers coordinate problem-solving efforts,
block watches, and citizen patrols for one of four sectors of the city. Each is
also assigned to D.A.R.E. teaching responsibilities during the school year and
concentrates his or her community contacts and problem solving in the
neighborhoods surrounding middle and high schools.

--The resident beat officers of Oak Park live in their beats (with a $250
monthly rent subsidy provided by the department); patrol by car, foot, and
bike; attend neighborhood meetings large and small; and actively work with
residents to identify problems and find solutions.

--Smallest in number are the two neighborhood liaison officers who each serve
as the problem-solving specialist for half of Huntington Beach.

--Although Newark's community policing units are small crime zone
enforcement units conducting zero tolerance operations in drug-infested areas,
our site team also observed neighborhood liaison officers operating on a
part-time basis. Their liaison duties tend to be adjunct to more traditional
assignments, but their role as problem-solving coordinators appeared to be
similar to that of formally designated positions elsewhere.

The generalist approach provides problem-oriented policing training to all
personnel, or at least all patrol-based personnel, and expects, encourages, or
demands that all members engage in problem solving as part of their regular
duties. Generalist problem solving varies according to the investment made in it.
At the lowest level, the agency may provide no training beyond the mandatory
police academy module, and its expectations may exist only on paper, for public
consumption, with no substantive impact on day-to-day practice. At the upper
end, agencies incorporate problem solving into work plans and evaluation and
supplement it with both top-flight training and structural opportunity (dedicated
time) to engage in it.

Of the agencies we visited, we observed generalist approaches in Buffalo,
Cobb County, the Oregon State Police, San Bernardino County, and San
Diego. The San Diego School Police and the Mascoutah Police Department
were in the early stages of beginning problem solving and should probably be
considered generalists at the time of our visits. The Austin police technically
have a specialized unit approach, in that three Crime NET units of eight officers
each work on problems where there are needs; they are also quietly creating a
generalist force, as they rotate patrol personnel through the Crime NET
assignments every 90 days to expose more officers to problem solving.

The relation between expectations and street-level operations were less clear in
two of our sites. In Milwaukee, all officers receive training in the SARA model
of problem solving, but the zero tolerance operational style used throughout
most of the city appears to incorporate little problem solving beyond
high-volume "knock and talk" team entries into residences named as drug
houses by anonymous callers. In contrast, the leadership of the Maricopa
County Sheriff's Department eschews any adherence to community policing or
problem-solving labels, but deputies' day-to-day operational approach
reflected commonly accepted principles of both.

Los Angeles presents a special hybrid case similar to Austin's. Until early 1999,
problem solving was formally delegated to the senior lead officers assigned to
168 beats (and thus formally constituting a split force model). Under Chief
Parks, however, the senior leads were assigned back to patrol as field training
officers, and sergeants were to be main contacts for problem solving with all
officers involved in the process. Thus, the LAPD is evolving into a generalist
model.

In a specialized unit approach, a small group of officers under a unified
command conduct problem solving where the need arises, either in a specific
district or throughout the jurisdiction. Examples included the six-officer
Problem-Solving Unit in Las Vegas, which was expanded to multiple districts
between our first and second visits; the two-officer NARC Team in Des
Moines; the Huntington Beach Mobile Task Force; community policing teams
in the Metropolitan Nashville's Enterprise Zones; and the Beat Health Unit in
Oakland. The specialized task assignment "fourth shift" in Racine also fit this
model, although it is also the sole example of a temporal model. The SPEED
Team in North Charleston also functions as a specialized unit periodically.

Training. Agency commitment to problem solving, seen indirectly in some of the
site visit reports, indicates varying gradations of investment. There are three
primary dimensions of commitment: the amount of training provided, level of
supervision, and the degree to which problem solving is incorporated into an
agency's infrastructure through documentation and use as an evaluative tool.

The sites were not always consistent across all three dimensions. Austin relies
upon 8 hours of basic academy instruction in problem solving, supplemented
only by video and inservice roll call training, which ordinarily might be
interpreted as a fairly basic level of commitment. However, Austin also created
a community services division, headed by a deputy chief, to track and
coordinate community policing and problem solving. Fort Worth, which has an
extensive commitment to community-level problem solving, promotes only a
grassroots learn-by-doing approach and steadfastly avoids formal training in
SARA, partly as a reaction to extensive State-mandated training requirements.
San Diego, which has earned a national reputation in problem-oriented policing,
only added SARA to its field training checklist in 1997.

At the lowest level of training investment are departments whose only
commitment lies in the small modules provided at the police academy during
recruit training and those with documents which vaguely "encourage" officers to
engage in problem solving, with no further followup or application.
Documentation also tends to be scarce in these venues--though site teams also
found scant records of problem-solving efforts even in more robust programs.

In many sites, it was not possible to distinguish basic training in
problem-oriented policing and SARA that might have been part of a recruit
curriculum from more intensive efforts that were mounted as part of a concerted
effort to foster the technique as an operational tool. And in some locations, the
continuity of training was unclear. For example, an officer in the Milwaukee
Police Department said it "started community policing by bringing in 'power
speakers,' including Herman Goldstein" 8 years ago but also acknowledged that
70 percent of the department now has less than 6 years of police experience.
The initial impact of the power speakers has been sustained and transmitted by
a sergeant to subsequent cohorts in one demonstration neighborhood, but for
new officers who begin their tours elsewhere, it has since been replaced by a
more generic form of problem-oriented policing training.

Supervision. The level of supervision of problem- solving teams or efforts
ranged from no formal supervision at all, to a sergeant or lieutenant overseeing
small units or coordinating diffused specialists, all the way to the Austin Police
Department, which created a deputy chief of staff position to coordinate
community policing and problem solving. Not surprisingly, formal supervision
was strongly correlated with the existence of an identifiable unit within the
organizational structure and much less so with the generalist models. In most
cases, the supervision was that of the community policing component, to which
problem solving was assigned as a formal duty or informal expectation. The
Oregon State Police, and Austin, Flint, Lakeland, Miami, New Bedford,
Oakland, and Racine among the local departments, all assigned command
supervision to lieutenants or higher ranking officers. Austin's Deputy Chief of
Staff was the highest ranking administrator; the Oregon State Police, Oakland,
and Fresno provided for control by district captains, although those are likely
titular duties apt to be delegated on a day-to-day basis.

Some departments have undergone shifts in their command and supervisory
structures. In New Bedford, the Neighborhood Policing Unit (NPU) was
started under a captain and a sergeant, then commanded by a lieutenant and a
sergeant; the NPU is currently under the command of the original captain again,
while the NBPD is in the process of decentralizing command of the NPU
officers out to the districts. A captain had headed Oakland's Crime Prevention
Division, but its functions have now been decentralized to the three area
captains.

A lieutenant commands Flint's North Precinct, which is the entire 33-officer
Neighborhood Policing Unit, with line support from four sergeants. A lieutenant
and four sergeants also direct Lakeland's 27 neighborhood liaison officers.
Lieutenants command the 12 NET teams in Miami, and a lieutenant and
sergeant coordinate the 7 officers of Racine's special assignment shift.

In Fresno, the districts' detective sergeants supervise the daily activities of the
OSS teams; only when there is a concerted enforcement effort requiring the
CRASH or GoldStar teams does responsibility transfer up to the area
commander. A sergeant is the community policing coordinator for Huntington
Beach's two problem solvers and reviews the patrol requests for directed
enforcement actions, whether or not they involve one of the special task forces.
A sergeant supervises and coordinates North Charleston's 10 SPEED officers,
and 2 sergeants are responsible for the 17 community policing officers in Sandy
City.

Problem-solving documentation. Where the site teams did not find a strong
structural mandate for problem solving, we infer that whatever is done under the
name of problem solving is either not formally reviewed or is incorporated
under the general supervisory responsibilities of the line sergeants and district
lieutenants. In agencies that have no formal problem-solving mandate, the
efforts of individual officers are probably invisible to the primary supervision
and evaluation structures. 

Greater commitment is demonstrated in those departments that create a formal
mechanism for recording problem-solving endeavors. Within this category,
however, there is variation: some departments have incorporated recording
forms and encourage their use but have not incorporated the plans into the
agency's records, evaluation, or promotional systems. Other departments use
problem solving as a formal portion of their evaluation process and annual
reports. In Miami and Los Angeles, either the agency or individual commanders
require monthly problem-solving plans from their officers. The Oregon State
Police were also in the process of requiring "business plans" from all members
of the organization, though the implementation phase had not yet reached all of
the field ranks at the time of our second visit.

Because Cobb County, Des Moines, the Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Police,
Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, Milwaukee, Newark, and North Charleston
had no formal expectations for problem solving, documentation was either
nonexistent or incorporated into the agencies' regular crime and activity reporting
mechanisms. Buffalo, Flint, Fort Worth, Lakeland, Mascoutah, Miami,
Metropolitan Nashville, New Bedford, Pocatello, Racine, Las Vegas, and the
San Diego School System all claimed to encourage or expect problem solving
and documentation, and several of these departments showed site visitors
multiple successful examples of creative problem-solving projects. However, in
most locations, both activities appeared to rest as much upon individual initiative
as on departmental mandate. Both Flint and Fort Worth were exceptions to this
general observation: although no formal documentation was required, both
departments directed their neighborhood officers to work in a problem-solving
mode. Miami and Milwaukee had each done and documented extensive local
problem solving in some districts, but projects in other districts were generally
undocumented, and the department had no agencywide mechanism for
systematic evaluation of the efforts.

Formal documentation was required by San Diego, Fresno, Huntington Beach (it
was most evident in the patrol officers' written requests for directed
enforcement), Los Angeles, Oak Park's community contracts, the business plans
expected of the Oregon State Police, San Bernardino, Austin, and Sandy City.
Fresno was the most advanced in terms of formal scanning; Austin made the
most extensive use of problem-solving documentation, archiving case reports for
citywide reference, and incorporating successful local cases into its training
regimen. Los Angeles also compiles a database for reference and training. San
Diego is probably the most advanced in its overall program of documentation,
incorporation into training, and assessment.

Fresno employs a formal "crime pattern" definition for problem identification
and has a mandated response for third-crime occurrences. Huntington Beach
compiles directed enforcement requests from patrol officers who use the
traditional SARA scanning approach to problem identification. Oak Park
documents community contracts, including the obligations of all parties (police
officers, community residents, and partner organizations) in the problem-solving
plans. Oakland's SMART team compiles monthly reports, and San Bernardino
maintains "premises histories" in its CAD system while problem projects are
active.

Community participation. Although many segments of the community and other
agency partners are involved in problem solving, true collaboration was evident
in only a handful of sites. Problem solving appeared to be a police-determined
activity in most of the jurisdictions, and in several jurisdictions it was explicitly
preferred. The police tend to be the agency that (1) learns of the problem,
either through community reporting or police statistics or awareness, and (2)
bears the responsibility for its resolution--but in concert with community and
other agency partners. In Fort Worth and Pocatello, the community appears to
be equal partners with the police in problem-solving initiatives, and Oak Park's
contracts for problem-solving initiatives formalize community participation to a
degree not found in many locales.

The Deli Task Force in Buffalo, which identified patterns of loosely organized
crime in several small food shops, is run with interns, in the face of rank-and-file
opposition to such activities; the impetus appears to have come from nonsworn
individuals brought in from outside the agency. Regular members of the
department seemed contemptuous of the task forces, although the site team
also observed individual efforts scattered throughout the department. Cobb
County's unique definitions of problem solving stem from private sector
interests. Five of the 10 examples cited in Cobb County as problem-solving
efforts were either off-duty details at malls and amusement parks or a
collaboration among managers of low income apartment complexes. Two more
examples involve either the school department's initiatives or those of social
service agencies.

In many locations, what we could discern of the community portion was heavily
invested in particular individuals. The River Bend community in Des Moines
appears to lead the problem-solving efforts: Des Moines is fairly new to
community policing, and the River Bend collaboration rests less upon
departmental initiative than upon the personal working relationship between a
community activist and a police lieutenant who are related through marriage.
New Bedford's entire community policing effort is the result of a partnership
with the local public housing agency, whose director and security director are
active players in police activities in and around public housing projects. In
specific districts in several agencies we visited, problem-solving successes
seemed to have required extraordinary efforts by individual civilians, often a
community activist, property manager, or small-business owner.

Summary note on organizational change related to problem solving. In the
chapter that follows (chapter 7), six factors favorable for change in relation to
problem solving are cited. In the sites visited, as discussed above, we found
evidence, to varying degrees, of all six factors. Certainly the concept of
problem solving is well accepted, and at least a partial shift from directed patrol
toward problem solving is evident in the majority of departments we visited.
The process of recognizing problem solving is apparent in the number of
departments (perhaps a third) that formally document problem-solving efforts.
Building systematic databases to enable all officers to benefit from the
problem-solving efforts of others is rarely found, but--as in Los Angeles--
departments recognize the value of assessing the impact of the process and
sharing information with others. Certainly problem-solving tactics are applied to
problems of all sizes and severity, from neighborhood noise nuisances to
open-air drug markets to street assaults, and problem-solving partnerships to
tackle problems abound.

Prevention

The roots of modern day prevention in law enforcement agencies may be
traced to the community crime prevention efforts of the 1970s and 1980s,
many of which were funded by the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration
and evaluated by the National Institute of Law Enforcement and Criminal
Justice (Rosenbaum, 1986). These strategies--neighborhood and block
watches (Cirel et al., 1977), citizen patrols (Yin, Vogel, and Chaiken, 1977),
surveillance and reporting of suspicious behavior to police (Bickman, Lavrakas,
and Green, 1977), and environmental design changes, commonly referred to as
crime prevention through environmental design or CPTED (Fowler et al., 1979;
Fowler and Mangione, 1982; Crowe, 1991)--evolved into the
community-based antidrug efforts of the 1990s (Roehl et al., 1995). The central
tactics of these early efforts can be readily seen in the prevention practices of
today.

Another strong theoretical rationale for one specific community crime
prevention strategy is the "broken windows" or "incivilities" hypothesis raised by
Wilson and Kelling (1982). Broken windows theory underpins the community
policing emphasis on quality of life issues; emerging zero tolerance strategies are
often erroneously attributed to broken windows theory as well (Kelling, 1999).

Prevention has, in many ways, been the gateway to community policing, as
many of the earliest collaborative interactions with the public have been for the
purpose of prevention. Police have traditionally worked with local children both
formally and informally through groups such as the Boys and Girls Clubs, Police
Athletic Leagues, and agency-specific activities such as fairs, summer camps,
etc. Law enforcement agencies have long had crime prevention officers and
"Officer Friendlys" who provide traditional services such as lectures and
brochures on individual safety, security checks on homes and businesses,
property marking with engraving pens, and children's photo ID programs.

We found that the prevention side of community policing, as defined by the
COPS grantees visited, is highly programmatic. When asked about their
prevention efforts under community policing, police representatives nearly
always cited discrete programs (e.g., D.A.R.E. and neighborhood watch) and
strategies (e.g., preventive patrol and alternatives for youths). They did not
articulate any philosophy of prevention, the logical end product of true
collaboration and problem solving focused on underlying causes.

In spite of the emphasis in recent years on prevention and seeding (defined in
the Weed and Seed program as prevention, intervention, and neighborhood
revitalization), prevention in the minds of the vast majority of COPS grantees
visited refers to specific crime prevention programs, not a more global, diffuse
model of reducing, and ultimately preventing, crime through problem resolution
and active collaboration. Even in the COPS sites exhibiting the most advanced
and complete forms of community policing at the time of our visits, such as
Austin, Fort Worth, and Oakland, prevention was viewed as an adjunct series
of discrete programs, not a component of a broad-gauge, integrated strategy
for preventing, reducing, and repairing crime and disorder problems. More
recently, in contrast, Washington D.C.'s Metropolitan Police Department
(which was not visited as part of this study but is the focus of a separate Urban
Institute study) has begun moving toward its "Policing for Prevention" vision,
which integrates the following components: focused enforcement,
problem-solving partnerships with residents and other District agencies, and
long-term, systemic prevention involving public and private service providers.

In measuring COPS effects on preventive activities by law enforcement
agencies, then, we distinguished among three stages of prevention:

1. Primary: Broadly available programs, intended to prevent members of the
general population from becoming offenders or victims and places from
becoming hot spots.

2. Secondary: Programs aimed at identified high-risk behaviors or places,
intended to prevent crime and disorder problems from worsening.

3. Tertiary: Programs that react to crimes already occurred, intended to repair
the harm from those crimes.

Prevention: Survey findings

We measured an agency's prevention program activities using a list of 11
tactics.8 These tactics had a moderate interitem reliability (KR alpha=0.77)
nearly identical to the alpha for community partnership building activities (KR
alpha=0.76). To measure tactic-specific implementation status around the time
the COPS program was launched, we computed the percentage of all large
local/county agencies claiming pre-1995 implementation of each tactic. To
measure the 1998 tactic-specific implementation status, we added the 
pre-1995 figure to the percentage of agencies responding that they started using
the tactic between 1995 and 1998.

Spread of prevention program tactics. To describe the extent of growth in the
use of prevention program tactics, table 6-12 reports the 1995 and 1998
means of agencies' reports of tactics implemented, as both a count and a
percentage of all tactics listed. The table indicates use of the prevention
program activities in our list grew between 1995 and 1998 among large local
and county policing agencies. On average, our combined sample of COPS
grantees and nongrantees reported pre-1995 implementation of 58 percent
(i.e., 6.4) of the prevention program tactics. By the summer of 1998, agencies
reported a moderate net increase, to 77 percent or 8.5. The change was
statistically significant at the p-level of 0.001.

The tactic-specific percentages in table 6-12 make clear that in 1998 agencies
continued to favor the same tactics within each subset of prevention programs.
At both points in time, the most common primary prevention programs were
drug education programs in schools and police/youth programs; the most
common secondary prevention programs were code enforcement to combat
disorder and confidential hotlines for reporting drugs and guns; and the most
common tertiary prevention programs were victim assistance and battered
women's programs.

Pre-1995 grantee/nongrantee comparison. COPS grantees and nongrantees
began the COPS era at nearly the same point in terms of the percentage and
number of prevention tactics in use before 1995 (see table 6-13, column A).
Grantees and nongrantees reported having an average of 58 percent of the
tactics in use as of 1995.

Tactic-by-tactic analyses suggest that grantees were significantly more likely
than nongrantees to conduct varying styles of preventive patrol (e.g., bike or
foot) (66.5 percent compared with 57.8 percent). In contrast, nonfunded
agencies were more likely to report having implemented victim assistance
programs (70.9 percent compared with 58.1 percent).

Comparative adoption of prevention tactics, 1995-98. Between 1995 and
1998, grantees adopted a mean of 2.3 additional tactics, compared with 1.8
new tactics adopted by nongrantees (see table 6-13, column C). The overall
difference between grantees' and nongrantees' rates of adoption was not
statistically significant. However, grantees' adoption rates did significantly
exceed nongrantees' rates for late night recreation programs (9.9 percent
compared with 2.5 percent) and victim assistance programs (24.6 percent
compared with 12.1 percent).

By 1998, grantees had implemented a mean of 8.6 tactics, compared with 8.2
for nongrantees (see table 6-13, column B). By 1998, grantees were
significantly more likely than nongrantees to have implemented varying styles of
preventive patrols (usually bike or foot, 95.4 percent compared with 83.8
percent) and late night recreation (28.5 percent compared with 17.2 percent);
code enforcement to combat disorder (92.3 percent compared with 87.1
percent); and tertiary prevention programs focusing on the needs of battered
women (83.7 percent compared with 74.8 percent).

COPS grant effects on post-1995 adoption of prevention program tactics. We
asked COPS grantees that reported adopting new problem-solving tactics
between 1995 and 1998 how their COPS grants affected their adoption.
Overall, COPS grantees attributed 59 percent of their post-1995 adoptions of
prevention program tactics to their COPS grants. For the most part, 60 percent
to 80 percent of agencies that adopted each tactic described the funds as
"instrumental" in starting or expanding its use; less than 6 percent reported the
grants allowed the agency to sustain its use through a budget cut; and the
remaining 15 percent to 40 percent reported the grants had no effect (see table
6-14 for details). 

There were exceptions. Only 45 percent of the agencies that began victim
assistance programs and 57 percent of the agencies that began confidential
hotlines for reporting guns and drugs, mediation to resolve disputes and
conflicts, or cooperative programs with schools to reduce truancy during this
period described COPS funds as instrumental. In contrast, roughly 80 percent
considered the funds instrumental in starting police/youth programs or the use of
varying styles of preventive patrols. Some 10 percent of agencies said the funds
enabled them to sustain drug education programs in schools despite budget
cuts. In contrast, more than 40 percent of the agencies that began confidential
hotlines for reporting drugs and guns or victim assistance programs reported
that their COPS grants had no effect on that startup.

COPS grant effects on continuation of pre-1995 prevention tactics. Overall,
grantees reported that 82 percent of old prevention program tactics were
positively affected by their COPS grants. For most tactics, 30 percent to 45
percent of agencies reported their COPS grants were "instrumental in starting
or expanding" use of the tactic; another 5 percent to 10 percent stated the
COPS funds helped them sustain use of the tactic despite budget cuts; and the
remaining 35 percent to 60 percent reported COPS funds had no effect on
their use of the tactic (see table 6-15).

A few tactics were exceptions to this general pattern. About 74 percent of
agencies stated their COPS grants were instrumental in starting or expanding
the use of varying styles of preventive patrols. Approximately 15 percent of
grantees implementing police/youth programs stated the COPS funds helped
them sustain those activities through budget cuts. In contrast, more than 60
percent stated the COPS funds had no effect on their continuation of
confidential hotlines to combat disorder or victim assistance programs. For their
most common old tactics, the percentages that reported a positive COPS
impact (i.e., starting, expanding, or sustaining) were 66 percent for code
enforcement to combat disorder, 60 percent for police/youth programs, 45
percent for drug education programs in schools, 39 percent for battered
women's programs, and 42 percent for victim assistance programs.

Prevention: Reports from the field

Prevention predates community policing by decades. Most of the departments
we visited support traditional community crime prevention strategies (e.g.,
Neighborhood Watch, citizen patrols, and the like) and standardized national
programs (e.g., D.A.R.E., GREAT, and PAL). In many agencies, prevention--
though highly valued--is not automatically included under the community
policing umbrella.

The COPS sites have taken different approaches to integrating their existing
prevention functions into their new community policing initiatives. In some
departments, prevention efforts go hand-in-hand with community policing. In
Sandy City, the crime prevention function has been transferred to the
community policing unit, which is responsible for community policing,
community investigations, D.A.R.E., crime prevention, public relations, and
media relations.

In others, the prevention office continues as a separate unit, less centrally
involved with the agencies' community policing functions. A common
arrangement is that found in North Charleston, where a central prevention office
handles programs with the public, including work with youths and special
events. The prevention office serves to support the agency's community policing
officers, organize the community, and provide support for officer-initiated
activities. In Pocatello, a civilian working in the prevention office has organized
a huge proportion of the town's residents into active neighborhood watch
groups--the bedrock of this and many other community policing programs.
Austin also has a Community Services Unit, which works closely with all
neighborhood centers, provides speakers for neighborhood association
meetings, organizes neighborhood watches, and sponsors an Explorer Scout
unit.

In most departments, prevention is an explicit goal of the organization but is
rarely the first priority. Prevention takes a primary role in only one agency
visited--Cobb County--which bases its community policing program around the
concept of prevention. Sandy City includes prevention among the three stated
goals of the agency: problem-oriented policing, Principles of Quality
Leadership, and crime prevention.

Specific prevention tactics in the sites visited. Our site visit protocols do not
enable us to quantify how much of which types of prevention each visited
department is engaged in, but examples of the various types of prevention
efforts we encountered are presented below. Chapter 4 indicates that 38
percent to 46 percent of agencies report that their COPS-funded officers do
not spend time on prevention activities, yet this figure does not reflect the
percentage of departments engaged in many prevention activities.

Varying styles of preventive patrol. Preventing crime by patrolling problem
areas is not a new concept (See Sherman, 1987), but new strategies aim to do
it more effectively. Agencies use overlapping "power shifts" to ensure that
enough officers are available for patrol during peak activity times. They use
information from the community about crime problems and direct officers to
address these problems by increasing patrol surveillance of these areas. Cobb
County, for example, uses preventive patrol for a low income apartment
complex, the closest thing they have to a hot spot, and reports success in a
program to patrol a mall parking lot at Christmas.

To improve the effectiveness of preventive patrol, many police agencies that we
visited had broadened the form of transportation used. On site visits we saw
officers on foot, horses, inline skates, old bicycles from property rooms,
expensive all-terrain bicycles, and all makes and models of planes, helicopters,
boats, and automobiles. Two of the more interesting patrol vehicles were found
in Sandy City, where community police officers patrol a park in a dry creekbed
("the gully") on all-terrain vehicles called quadrunners, and in Pocatello, where
officers use snowmobiles. These alternate methods of transportation are used to
access places that are difficult to reach by automobile and often make it easier
for police and citizens to interact during patrol.

Foot patrol is organized around the concept of providing face-to-face
opportunities for officers and civilians to get to know each other. The Flint
neighborhood foot patrol program experiment was conducted from 1978 until
the mid-1980s and was extremely popular with the citizens. This return to foot
beats was popularized and rapidly spread throughout the United States.
Ironically, Flint quietly ended the program in 1986 or 1987 when the remaining
foot patrol officers were redeployed to patrol cars to handle the increased
number of calls associated with the arrival of crack cocaine. 

Racine has used foot patrol as a strategic way to gather intelligence on
community problems. During the summer of 1995 the Street Sweep initiative
was started. In this program the chief and the officers walked in troubled
neighborhoods, talking to citizens about crime problems and noting
environmental conditions such as dilapidated housing, which sometimes were
targeted for renovation.

Bicycle patrol commonly has four purposes: (1) high visibility in the community,
(2) increased communication with citizens, (3) tactical advantages (such as
stealth patrolling or allowing officers to patrol parking lots unseen), and (4)
reaching areas not easily accessible to automobiles, such as beach boardwalks
or parks. Bike patrol is believed to make officers more approachable because
they are out of the squad cars, and it is easier, both physically and
psychologically, for the public to approach an officer on a bike.

Citizen patrol. Not only officers do directed patrol. Sandy City has trained
more than 400 citizens, with 365 currently involved, for their mobile patrol
program. Two people patrol specific areas in 2-hour shifts, primarily during the
hours of 10 p.m. to 4 a.m., Thursday through Sunday. They use personal cars
with metallic signs on both sides and use their personal cell phones to call police
dispatchers. The focus is thefts from cars and garages, and the volunteers call
homeowners if garage doors are left open and remind them to take in bikes.
Over the past year and a half the volunteers have made 9,000 calls.

Neighborhood Watch programs. Neighborhood Watch programs are perhaps
the most common prevention efforts found in the sites. They involve the basic
creation of a neighborhood organization and citizen-based tactics of property
marking, surveillance, and reporting information to the police. Many
neighborhood and block watch groups have become more activist over the
years, partly in response to the growth of neighborhood drug problems. Their
surveillance and reporting has become more sophisticated, and residents
increasingly become involved in problem-solving activities designed to resolve
problems close to home.

Youth programs. For the most part, the primary prevention activities directed
toward youths were fairly standard across sites. Drug education programs were
largely patterned after D.A.R.E. Most police/youth programs involved explicit
agency sponsorship of athletic teams, with regular involvement by a corps of
committed officers and participation by at least several dozen youths; a few
such teams had achieved enough visible success to become focal points for
community pride and financial support.

The visited sites have an extensive list of youth programs such as Explorer
Scouts, D.A.R.E., GREAT, PAL, Boys and Girls Clubs, bicycle rodeos, and
Shop with a Cop. Some agencies have developed comprehensive programs in
which many aspects of juvenile life are addressed by programs and services.
The objective of these programs is often twofold--to prevent juvenile crime and
youth victimization.

Several of the agencies visited have developed or participated in youth
programs which concentrate on many aspects of the lives of youths, providing
places for supervised recreation, mentoring and tutoring, alternative activities,
and special training. These programs are generally operated in cooperation with
other local organizations, such as Boys and Girls Clubs, bringing multiple
resources to assist the youths. An example is Nashville's Enterprise Zone,
which was built with funding from multiple sources. Through this program,
children and families in a low-income community receive services from the
Department of Human Services, including case workers from Family and
Children's Services, welfare representatives, and job training program leaders,
in addition to the community policing team.

The Las Vegas Paiute Tribal Police operate ICARE (Indian Children at Risk
Education), which expands the basic D.A.R.E. concept to reflect the acting
chief's convictions that it takes more than "Just say 'No'" to stop drug use and
that Indian children will be more responsive to programs that emphasize their
culture. ICARE educates the children on the essence of tribal existence, such as
knowledge of the Paiute culture, dress, and food. Officer Shin-Av, a character
based on a tribal myth, plays the roles that McGruff plays elsewhere. ICARE
also emphasizes career opportunities; awareness of all types of drugs, including
alcohol and cigarette smoking; cultural sensitivity; and what children should do
when other students come to school with guns. The tribal council provides an
annual ICARE budget of $3,000, which has been used to support field trips
and to create buttons, bumper stickers, and T-shirts.

The Racine Police Department has been involved in an unusual prevention and
community policing project. Along with other community agencies, the
department raised $80,000 through public and private organizations to build a
ranch-style, three bedroom house that serves as the Wadewitz Community
Policing Office. This house will be used as a neighborhood satellite office for 5
to 10 years. After that, the house will be sold to a low to moderate income
family. The house contains a conference room for neighborhood meetings and a
computer training room equipped with donated computers. In another of
Racine's community policing substations, the Racine-based Children and Family
Resource Center offers parenting skills training to teen mothers.

In Buffalo, one district station is located in a facility that will also house a
community center with a gymnasium and other facilities. The Westminster
Police Department (a member of the Huntington Beach Consortium) targets
at-risk youths with Operation Revitalization, a partnership among the police,
schools, community, youths, and social service providers. Operation
Revitalization offers school resource officers, drug-free and violence-free zones
at affected schools, a student police academy, an educators' academy, and
youth and community councils.

The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department sponsors a youth program in which
at-risk youths in grades six to eight attend group sessions to explore new ways
to deal with old problems. They include topics such as conflict resolution, anger
management, coping skills, family and peer relations, academic success
strategies, and peer mediation. The program includes a 1-day field trip, a 2-day
wilderness camp, a mentor-style tutoring program, parenting classes, and
after-school and weekend activities sponsored by the community based
officers.

Youth recreation programs. Police agencies have long provided recreational
opportunities intended to channel the energy of youths into safe and supervised
activities. The police involvement in youth recreational activities may also serve
as a bridge between youths and law enforcement and provide role models for
the youths. Six agencies mentioned having a Police Athletic League (PAL) or a
Sheriff's Athletic League (SAL), and five agencies reported a law enforcement
Explorer Scout program (North Charleston, Oak Park, San Bernardino Sheriff,
Fresno County Sheriff, and Newark). 

Only one visited site (Austin) currently reports having late night recreational
programs, such as midnight basketball, one of the hotly contested examples of
prevention in the originally proposed 1994 crime bill. Other agencies visited
used to have such programs but had to shut them down because of neighbors'
complaints about related noise and other disorders late at night.

Antigang programs. Gang problems are currently seen as a major problem by
law enforcement. One popular response to this problem is the Gang Resistance
Education and Training (GREAT) program. It is offered in at least three of the
sites visited (Cobb County, Lakeland, and Sarpy County). The interest in gang
prevention is high in Lakeland, where a gang prevention meeting drew more
than 300 attendees. Another antigang program is found in Fresno County,
where the sheriff's department has a CRASH Team (Combined Resources
Against Street Hoodlums), which identifies gang members for prosecution and
intervenes with known and suspected gang members. Its prevention activities
include involving the youths in boxing programs and exposing youths to
CRASH Team members who serve as counselors in camps, participate in
youth events, and educate students and teachers, parents, and citizens. There is
also a multiagency team, CRUSH, which has an educational antigang
curriculum.

Curfew/truancy programs. Curfew programs are widely used and are very
popular. A 1995 U.S. Conference of Mayors survey of 1,000 cities with
populations of more than 30,000 found that 70 percent, or 270 of the 387
cities responding, have a curfew ordinance in place, and an additional 6 percent
were considering adopting curfew legislation.9 Curfews are generally thought to
perform two functions: to prevent juvenile crime and to prevent youth
victimization. A literature review done by Ruefle and Reynolds (1995) found
little or no recent empirical evidence indicating that curfew initiatives have an
effect on juvenile crime. However, some agencies have reported some positive
effects of curfews.

Five of the sites visited reported having curfew programs, although others may
have these programs but did not mention them. Officers in the Buffalo police
curfew program found they had no place to take children when the parents
were not home. After arrangements were made with the county Department of
Family Services to staff a shelter for the curfew violators, police began more
vigorous enforcement actions. 

The San Diego Police Department and School Police collaborate in truancy
prevention projects. Lakeland has a truancy prevention program, which is run in
conjunction with the schools, juvenile court, and children and families agency.
Miami reports that soon after the number of truancy pickups around schools
increased, robberies targeting elderly pedestrians declined. Sarpy County also
addresses truancy, and the Fresno County Sheriff's office sends officers to sit on
the School Attendance Review Boards.

Prevention/education efforts. The most commonly cited prevention tactic on our
checklist was antidrug programs in the schools, the prime example being
D.A.R.E. In our Wave 3 survey, 91 percent of municipal or county police
agencies serving populations of more than 50,000 reported starting drug
education programs in schools before 1995. Agencies may be drawn to
D.A.R.E. because the program package is easy for an agency to use. One of
the documented benefits of the D.A.R.E. program is it garners more
understanding and respect for the police from youths. 

Fourteen of the program sites explicitly stated they have or had a D.A.R.E.
program, although one dropped it. In Buffalo, a D.A.R.E. officer was elected to
the city council. Sarpy County's one COPS-funded officer was the D.A.R.E.
teacher. In Sandy City, the responsibilities of community police and D.A.R.E.
officers have been combined. The officers teach D.A.R.E. 2 days a week
during the school year and provide community police services to the community
served by "their" schools during the remainder of their duty time.

Another way that agencies address juvenile crime is by deploying officers to
schools, including officers funded by the COPS hiring programs.10 The
Lakeland Police Department has four school resource officers (SROs) who
split their time between prevention and investigation activities. One SRO is
assigned to the high school, two to the two middle schools, and one to the
elementary schools. The SROs represent a partnership between police
department and the school district, and each partner pays for half the cost of
the SROs. Related efforts are with the juvenile court, Office of Children and
Families, D.A.R.E., GREAT, and a truancy reduction program.

Education on ways to avoid being victimized has been one of the mainstays of
prevention programs. One innovative way of doing this is found in the Nashville
Police Department's program, which provides crime prevention information via
the Internet, including a test of personal risk of crime and an audio file of
self-defense techniques for women. Other education and notification programs
include Oak Park's citizen phone tree to alert neighboring businesses of crime,
Miami's new program to alert neighbors adjoining burglary victims within 24
hours, and Fort Worth's Reverse 911 which, once operational, can be used to
give prevention tips.

Sexual assault prevention. In San Diego, the sexual assault unit is strongly
committed to community policing, with an active volunteer speaker's bureau,
including both male and female speakers, who often work in teams. Their goals
are to raise the visibility of acquaintance rape, to encourage responsibility by
both parties, and to deal with "mixed signals" from both male and female
perspectives. Extensive slide presentations and speakers' training packages
have been developed. News media helped to recruit speakers and to publicize
the bureau's existence and message.

Landlord training. One of the most pragmatic prevention programs is landlord
training. Some agencies work with low income and public housing managers to
screen applicants for past history of criminal activity, vandalism, and/or failure
to pay rent. In Milwaukee and elsewhere, blacklists of undesirable tenants are
shared among landlords. Certainly one result is displacement; a more positive
outcome is the potential problem tenant becomes aware of increased penalties
for these behaviors and pledges to cease these behaviors in the future.

San Bernardino and Oakland provide training for landlords in screening tenants,
crime prevention through environmental design, and crime- and drug-free
property management techniques. In San Bernardino's pilot test period, calls for
service decreased between 25 percent and 84 percent in participating low
income apartment complexes, and occupancy increased 10 percent to 12
percent. Cobb County has a specialized prevention unit that works with
apartment managers.

Code enforcement. Many of the sites visited engaged in some form of code
enforcement as a means of crime prevention. Probably the two most common
objectives were (1) to coerce absentee owners of residential properties to evict
tenants who were selling drugs or to clean up the property, and (2) to coerce
owners of liquor serving or selling businesses to take responsibility for their
customers' disorderly behavior in the immediate vicinity. Oakland's Beat Health
program, which relies on multiple civil abatement processes, is probably the
best example of a code enforcement program (Green, 1996). The code
enforcement efforts we observed differed widely in terms of the extent of due
process required; the community participation that was legally needed,
requested by the police agency, and offered by the affected neighbors; the
degree of cooperation obtained from other government agencies, including
inspectors and prosecutors; and the effectiveness of the efforts in terms of
removing problems.

Drug and gun hotlines. In areas where fear of retaliation is high, some agencies
have found confidential hotlines useful for receiving anonymous tips of illicit drug
marketing or gun-carrying; the tips provide officers probable cause for taking
action without requiring tipsters to testify in court or even identify themselves.
The effects of such hotlines seems to depend on several features:

1. The venue and aegis--operation by a neighborhood church or trusted
community-based organization may encourage residents to offer tips.

2. Responses to tips--responses to anonymous tips included officer drive-bys,
stationing a visible or concealed officer within sight of the alleged violation,
stops and interrogations of individuals, and voluntary searches of properties by
large tactical squads dispatched to the premises of the alleged violations.

Conflict mediation. Police officers become involved in different types of
mediation efforts, including:

1. Informal attempts to mediate disputes among neighbors, family members, or
others in the course of responding to calls. In Oak Park, for example,
residential officers mediate disputes among tenants.

2. Participation in mediating gang conflicts.

3. Participation in or referral of cases to formal mediation processes that may
follow a restorative justice model. In Oakland, a conciliation service provides
training to community police officers to guide them in referring disputants to
their services and to teach them communication and conflict resolution skills.

Environmental design efforts and CPTED. In many of the sites visited, problem
solving and prevention efforts often involve simple environmental efforts
(cleanups and sealups, for example) as well as more sophisticated changes
based on CPTED principles. Lakeland police, for example, included physical
design changes in a comprehensive strategy to address crime and disorder
problems in the Washington Park Homes public housing complex, installing
barriers to prevent traffic flow related to open-air drug markets. In the Parke
Street neighborhood, the strategy included target hardening and physical
improvements, including the installation of no parking signs in drug marketing
areas, improved street lighting, and cleaning up tree trimmings in areas used for
drug dealing to increase visibility. HUD funds three crime prevention specialists
and, although principally focused on public housing areas, they are also
available to neighborhood associations. 

Work with probation and parole. In the past, law enforcement agencies have
rarely had information on individuals in their jurisdictions who are under parole
or probation. Because some previous offenders have a high probability of
becoming recidivists and because supervision of parolees and probationers is
often minimal due to heavy caseloads, law enforcement agencies find ways to
identify and keep tabs on these individuals. For example, the Los Angeles
Police Department anticipates having a computer database available 
to mobile computer users, giving information on whether a suspect is on
probation and, if so, what the terms are (e.g., curfews, geographic location).

The San Bernardino Sheriff's Department has a CAD program that sends
teletype messages to probation and parole officers notifying them of police
contact with probationers and parolees. Lakeland has also started initial efforts
to work with probation. They work with the prosecutor's office on a SHOCAP
(Serious Habitual Offenders Comprehensive Action Program) effort. The
Fresno County Sheriff's Department works with the juvenile probation
department to heighten supervision. A team of probation officers and deputies
knock on probationers' doors and conduct searches in an effort to find those
who are out of compliance with the conditions of their release. They target
probationers known to be violent or gang members. In several sites, probation
and parole officers serve on inspection teams involved in civil abatement, in part
to bring their powers of warrantless searches to the process.

Domestic violence programs. The COPS Office sponsors a domestic violence
program to provide funding to law enforcement agencies outside of the hiring
and technology grants. We did not study COPS-funded domestic violence
programs in any detail during site visits but did identify several noteworthy
efforts. In Huntington Beach, COPS-funded department personnel assist in
community outreach, public speaking, maintenance of a domestic violence
database, and report writing. Des Moines provides cellular phones for victims
of domestic violence. The phone is programmed to dial 911 and potential
victims are assured a prompt response by the police. One limitation is that
the phone gives the dispatcher only the victim's home address, not her or his
current location. Newark and Milwaukee have similar domestic violence
programs.

In San Diego, the Domestic Violence Unit's director sees it as "a homicide
prevention unit" that reflects the principles of community policing. The unit was
established on the recommendation of the Domestic Violence Council (an
organization of some 200 businesses). It refers child witnesses of domestic
violence to treatment and residential centers in the community, victims 
to shelters when appropriate, and batterers to batterers' groups. The unit's
sergeant is frequently invited to speak to community groups. The unit
encourages and uses volunteers, has a hotline for reporting incidents of
domestic violence, and participates in public information campaigns (including
pins, stickers, and billboards) funded by the Domestic Violence Council.

Victim assistance programs. Four of the visited sites drew the team's attention
to their victim assistance programs. North Charleston has a victims' advocate
program started in 1993. In Oak Park, the residential beat officers check back
with victims of crime. Oakland police chaplains can be called to the scene to
assist in crisis counseling, and San Bernardino has a Clergy Council.

Organizational Changes in Support of Community Policing

Shifting from reactive response to proactive problem solving, developing
partnerships with the community and nonlaw enforcement agencies, and 
expanding prevention initiatives generate pressures for organizational changes of
police agencies. As one urban police department says in opening its community
policing training sessions, "Good community policing isn't new to the best
officers. But the organizational support you'll start getting for it is." 

Organizational change is difficult in any organization, and the conventional
wisdom of the past is law enforcement agencies are particularly resistant to
change. A common assumption accepted by many police practitioners and
observers is departments will "most likely require 10 or more years for full
implementation" (Roberg, 1994). Yet in many of the COPS-funded agencies
we examined, at least temporary organizational changes in support of
community policing occurred with rather astonishing speed.

In some departments, turnover at the chief's level and other top command
positions has spurred rapid changes in direction, philosophy, and structure. In
others, departmental leaders have worked to restate the organization's mission,
followed by changes in policy and operation designed to achieve new goals.
This is not to say that change has been easy or that all officers have readily
accepted and followed the new philosophy. Skolnick and Bayley (1986) may
be right in concluding that innovation may require "urging retirement on
members of the old guard." Indeed, when one lieutenant was asked about a site
visitor's sense that his department's enthusiasm for community policing seemed
high in the field but nonexistent around headquarters, he responded, "I've been
with the department for 12 years. I get [community policing], and everyone
who came in with my class or later gets it. By the time we're in charge, we'll be
doing community policing from top to bottom. And [since officers are eligible
for retirement after 20 years] an 8-year transition isn't that long compared to
other departments." Nevertheless, most law enforcement agencies we visited
deserve credit for their capacity to change when new, seemingly sensible ways
of doing business are presented.

Traditionally, organizational change requires several components--setting and
clearly communicating new goals and objectives, changing policies and
procedures accordingly, providing training and support to employees to enable
them to implement the new procedures, and rewarding employees for making
appropriate changes. To implement community policing, these traditional
organizational changes are reflected in specific innovations within police
agencies, including:

1.Revising mission, vision, and/or values statements. 

2. Developing a strategic plan for the implementation of community policing.

3. Changing policies and procedures to enhance beat integrity and stability,
increase community contact, and enhance officers' sense of ownership of their
patrol areas, through:

a. Aligning administrative, patrol, and community beat boundaries to coincide
with the level of problems and natural neighborhood boundaries.

b. Assigning officers to beats permanently or for a significant period of time.

c. Switching from a time (watch/shift) imperative to a territorial (beat)
imperative, making supervisors and officers responsible for problems in the area
on a 24-hour basis, not just during their watch.

d. Flattening the organization to reduce the levels of command and giving
officers discretion to handle problems as they see fit.

e. Providing time for officers to do problem solving and engage in proactive
community contact by freeing some officers from answering radio calls or
increasing the amount of time officers have.

f. Involving units other than patrol and designated community police officers in
community policing activities.

4. Providing training of all personnel in the principles and practices of
community policing.

5. Changing performance criteria to reflect community policing principles.

In the section that follows, we present summary information on the extent to
which COPS-funded agencies have made organizational changes in support of
community policing. Other organizational changes that facilitate the formation of
partnerships and implementation of problem solving have been previously
discussed.

Organizational changes: Survey findings

We measured an agency's organizational practices and changes using a list of
10 items.11 Conceptually, these items were selected to measure agencies' use
of organizational practices more or less commonly introduced in support of
community policing. These practices had a moderate interitem reliability (KR
alpha=0.77). To measure implementation status around the time the COPS
program was launched, we computed the percentage of all large local/county
agencies claiming pre-1995 implementation of each practice. To measure the
1998 tactic-specific implementation status, we added the pre-1995 figure to the
percentage of agencies responding that they introduced the change between
1995 and 1998, then subtracted the percentage reporting they had dropped a
pre-1995 practice since 1995.

Spread of supportive organizational changes. To describe the extent of growth
in the use of supportive organizational features, table 6-16 reports the 1995 and
1998 means of agencies' reports of practices implemented, as both a count and
a percentage of all practices listed. The table indicates use of these
organizational practices grew between 1995 and 1998 among large local and
county policing agencies. On average, our combined sample of COPS grantees
and nongrantees reported pre-1995 implementation of 4.2 of the 10 changes.
By the summer of 1998, agencies reported a moderate net increase to 6.7. The
change was statistically significant at the p-level of 0.001.

As table 6-16 shows, all 10 organizational changes became more common
between 1995 and 1998, but one in particular proliferated more rapidly than
the others. The share of agencies reporting they had revised their mission,
vision, or values statements grew from 44.9 to 82.6, so that its rank rose from
fourth most common to first. Although structuring dispatch rules to maximize
officers' time in their beats also became more common between 1995 and
1998, it spread at a slower rate than others, so that its rank dropped from fifth
to seventh. Revision of employee evaluation measures grew most rapidly (from
19.7 percent of agencies to 54.5), while moving beat boundaries to match other
agencies' administrative boundaries grew most slowly, from 29.3 to 36.7
percent of agencies.

Pre-1995 grantee/nongrantee comparison. Overall, COPS grantees and
nongrantees began the COPS era at nearly the same point in terms of the
percentage and number of organizational changes implemented by 1995 (see
table 6-17, column A). Grantees reported following an average of 42.5 percent
of the practices as of 1995, slightly exceeding the 39.2 percent reported by
nongrantees.

Tactic-by-tactic analyses suggest, however, that grantees were significantly
more likely than nongrantees to report implementing a team policing approach
(43.9 percent compared with 32.6 percent) and to provide the community a
voice in prioritizing problems (39.3 percent compared with 30.1 percent).

Comparative adoption of supportive organizational changes, 1995-98.
Between 1995 and 1998, grantees adopted a mean of 2.8 additional
organizational changes, compared with 2.0 changes adopted by nongrantees
(see table 6-17, column C). The overall difference between grantees' and
nongrantees' rates of adoption was statistically significant at the .10 level.
Specifically, grantees' adoption rates exceeded nongrantees' for introducing
new employee evaluation measures (39.6 percent compared with 20.0
percent), new decisionmaking authority for beat officers (31.5 percent
compared with 18.6 percent), and restructured dispatch rules to enhance beat
integrity (23.5 percent compared with 11.8 percent).

Comparing 1998 implementation status (i.e., regardless of whether a tactic was
adopted before or after 1995), grantees had implemented a mean of 7.0
changes by 1998, compared with 6.0 for nongrantees (see table 6-17, column
B). By 1998, grantees were significantly more likely than nongrantees to have
implemented management-related changes to support community policing
efforts. Grantees were more likely than nongrantees to have implemented 
a team approach instead of a chain-of-command structure (75.9 percent
compared with 61.1 percent), given beat officers new decisionmaking authority
(63.3 percent compared with 45.7 percent) and revised employee evaluation
measures (59.7 percent compared with 38.9 percent). Additionally, grantees
were more likely than nongrantees to have implemented alternative 
response methods (82.2 percent compared with 70.9 percent) and new
dispatch rules (67.3 percent compared with 56.2 percent). Finally, grantees
were more likely than nongrantees to have implemented strategies to provide
the community a voice in nominating and prioritizing problems (70.0 percent
compared with 56.7 percent). 

COPS grant effects on post-1995 adoption of supportive organizational
change. We asked COPS grantees that reported making organizational changes
between 1995 and 1998 what roles their grants played. Overall, COPS
grantees attributed 70 percent of their post-1995 organizational innovations to
their COPS grants. For the most part, 65 percent to 80 percent of agencies
that made each change described the funds as instrumental in starting or
expanding the new practice; fewer than 5 percent reported the grants allowed
the agency to sustain a change through a budget cut; and the remaining 15
percent to 30 percent reported the grants had no effect. There were a couple of
exceptions. Less than 60 percent of the agencies that participated in joint
crime/violence reduction task forces during this period described COPS funds
as instrumental. In contrast, more than 80 percent considered the funds
instrumental in implementing a team approach, changing beat boundaries to
coincide with neighborhood boundaries, and giving beat officers new
decisionmaking authority. In addition, more than 35 percent of the agencies that
began joint crime/violence task forces, revised their mission statements, or
revised their employee evaluation measures reported that their COPS grants
had no effect on these changes (see table 6-18, page 52, for details).

COPS grant effects on continuation of pre-1995 supportive organizational
change. Overall, agencies reported the COPS program positively affected 84
percent of old organizational practices. For most practices, 40 percent to 65
percent of agencies reported their COPS grants were "instrumental in starting
or expanding" their use; less than 10 percent stated the COPS funds helped
them sustain them despite budget cuts; and the remaining 30 percent to 55
percent reported COPS funds had no effect on their practices (see table 6-19,
page 53).

A few practices were exceptions to this general pattern. About 68 percent of
agencies stated their COPS grants were instrumental in starting or expanding
the use of new strategies to provide the community a voice in prioritizing
problems or expanded beat officers' discretion. More than 55 percent stated
the COPS funds had no effect on their continuation of alternative response
methods for calls or creating beat boundaries that coincide with other agencies'
administrative boundaries. For their most common old practices, the
percentages that reported a positive COPS impact (i.e., starting, expanding, or
sustaining) were 53 percent for creating beat boundaries that coincide with
neighborhood boundaries, 52 percent for revised mission statements, 49
percent for joint crime/violence reduction task forces, and 43 percent for
alternative response methods.

Organizational change: Views from the field

Both the programmatic site assessments and the organizational case studies
discussed in chapter 7 suggest a wide variation in the implementation of
organizational change. In interviews with chief executives, we asked about the
changes made in support of community policing and whether they had been
made before or after COPS grants awards. The types of changes made are
discussed below, in order of their prevalence in the agencies visited (it should
be noted that the prevalence counts are probably underestimated because the
interviews did not systematically capture each type of organizational change).

In the chapter that follows, conditions favorable to implementing community
policing are drawn from the experiences of 10 departments on which Harvard's
Kennedy School of Government prepared case studies. We see many similar
threads in the experiences of the 30 sites our practitioner/researcher teams
visited as well. The key importance of the leadership role of the chief executive
officer of the law enforcement agency has already been discussed, along with
the level and nature of supervision from other command staff. In cities such as
Oakland, a favorable political environment (specifically strong support from the
mayor and city council) has furthered implementation; in others, such as
Milwaukee, local politicians have initiated major changes in the direction of
community policing. In several cities, notably Los Angeles, the impetus for
community policing came from crises or strained relations with minority
communities.

Below, we see that a third to nearly half of the departments (and this is surely
an undercount) have made major changes in the organization supportive of
community policing. The most common organizational change in support of
community policing was the provision of training, mentioned by 45 percent of
the agencies visited. The type and extent of training varied substantially from
agency to agency, ranging from a few hours as part of annual inservice training
to a week or more. Problem-solving tactics were the most common form of
training received by officers; as expected, designated community policing officers
were more likely to receive the extensive training than patrol officers. Several
departments reported providing training for supervisors and command staff first,
followed by training for all sworn personnel, in part because of the length of time
required to train all officers in large departments. The training includes attending
POST-provided training, bringing in POST trainers or other consultants, using
current personnel as trainers, and sending officers to national conferences, such
as the problem-oriented policing conference held annually in San Diego.

Several agencies reported unusual training programs. In Oakland, a private
agency, Oakland Sharing the Vision, is funded to train citizens in community
policing and problem-solving strategies. A 3-hour course dubbed "Community 
Policing 101" has been developed and will be delivered to 400-500 citizens in
15 to 20 training sessions over an 18-month period. It has also been videotaped
in five languages to be shown on a local television station. The curriculum is
intended to promote understanding and prepare residents for their shared roles
and responsibilities in community policing and crime prevention. The Austin
Police Department has developed multiple modes of training--classroom, roll
call, and video. The department has developed a Problem Solving Manual and
Resource Guide for training which articulates new roles for officers and persons
of all ranks. The small department in Mascoutah has availed itself of many
opportunities; in 1996, the 11-person workplace reportedly participated in 50
training programs conducted by the State and private consultants. The Oak
Park department has provided extensive training in cultural diversity and human
relations to all of its members; in 1992, 13 courses, conferences, inservice
meetings, and instructional visits were held on topics such as gay and lesbian
awareness, elder rights, cross-cultural communications, and dealing with upset
citizens. Our second visit to the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department
coincided with a 2-day training session conducted by a team from the Western
Community Policing Institute. District-level teams, each consisting of officers
and residents, were led through spirited, specific, and constructive discussions
of how officers and residents view each other's capacities and limitations, their
own capacities and limitations, and problems in the district. After crime and
disorder problems were prioritized, each team developed a plan of attack with
specific, measurable assignments for all members.

Approximately 35 percent of the agencies visited have realigned beat
boundaries to conform to natural neighborhood boundaries or service areas and
deploy patrol and/or dedicated community police officers to these geographic
areas (i.e., "geo-deployment"). Generally, the beat boundaries are defined by
multiple methods, including the existence of physical boundaries (freeways,
rivers, etc.), identified neighborhoods, and the number of calls for service. The
Oakland Police Department, for example, increased the number of beats from
35 to 57, aiming to serve naturally occurring neighborhoods of between 5,000
and 7,000 residents. A community police officer is assigned to each beat; patrol
officers will cover a beat or two, depending on need. A number of law
enforcement agencies have also lengthened the amount of time an officer is
assigned to a given beat to increase the opportunity to get to know, and be
known by, citizens. Long-term assignments in police parlance, however, tend to
be about 2 years.

In contrast, the San Diego Police Department was in the process of collapsing
each district from four or more beats, each patrolled by one officer, into two
service areas, each patrolled by a team; simultaneously, patrol resources were
expanded by breaking up special units and deploying COPS-funded officers.
While senior command anticipated that the restructuring would cause some
reduction in general familiarity between officers and residents, the new structure
was expected to expand the flexibility to free up an officer from response duty
to work on a specific problem-oriented policing project or attend a community
meeting, for example, while the rest of the team covered patrol duties (see
Maxfield et al., 1998, for additional details).

Approximately 35 percent of the agencies visited also reported changing
performance criteria in support of community policing, although several
reported the changes were informal. When the changes were reported as
informal, this typically referred to supervisors taking into account the amount of
problem solving and community contact conducted by individual officers.
Where the changes were formal, personnel evaluation forms were revised and
the changes formally communicated to the rank-and-file. A fairly dramatic
change in performance criteria was implemented by the North Charleston
police chief, who instituted a public "scoreboard" in each precinct, displaying,
by month, each officer's sick days, annual leave, military leave, calls dispatched,
calls assisted, and self-generated activities (i.e., security checks,
problem-solving activities, etc.). The scoreboard, needless to say, has been a
hotly contested measure of officer performance.

Approximately 30 percent of the agencies reported revising mission and/or
values statements. In most departments, it appears these revisions were made by
a committee composed of command and rank-and-file officers. In the
Mascoutah Police Department, all officers were involved. 

Approximately 30 percent also reported developing long-range plans, typically
covering the next 5 years, to implement community policing. In Oakland, the
strategic plan was developed by a group of police and community
representatives. In Austin, a plan for community policing was developed in
1991, then revised and updated in 1993 and 1996.

In a half dozen agencies, steps were taken to decentralize policy making and
give officers more discretion to tackle problems as they saw fit. In Buffalo,
community police officers report directly to captains rather than the lieutenants
who act as frontline supervisors (the Buffalo Police Department has no sergeant
rank).

These policy changes are often related to organizational changes in support of
geographic command, also seen in a half dozen agencies. In Miami, for
example, 12 lieutenants in charge of 12 Neighborhood Enhancement Teams
were expected to act as "neighborhood-level police chiefs" within the NET
areas. They had responsibility for all sergeants, neighborhood resource officers,
and patrol officers, and for community contact, coordination with other city
departments, initiating problem solving, etc. Field lieutenants underneath their
command had watch responsibilities--they were responsible for officers
working each of the three major shifts.

Other departments have implemented geographic command, often summarizing
this form of organizational structure as creating "local neighborhood police
chiefs." Fort Worth began its community policing efforts in 1986, implementing
territorial rather than temporal policing. Today, lieutenants have full authority
over 12 neighborhood police districts, and 89 neighborhood police officers are
dedicated to problem solving with a beat. Geographic commands are
sometimes related to accountability models, with New York's COMPSTAT
model being the most well known. Under these models, authority and
accountability go hand-in-hand, and command staff are held accountable for
what happens in their geographic area, regardless of the time of day or day of
the week.

Other organizational changes were reported by a small number of departments.
These included making beat assignments permanent, involving other police units
(particularly patrol) in community policing, and creating citizen advisory groups.

As agencies deepened their organizational commitments to community policing,
they commonly encountered certain obstacles. Resistance to the community
policing philosophy and strategies from internal and external sources was by far
the most common problem reported by police agencies. All departments admit
at least a few officers, and possibly command staff, have not bought into the
concept; others admit it is more than a few. In some agencies, the rank-and-file
union has resisted community policing not so much because of concerns about
the strategies themselves or officer safety but because it fought hard for and
wants to keep such things as 10- or 12-hour shifts and beat assignments and
transfer policies based on seniority--things that may be changed to
accommodate the different needs of community policing tactics.

The oft-stated view that community policing is not "real" police work is a
double-edged sword. Specialized units and dedicated officers are seen as elite
assignments in which officers work 9 to 5 weekdays, have flexibility, and
exercise discretion over their time--yet are also seen as doing the "soft stuff." In
some departments, jealousy has grown over community police officers'
perceived advantages: beepers, cell phones, casual uniforms, etc. Perhaps the
biggest complaint from patrol officers, however, comes when community police
officers are freed from answering 911 calls, and the call load is high. In all
departments, community police officers respond to emergencies, of course; in
several (notably Sandy City), compromises have been made to have community
police officers handle radio calls during at least part of their shifts.

Even though specialized community policing units carry some well-known risks
(see, e.g., Sadd and Grinc, 1993), many believe that when they are successful
at least for a time, special units are a helpful waystation on the path to
organizationwide community policing. Special units serve to steep officers in
problem solving and community policing, training them while indoctrinating them
in the principles. The best of these officers (such as the senior lead officers in the
LAPD) may then return to patrol as field training officers and proselytizers.
Special units may also show the value of community policing (in solving and
preventing crimes, in improving community relations, etc.) to observers and
skeptics within and outside the department. In Sandy City, for example, a
problem-solving team investigating reports that people were living in U-Lock-It
storage units made the largest drug bust in the city's history after finding four
freezers full of cash and marijuana; unusual electrical usage was one indicator of
the problem uncovered during the assessment phase of the SARA model.

Yet the successes of such units may create a climate of doused expectations
when the chief tries to extend the principles that worked in the successful unit to
the entire department. Former members may feel disappointed because they no
longer have all the resources they had in the special unit. Others may feel the
weight of new community policing responsibilities added to their old duties to
respond to calls. At the stage of conversion from special-unit to generalist
community policing, special morale-building work may be needed, even (or
perhaps especially) with high performers.

Resistance from command staff, supervisors, detectives, and other special unit
personnel varies. The attitudes of first-line supervisors are critical because they
permeate the rank-and-file. Detectives are said by many agencies to be the last
departmental personnel to be brought into community policing. In a few
departments, such as San Diego, detectives are assigned to cases from specific
geographic areas, rather than the more traditional assignment by type of crime.

Another source of resistance to community policing may be seen in the
reluctance of other city departments to get involved in problem solving and
other activities. In some cities--Oakland, for example--their involvement is one
of the cornerstones of civil abatement tactics. Police-driven problem-solving
projects may place burdens on other departments' resources (criminal justice
agencies such as juvenile officers, probation and parole, and prosecutors, for
example, and social service agencies offering prevention and intervention
services), and turf and control issues abound.

Few sites visited have formal evaluations underway to assess the progress and
impact of their community policing efforts beyond using calls for service to
gauge the success of problem-solving projects. And rarely do sites introduce
new community policing tactics under conditions that approximate randomized
experiments or even defensible quasi-experimental designs. A few do,
however, have the benefit of periodic community surveys conducted by
in-house researchers, city agencies, or outside evaluators.

When asked how they measure success, chiefs mostly point to support from the
business community, citizens (although many still have volatile relationships with
minority groups), and city councils and county boards, evidenced in their
approval of funds for local matches and retaining officers. Cooperation and
coordination from city departments in problem solving are another mark of
success. 

COPS and Community Policing: Conclusions

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.

Four of our data collection methods bear on this question, each with its own
strengths and weaknesses. Our telephone surveys provide a national picture of
trends in the adoption of 47 policing tactics commonly described as examples
of community policing, for municipal and county police agencies serving
populations of more than 50,000.[12] However, the survey measures only
agencies' official statements about what community policing tactics they
adopted and whether COPS funds played a role. Our 30 onsite programmatic
assessments provide our teams' assessments of what "ground truth" lies behind
such statements in different settings and what comprehensive strategy, if any,
guides the local adoption of a particular package of community policing tactics.
However, they offer no basis for estimating how prevalent any given situation is.

Our supplemental study of COPS grantees' use of multiple funding streams (see
chapter 3) provides indications of the great extent to which agencies interpreted
grant requirements to support local visions and used Local Law Enforcement
Block Grant funds to augment COPS support of community policing. However,
those findings suffer the limitations of a telephone survey and may not generalize
beyond the very largest jurisdictions receiving COPS grants. Finally, the 10
case studies carried out by a team from Harvard's Kennedy School of
Government and analyzed in the following chapter document examples of how
local chiefs used COPS funds to advance their community policing agendas.
Like our programmatic site assessments, however, they offer no basis for
generalizing to the Nation as a whole.

Among medium and large municipal and county police, COPS grantees and
nongrantees reported they began the COPS era in 1995 at about the same
stage of community policing implementation, with a few exceptions. Grantees
were somewhat more likely than others to report they were interacting with
citizens in neighborhood cleanups and citizen action/advisory boards, while
nongrantees were more likely to be working with businesses and operating
victim assistance programs.

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; and patrolling by foot, bike, or other transportation modes
that offered officers 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 the fuel but not the launch pad for an ongoing nationwide
community policing movement.

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: joint crime
prevention projects with businesses, citizen surveys, techniques for bringing the
community more fully into problem solving, bringing probation officers into
problem-solving initiatives, late night recreation programs, and victim assistance
programs. 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. 

None of the 47 tactics in our list was significantly more likely to be adopted by
nongrantees than grantees, and for most of the innovations listed in the
paragraph above, 60 percent to 75 percent of the grantees that started or
expanded them described their COPS grants as instrumental in doing so.

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 that are commonly labeled 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.

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. Increasingly, traditional enforcement and investigative activities are
being 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, in that they are
unlikely to either fix underlying causes or attract the community support needed
to maintain solutions. Enforcement solutions to stubborn problems are likely to
be short term at best, although when successful, they sometimes encourage
residents to reenter public spaces and begin developing more permanent
solutions.

Another 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,
such as Operation Goldstar operated by the Fresno County Sheriff's
Department and Huntington Beach Police Department's annual 4th of July
response, 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 the 4th of July) and within a
circumscribed area (e.g., high trafficking area or downtown). What might have
been called a crackdown 5 years ago is now implemented under zero tolerance
or order maintenance policies and included as part of community policing. Zero
tolerance policies have been included by some 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 goals
of community policing within a framework that uses community input in setting
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 rejection of zero tolerance
tactics, those tactics may directly undercut the objective of partnership building
by alienating potential community partners.

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.

Prevention efforts abounded in the sites we observed, primarily manifested as
traditional prevention programs now subsumed under the community policing
label. Neighborhood Watch, D.A.R.E., 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. 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 who are
somewhere along the long and tortuous road. A few want nothing to do with it.

Our national survey and site visit results indicate that COPS funding has
accelerated the pace and broadened the area covered by the umbrella term
"community policing." As is evident throughout this chapter, 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 umbrella traditional
quick-fix enforcement actions, draconian zero tolerance policies,
long-established crime prevention programs, and citizen advisory councils that
are clearly 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 Local Law Enforcement Block Grant funds to augment
COPS and local support 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 to the 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. These influences are the subject of the
following chapter.

Notes

1. Four of 30 agencies to be visited served as pilot tests and were visited in
the first half of 1996; the remaining 26 agencies were visited in 1997. Fifteen of
the sites were visited a second time in late 1997 or early 1998.

2. Data collection instruments, survey design, and completion rates are
explained in the methodological appendix.

3. The Wave 3 response rate was poor for nongrantees. A Wave 4 survey
fielded in June-July 2000 reinterviewed agencies of all types and sizes that were
interviewed during Wave 1. In a future report, the new data will be used to
update the survey findings reported in this chapter.

4. Forthcoming.

5. Item wording appears in appendix 6-B.

6. In the context of service integration, Bruner (1991) has expressed the
distinction in terms of three levels: communication, in which information is
shared but no joint activity occurs; coordination, in which joint activity occurs
but participants maintain their own sets of goals, expectations, and
responsibilities; and collaboration, which requires the creation of joint goals to
guide participants' actions.

7. See appendix 6-B for item wording. 

8. See appendix 6-B for item list. 

9. "Cities with Curfews Trying to Meet Constitutional Test," Washington Post,
Dec. 26, 1995.

10. After our site visits were largely completed, the COPS In Schools began
awarding grants exclusively for school resource officers, and the use of school
resources officers expanded sharply as a result.

11. See appendix 6-B for specific items.

12. A report later in 2000 will present findings based on our ongoing Wave 4
survey, which includes agencies of all types and population categories.

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

Appendix 6-A. Policing Tactics Checklist

(DO NOT RETURN--HOLD FOR PHONE INTERVIEW)

This checklist relates to the specific policing tactics listed on the next three
pages. Please do not send it back to us. Our interviewers will begin telephoning
agencies in a few weeks to ask about each tactic. When the interviewer calls,
please have the checklist handy so that the interview will flow as quickly as
possible.

The interviewers will first ask if agencies are using or planning to use any of the
following tactics. Of course, agencies use a wide variety of tactics, and we
understand that many of these items may not be appropriate for your agency--
especially if yours is small. When they ask about each tactic, please respond
with the number below that describes its status in your agency: 

1. We have not done this since 1995 and have no plans to start.

2. We began doing this before 1995, and we have continued or expanded
it since then.

3. We began doing this before 1995, but we've dropped it since then.

4. We began doing this after 1995, and we plan to continue or expand it.

5. We tried this for a while after 1995, but we dropped it.

6. This tactic is not applicable in our jurisdiction.

Second, for each tactic that your agency uses, please tell the interviewer how
your COPS grant(s) affected its use: 

7. No effect.

8. Was instrumental in starting or expanding the tactic.

9. Allowed you to continue it in spite of budget cuts.

10. Caused you to cut this tactic by shifting your priorities somewhere else.

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

Appendix 6-B. Estimation Models for Assessing Tactic-Specific Differences
Between COPS-Funded and Nonfunded Agencies

The analysis begins by testing whether preexisting (pre-COPS) differences
existed between COPS-funded and nonfunded agencies on the implementation
of specific community policing tactics. We also tested whether there were
differences on tactic implementation by the end of the program's third year
(summer 1998). The estimation model can be expressed as:

Model 1.

Where Yit is implementation of a specified community policing tactic for the ith
law enforcement agency at t time point; Fi is a binary variable that represents
whether the ith law enforcement agency is a COPS-funded agency; and uit is a
random error term at t time point. The bs are parameters to be estimated, with
b1 providing an estimate of the differences between COPS-funded and
nonfunded agencies on Yit. As such, model 1 provides a reasonable estimate of
the difference between COPS-funded and nonfunded agencies at discrete time
points.

To assess whether there was significant post-COPS (summer 1998) growth in
preexisting tactic-specific differences between COPS-funded and nonfunded
agencies, we used a "difference-in-difference" model approach. We compared
the difference in the implementation of specific tactics between COPS-funded
and nonfunded agencies by summer 1998 to the difference that we measured
before 1995 (pre-COPS). The regression model to estimate the difference-
indifference over time can be expressed as:

Model 2.

Where Yit is the ith law enforcement agency's implementation of a specific
community policing tactic; Fi is a binary variable that represents whether the ith
law enforcement agency is a COPS-funded agency; and Pit is a binary variable
that represents the ith case as a post-COPS case. The bs are parameters to be
estimated, with b2+b3 providing an estimate of the change over time for
COPS-funded agencies; b2 providing an estimate of the change over time for
nonfunded agencies; and b3 providing an estimate of the change in the
difference between COPS-funded and nonfunded agencies over time (the
difference-in-difference estimate). Typically, the difference-in-difference
estimate provides a first approximation of the intervention effect, with
preexisting group differences removed.

The standard errors computed for difference-in-difference models were
adjusted to account for sample design effects and the correlation of
observations on the same facilities at two points in time. Significance tests were
based on z-statistics.

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

7. COPS Grants, Leadership, and Transitions to Community Policing

Mark Moore, David Thacher, Catherine Coles, Peter Sheingold, and Frank
Hartmann

As explained in chapter 2, the COPS program had two fundamental objectives.
The first, and probably more visible one, was to increase the scale of policing in
America: "to put 100,000 additional cops on the streets." But the Federal
program was also designed to reorient American policing by changing its
predominant strategy and operations from emphasizing reactive law
enforcement to emphasizing proactive community problem solving. To the
extent that the expenditure of Federal dollars and use of Federal prestige and
authority were justified by the aim of producing this change in American
policing, COPS' success in achieving that result is necessarily an important part
of the program's evaluation.

One way to measure the impact of the COPS program on the field of policing is
through surveys of a representative sample of police departments, as reported
in chapter 6. These surveys offer reliable national-level evidence on the 
extent to which authorized officials report that their agencies changed their
practices over the last several years. Programmatic assessments in 30 grantee
agencies supplemented the survey findings with qualitative findings about the
reported changes; collectively, they demonstrated the broad range of meanings
that adoption of a given community policing tactic has across agencies.

Community policing is, of course, more than a collection of tactics. Ideally, as
discussed in chapters 2 and 6, adopting community policing changes an agency
in fundamental ways--in part by intention, but also in reaction to forces that the
programmatic changes set in motion. Therefore, to complement the national
survey and programmatic site assessments, the evaluation design called for a
separate effort to be carried out by the Kennedy School of Government's
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management. That effort focused
intensive scrutiny on 10 police departments chosen because they seemed to
have had varying degrees of success in making the transition to community
policing.[1] The close scrutiny, in turn, led to "case studies," each of which
described how a particular police department attempted to change its overall
strategy during the period in which it applied for, received, and then
implemented one or more COPS grants. The case studies, which are available
as separate documents in this project, were designed to complement the survey
data in four important ways. 

--First, because the cases were prepared through extensive onsite interviews
and the examination of records, they offered a kind of "ground truth" regarding
what lay behind the survey responses.

--Second, the cases enrich our understanding of the survey results by adding
concrete, particular images of what it might mean for a department to "increase
its commitment to proactive, problem-solving initiatives" or to "increase its
reliance on working partnerships with communities."

--Third, the cases present a contextualized, narrative account of the changes that
occurred in police departments. This feature allows us to consider the question
of what role the COPS grants played in independently producing changes in the
overall strategy of a department.

--Fourth, insofar as the cases allow us to get inside the minds of those who
were managing the police departments, they allow us to see how the COPS
grants were used by the managers to help them achieve their objectives. 

These features of the case studies imply that a cross-site analysis of the cases
could make two important contributions to the overall evaluation effort. The first
is to provide additional detailed, but anecdotal, evidence on the extent to which
the COPS program was successful in helping to change the field of policing.
The second is to offer some important clues about how change-minded police
managers could make the best use of the COPS grants to leverage a shift in the
overall strategy of their organization.

The Methodology of the Study

At one level, the conceptual framework for the cross-site analysis is simple and
straightforward: We are interested in determining whether, to what extent, and
how COPS grants changed the overall strategy and operational methods of
those police departments that received the grants, and the ways in which
managers made use of these grants to accomplish these goals.

Defining the dependent variable: "Change in strategy and operations"

Given this objective, the dependent variable in our study is simply "the
magnitude of change in the strategy and operations of the police department
being observed over a particular period." Following John Eck and Daniel
Stern,[2] we define the important changes in strategy in terms of (1) increased
use of "problem solving" as an organizational process, and (2) increased efforts
to "create and maintain partnerships with community residents" on the other.
We were also interested in the degree to which the changes we observed had
become institutionalized, in the sense that the new strategy had been understood
and embraced by department personnel, and that administrative systems within
the organization had been modified to support the new operational processes.

Defining the explanatory variables: The COPS grant

An important independent variable in our analysis (particularly important to the
use of the cross-site analysis for the evaluation of the COPS program) is the
COPS grant itself. We are interested in whether the COPS grant (understood
not only as the grant itself, but also as the process of deciding to apply and
important interactions with the COPS Office itself) had an important impact on
the rate of organizational change.

Defining the explanatory variables: Contextual factors

A significant difficulty in the evaluation, however, is that the COPS grants are
not the only variables shaping the behavior of local police departments. Police
departments are always powerfully influenced by contextual factors as well as
by the grant itself. We looked at three contextual factors in particular: 

--The political environment: (i.e., the extent to which citizens, interest groups,
media, elected representatives on city councils, and mayors and city managers
were demanding, supportive of, tolerant of, or hostile to changes in the strategy
of policing).

--The task environment (i.e., the extent to which conditions in the city, such as
levels of crime, fear, disorder, affected the work of the police).

--The organization's history (i.e., the extent to which the organization's past
history created some momentum for change in the direction of community
policing, or some inertia that had to be overcome if the organization was to
change, or had created a moment of crisis in which the organization felt it had to
change).

One can liken these contextual factors to a river in which the COPS grant is
dropped, like a pebble. The currents of the river can be stronger or weaker.
They can be running in the same direction or working at cross-purposes. They
can be pushing in the direction of changes desired by the COPS program or in
different directions. Depending on these conditions, the COPS grant will
produce a larger or smaller ripple. If the stream is placid, and moving in the right
general direction, the COPS grant may have a very large, independent effect. In
contrast, if the stream is moving rapidly ahead, or being roiled in crosscurrents,
the COPS grant will have little impact.

Defining the explanatory variables: The role of management

An additional factor of particular interest to us, and which has been
accommodated in our analytic scheme, is the idea that there are purposeful
individuals in positions of authority who may use the COPS to leverage broader
changes in organizational strategy. For purposes of analysis, it is important to
understand that viewing the COPS grants as an instrument that can be used by
purposeful managers transforms the status of the COPS grants in the analytic
framework. Instead of viewing the COPS grants as independent variables
exerting a separate effect on organizations, they are viewed as dependent
variables, grasped by purposeful managers, and exploited for the managers'
goals. 

This does not mean no effects could be attributed to the COPS grant itself. The
COPS grants may still be viewed as having an important effect. Indeed, their
real effect may well be greater if they were actively used by strategic managers
than if they simply landed within an organization and did whatever they did. It
does suggest, however, that to the extent that we find some important changes
that can be attributed to the COPS grants independent of contextual factors,
some portion of that must be attributed to the ways in which leaders and
managers used the grants as well as to the grants themselves. This fact is of
particular interest to us because one of the things we are trying to learn through
the case studies is how skillful change managers used the occasion of the
COPS grants to leverage a wider change in their police department.

Figure 7-1 sets out a schematic diagram that presents the basics of the analytic
scheme that have been discussed so far. It says that the observed level of
organizational change is a function of (1) the context of the organization, (2) the
COPS grant, and (3) the managerial interventions that are being made through
and alongside the COPS grant. It also indicates that each of the explanatory
variables can be influencing one another as well as the dependent variable.

In much of the rest of this report, we will be refining and adding detail to the
basic variables in this model, trying to measure the variables in particular
organizations in our study, and developing inferences about which of the
independent variables seem particularly important in determining the magnitude
of the organizational change. In these respects, we are carrying out the usual
analytic processes of social science.

Problems of observation and inference

It is important to understand, however, that in many respects the analysis is not
and cannot be a straightforward process of data analysis and inference. Part of
the difficulty comes in trying to develop operational definitions of what we mean
by variables such as the "change in the strategy and operations of a police
department" or the "context of the organization," or "managerial purposes and
interventions." Another difficulty comes in accurately measuring whether a
variable was or was not present in a particular case, and if present, to what
degree, or in what quantity. A third difficulty comes in making causal inferences
about the extent to which the magnitude of an organizational change can be
reliably attributed to a particular variable.

Perhaps the greatest difficulty, however, comes from the fact that we are by no
means sure that the causal system we are examining is one that is well modeled
by a simple linear, additive system. That system would be drawn like figure 7-1,
but with arrows pointing only in one direction. We think the arrows go in both
directions in this causal system. Moreover, we think that there might well be odd
discontinuities in the process. For example, it may well be that the size of the
COPS grants' impact on an organization could be highly variable depending on
the organization's context--that the very same COPS grant could be highly
catalytic and powerful in one organization and its context, and inert in another. 

If the causal system were like this--with causation running in several directions,
with many critical mass effects, and so on--then it becomes very difficult, and
probably wrong conceptually, even to talk about, let alone measure, the
separate, independent effects of the COPS grant (or for that matter any other
particular factor, such as the use of special units or the locus of change). The size
of the effect depends on the grant and the state of the particular system in which
the grant is dropped rather than on the grant itself.

We think that this is, in fact, true. We worked hard at trying to separate the
particular effects of the COPS grants on the observed level of organizational
change, but we think that the size of this effect does, in fact, depend crucially on
the state of the system as a whole. For that reason, it is never possible to
identify the independent contribution of a particular factor to organizational
change. Furthermore, given the many ways in which various factors interact
with one another to affect organizational change, it would take far more cases
than we have at our disposal to tease out the precise effects associated with
different configurations of factors. That is particularly so once we consider the
myriad interventions involved in managerial action.

The existence of these problems is one reason why the cases are good data to
use in investigating what impact the COPS grants had. They present a
contextualized and narrative account of the state of the whole system and thus
allow us to see the effect of the COPS grants in an interactive, dynamic
system.[3]

Measuring the Change Toward Community Policing

The crucial dependent, evaluative variable in our study is the level of
achievement and degree of change a department makes in implementing the
philosophy of community policing. Of course, a police department can change
along many different dimensions. It can get larger or smaller. Its morale can go
up or down. It can become more or less focused on serious crime and
dangerous offenders. It can become more or less aggressive in its patrol
operations. Its administrative systems and technological infrastructure can
become more or less sophisticated and well adapted to its operations. It can
become more or less corrupt and brutal. Arguably, any or all of these
dimensions of change could be of interest to someone for some purposes.

Defining the change toward community policing

For our purposes, however, we focus on a particular kind of change: the extent
to which police departments that received COPS grants shifted their overall
strategy and operations toward community policing. To answer that question,
one must have an operational definition of what it means to "move toward
community policing": what concrete, observable characteristics of police
departments constitute a more or less significant change in the direction of
community policing.

Following John Eck and Daniel Stern, we define community policing as an
effort to enhance two functions that were always present in police 
departments but which are given new emphasis and importance by the
philosophy of community policing. One of those functions is increased 
reliance on problem solving as an operational method within the police
department. The other is an increased effort at establishing working
partnerships with other government agencies and, most importantly, with
various kinds of community groups.[4] The COPS Office itself also emphasizes
these two functions as crucial elements of community policing.

Movements of police departments' operations along these two large dimensions
that define the strategy of community policing captures one important way of
measuring the change in a police department. In addition, however, we are
interested in the questions of how long the changes will be sustained--whether
momentum generated by the change in the time period in which we made the
observations will be sustained or flag.

To measure the extent of change on these dependent variables, we developed
operational measures that could be observed directly in the police departments
we were examining. This necessarily involved taking abstract concepts like
problem solving, community relationships, or institutionalization and making
them more concrete by specifying the particular things we can observe in police
departments that make us think the activities are occurring at an increased level
compared with the time before the COPS grant arrived. This is tantamount to
describing precisely what is meant by the general concept of "community
policing" as an overall strategy of policing. Needless to say, this has been a
contentious issue in the field. It is contentious partly because individuals who
have either supported or criticized the idea of community policing have big
stakes in being able to characterize what they mean by the idea; the supporters
want to make sure that the idea is a significant and valuable departure from what
has been true of policing in the past, and so define community policing as
something significantly new and valuable; the critics want to act as though the
idea represents nothing new, or activities that are at best a small add-on and at
worst a waste of police time and effort, and so define community policing in
somewhat trivial terms.

It is also contentious because some have argued that the idea is more powerful
not only rhetorically but also operationally if the concept is left a bit abstract.
The reason is that the abstract concept can challenge existing practices in a
broad way, and through that broad challenge, leave lots of room for innovation
and development. In contrast, if "community policing" were codified in a
particular set of practices--if it were, in effect, bottled as a particular "model
program"--then much of the innovation initially stimulated by the broad concept
would simply stop. Instead of exploring the broad range of possible ideas
associated with community policing, the field would simply focus on the
program model.

Still, to determine whether an organization has moved toward a strategy of
community problem solving, there is no choice but to specify discrete
operational measures. We do so later in this chapter for each dependent
variable of interest to us: the extent of problem solving, the efforts made to
strengthen community relations, and the degree of institutionalization of the
change. The measures have not been statistically validated but do reflect the
extensive experience of the case study team in the development and design of
the concept of community policing, efforts to construct definitions of community
policing for the field as a whole, and projects to help departments make the
transition to this new strategy. Our measures are not much different than those
developed by other authors writing about this subject (see chapter 2); perhaps
more importantly in the evaluation context, they are reasonably consistent with
the efforts of the COPS Office itself to define community policing. In any case,
we present below the characteristics we used to define movements toward the
strategy of community problem solving.

Operational measures of community policing: Problem solving. In looking for
evidence of changes in a department's reliance on problem solving as an
operational method of policing, we considered the following items:

1. The extent to which a department's concept of problem solving had shifted
from the relatively superficial ideas of "directed patrol" and "special operations"
(designed primarily to deal with a crime problem by concentrating patrol
operations on particular places and times) to the more complex idea of problem
solving (which includes problems involving disorder and fear as well as those
involving crime, and which requires the police to search for interventions in
addition to threatening or actually arresting offenders). 

2. The extent to which administrative systems in the organization were created to
"recognize" problem-solving efforts, and thus transformed the activity from
something that happened informally at the individual officer level to something
that happened formally at multiple levels in the organization. One version of this
change was the creation of particular structurally defined units committed to
problem solving. However, another more significant advance was the creation of
administrative systems capable of authorizing and recognizing problem-solving
initiatives at whatever scale and wherever they occurred in the organization.

3. How broadly the authorization to initiate and engage in problem-solving
efforts was distributed across the organization. We assumed that the more
widely the activity was authorized, the more of it occurred, and the more that
problem solving was likely to be embedded in the culture of the organization.

4. The capability of the organization to define and act on problems of varying
sizes. Some problems are relatively small in terms of their importance to a
community, the time and effort it would take to solve, the claims they make on
specialized resources within the department, and the amount of help required
from other government agencies and the community. Other problems are much
larger. 

5. Whether the departments were set up to assess the impact of particular
problem-solving efforts or to learn from them. Those that were capable of
doing so were considered further along in their commitment to problem solving
than those that did not devote much attention to assessing impact or learning
from their own operations.

6. The extent to which the organization was capable of enlisting other
government agencies and the community both in defining and solving community
problems. Those departments that were skilled in enlisting other organizations to
help them solve problems they had defined, and (more importantly) open to and
willing to work on problems nominated by community groups and other
government agencies, were considered "more advanced" than others.

In a crude sense, these characteristics became the scale along which we
measured progress toward "increased quantity and quality of problem solving."

Operational measures of community policing: Community partnerships. In
looking for evidence of increased efforts at creating and sustaining community
partnerships, we considered the following indicators:

1. The extent to which the police department took advantage of and extended
previous efforts to mobilize citizens to help the police achieve their objectives.
This included the extent to which the police developed a network of
neighborhood watch groups. In addition, we were interested in the newer efforts
to recruit and maintain a corps of volunteers to help them staff their operations.

2. The extent to which the police department articulated and operationalized a
philosophy of service and responsiveness to individual citizens and citizen groups
with whom they interacted as clients. Related to this was the question of whether
they relied on surveys of citizens as an important measure of performance.

3. The extent to which the police department structured itself to ensure easy
access and continuing connections to citizens through its core patrol operations.
This included the questions of (a) whether the department had defined precincts,
sectors, and beats to correspond to natural neighborhood boundaries; (b)
whether the department relied on modes of patrol (such as foot, bicycle, or
mounted) that encouraged face-to-face contact with citizens; (c) whether staffing
allocation schemes and dispatching rules fostered a continuing relationship of an
officer with a particular geographic area; (d) whether officers were explicitly
authorized and encouraged to attend community functions of various kinds; (e)
whether the department had established decentralized physical locations (e.g.,
storefronts or mobile vans) that offered convenient access to citizens; and (f)
whether the department established specific liaison officers from among
operational patrols to be responsible for work with particular groups of citizens
(whether neighborhoods or people with particular interests such as women or
minorities, or the downtown business community).

4. The extent to which the police formed more effective partnerships with
other governmental agencies, including other elements of the criminal justice
system, and other elements of municipal governance.

5. The extent to which the police department embraced accountability and made
their organization and its operations more visible to individual citizens and
organized groups. This includes the development of citizen academies that allow
citizens to learn how the police department operates, advisory groups and 
citizens' forums at different levels in the department to discuss policies and
operational priorities, and much more open and proactive policies and practices
toward the media. Of particular importance here is the extent to which the
police department becomes and remains open to citizens' nominations of 
important problems to be solved and operational priorities.

6. Efforts to establish close working partnerships between the police and
representatives of minority groups. Part of this concerns the extent to which the
police engaged in active efforts to recruit a diverse police force but goes
beyond that to ask the question of whether the police could actually establish
effective working partnerships with poor, minority communities. This seemed
particularly important because it is in these quarters that police legitimacy is
often the shakiest. It is also in these quarters that the work of building effective
partnerships is often the most difficult, since it involves crossing ethnic and class
barriers and setting aside a history of antagonism.

As in the case of problem solving, these different features of a police
department's capacity to establish working partnerships with citizens define a
ladder of achievement. The more activity and capability we see in these
different realms, the further along a police department has gone toward the
implementation of a strategy of community policing.

Sustainability of the changes observed. In trying to measure the degree to which
the changes we observed were likely to be sustained in the future, we
considered the following indicators:

1. The extent to which the commitment to change remains rooted in the
leadership of the department, and in the expectations of those in a department's
political environment who oversee the department's operations. We reason that
if the commitment to community policing is anchored in the expectations of
citizens, their representatives, and those who lead the police departments--or if it
is anchored in a funding source that continues to supply funds for reforms--then
the likelihood of the changes continuing over time increases.

2. The extent to which the changes were organizationwide rather than specific
to a particular structural unit. It seemed likely that the changes wrought would
be more likely to survive and be influential if many in the organization were
caught up in the change process than if the change was isolated within a
particular structural unit.

3. The extent to which the changes were rooted in the physical and
operational infrastructure of the department--e.g., the extent to which the
changes were embodied in new physical plant, in new information technologies,
and in new operational procedures. The tighter the connection between the
changes and these underlying infrastructures, the more durable and influential
the changes were likely to be.

4. The extent to which the changes were embodied in revised administrative
systems that guide the organization's operations. Particularly important here are
the personnel systems that police rely on to recruit, select, train, evaluate,
compensate, promote, and discipline officers. Also important are the systems
the department uses to allocate resources, monitor operations, and measure the
overall effectiveness of a department.

5. The extent to which the changes came to redefine the cultural
understandings and commitments of the department--the extent to which
employees at all levels of the organization bought in to the idea of community
policing and understood and believed in its principles. Of particular interest was
a kind of "generational" effect that was produced by a change in the proportion
of people in a department who had grown up under the new system rather than
the old system of policing.

Again, these characteristics form a scale of achievement. If many of the things
we were looking for were present, we considered the changes to have been
effectively "institutionalized." If none of them were present, we viewed whatever
changes we had seen as quite vulnerable.

Findings from the cases: Significant levels of achievement and changes in
organizational strategy

Using these definitions and criteria, table 7-1 presents our preliminary
assessments of the levels of community policing, and the magnitude of the
changes we observed, in the 10 cases we examined. In examining this table,
two points are worth keeping in mind. First, it is very hard to change the
fundamental strategy of an organization. This is true even in the private sector,
with the concentration of authority that executives enjoy, with the powerful
methods they have of measuring their performance, and with the power to hire
and fire employees and shift resources when change is required. It is even more
true in the public sector where authority is less concentrated, where
measurements of performance are more uncertain, and where the powers to
direct and control personnel and transfer resources are much more limited.
Therefore, even small changes toward a new strategy are often events worth
praising. Second, eight of the departments in our sample were chosen because
they were high achievers. We chose two whose accomplishments seemed closer
to the mean. However, like the children in Lake Wobegon, all of the
departments we examined were equal to or above average. Consequently, when
we use words like "low level, low rate of change" we are making these
judgments against a high standard.

Given these important caveats, table 7-1 suggests the following conclusions:

--First, by the time of our visits in 1997 and 1998, 8 of the 10 departments had
gone a long way toward the successful implementation of a philosophy of
community, problem-solving policing. 

--Second, in six of the eight departments that had gone a long distance in
implementing community policing, we thought there was a high or medium-high
degree of institutionalization. In two others, we thought the changes were less
well established.

Of course, these favorable results should not be surprising. Eight of the 10
departments were selected precisely because we believed they were among the
organizations that had gone farthest in implementing the strategy of community
policing. Therefore, these results tell us nothing about how common this level of
success is in the Nation at large. Still, it was heartening to find that some police
departments had, in fact, advanced the frontiers of community policing. 

Moreover, some of these departments achieved a remarkably high level of
success in advancing toward community policing in a relatively short period,
starting from a relatively disadvantaged position. Many of the highest achieving
departments in 1997 occupied this position because they started early in the
direction of community policing, and that experience provided a platform they
could use to advance farther. (This characterizes Colorado Springs, Portland,
St. Paul, and Spokane.) A few departments, however, (notably Lowell) started
only recently toward community policing, and nonetheless made rapid progress
and seem to have institutionalized some of the important changes. Therefore, we
see not only significant levels of accomplishment in our cases but also some
dramatic and rapid changes.

It is also significant, we think, that for the departments that moved later from
lower bases of performance, the COPS grants played a crucially important role
in initiating and catalyzing change. This was particularly true in Lowell. Again,
this tells us nothing about how often this effect occurred nationally. However,
there are data showing the existence of an effect in at least some departments.

This is all the good news. It is also worth noting some less encouraging news as
well. Although many departments seemed to move pretty far in the direction of
increasing the quantity and quality of problem-solving efforts, they did less well
in developing their capacity for establishing and maintaining community
partnerships. By our assessment, five departments achieved high levels of
performance in establishing community partnerships. In addition, five made big
or medium to big changes in this dimension of performance. There are some
standouts in this domain: Portland's strong links to a network of community
associations, and St. Paul's well-established connections to minority
communities, establish benchmarks for the rest of the field. However, many
departments did not get as far toward effective community partnerships as they
did toward problem solving.

Particularly troubling is the fact that success in establishing working partnerships
with minority communities was spotty at best. The only clear success stories
here were the work that the St. Paul Police Department did with the Hmong. In
addition, Lowell and Portland have made solid gains in working with their
minority communities. Spokane made a major effort to strengthen its
relationships with its minority communities, but it is not clear whether that has
produced an important change in the attitudes of the minority community.
Apparently, establishing effective partnerships with community groups remains
more challenging to police departments than the development of a proactive
capacity for problem solving, and it remains particularly challenging to establish
effective working relationships with poor minority groups--just as it has always
been.

Accounting for High Levels of Achievement and Rapid Change: The Role of the
Context and Environment

One explanation for the high levels of achievement of the departments we have
reviewed is that the particular context in which they were operating made it
necessary or inevitable that they would achieve high levels of success. In this
view, neither the COPS grant itself nor the particular managerial efforts
undertaken to produce a change in the strategy of policing could claim to have
contributed much to their success.

Table 7-2 presents our preliminary assessments of whether the context of each
department was favorable, neutral, or unfavorable to the implementation of
community problem-solving policing. A series of analyses of the impact of each 
of these features of the context on the degree of organizational change revealed
that the different parts of the context cannot account by themselves for the
observed levels of organizational change. This suggests there is some role for
leadership to play in determining how far a department can go in implementing
community policing. We will explore how leadership was able to overcome
some of the problems in the contexts later in this section. Before doing so,
however, it is useful to offer some tentative observations about the relative
importance of different aspects of the context from a more nuanced and detailed
examination of the cases than a table alone can capture.

First, it seems clear that a favorable or neutral political environment helps. None
of the cases we observed found themselves in an environment that was
completely hostile to community policing. Several, however, found themselves
in situations where political interest seemed either ambivalent or indifferent. This
created an opportunity for a reform-minded chief to forge ahead if he wanted to
do so, and that is what they did (Fremont, Spokane).

Second, community policing also gets a boost when there is a strong local
tradition of neighborhoods, joined with a tradition of neighborhood governance
(Portland, St. Paul). Portland's strong communities date back to 1974 Model
Cities efforts that established the Office of Neighborhood Associations. It is
weaker when it is hard to find these coherent communities, or when city
government as a whole is not organized in these ways (Savannah, Fremont).
Knoxville had a "torrent of community organizing" at about the same time as they
were introducing community policing, and that seems to have aided their efforts
to implement community problem-solving policing.

Third, the supply of financial resources that translated into manpower in the
force seemed to be very important. Several departments had important
initiatives stopped by budget cuts that hit in the early and mid-1980s. However,
these cuts seemed to pave the way for dramatic changes when cuts were
restored in subsequent years, and then supplemented with Federal support. The
most favorable budget trajectory was one in which cuts were followed by
increases at the time that the new initiatives were being launched. (On this
subject, it is important to note that resources available to a department were
importantly influenced by managerial action and leadership. In two cities, chiefs
did political work associated with passing bond issues. In virtually all, they built
strong political bases that would ensure a flow of tax resources. In many cities,
they supplemented these funding streams with grants.)

Fourth, in several cases, some of the strongest pressures and most important
cultural events that triggered change came from significant problems in handling
minority groups. These could have been chronic problems that flared up
predictably with police operations (Spokane, Savannah). However, in other
cases, the problem came from the arrival of new groups that needed to be
integrated into the community (St. Paul).

Fifth, it seems that there are some kinds of problems that community policing is
well adapted to handle. This includes problems with housing projects, or with
drugs and disorder. When these problems are present, or when they develop as
important problems in a community, community policing gets a boost (Lowell,
Portland, Savannah).

Sixth, community policing is aided by a track record of applying for grants,
receiving grants, and having a history of innovativeness. Many, though not all, of
the most successful departments we observed participated in past waves of
innovation that have swept over policing, while the two least successful agencies
had not had this experience. These waves of innovations included many specific
programs: those focused on enhancing patrol and investigative effectiveness
(e.g., ICAP, rescheduling of patrol force); those focused on more proactive
prevention (Youth Programs, CPTED); and those focused on building
community relations (Neighborhood Watch, Team Policing). Some of these
innovations--those that focused narrowly on improving the capacity of the
police to apprehend offenders through patrol and investigation--could
conceivably have acted as a trap that anchored police in traditional methods.
However, as it turned out, experience with past waves of reform instead acted
as a platform for advances in community policing. 

As reform picked up speed, organizational managers built successfully on the
most progressive aspects of their innovative past, such as proactivity, the use of
information, and the interest in prevention. Particularly important was having had
some experience with team policing. Fremont and St. Paul drew on this
experience in their own organizational past to help develop community policing
reforms, and other agencies were able to import it in various ways: Colorado
Springs hired chiefs who had been police officials in Los Angeles and brought
their experience with team policing with them; and Portland drew on the
experience of the County Sheriff's Department in team policing. It is as though a
general experience with innovating, and more particular experience with
particular kinds of innovation, prepared the department for making rapid
progress in implementing community policing. 

Seventh, the cases suggest that successful implementation and institutionalization
of community policing is aided by a generational effect. People who remember
team policing or department turnover while a manager tries to implement
community policing seem to have an important effect on the level one can
achieve and the extent to which the changes become internalized (Portland,
Knoxville, St. Paul).

Eighth, for many departments we observed, it was crucial that the chief and
some key members of his staff be connected to regional or national networks of
police executives who were talking about new philosophies of policing (all
cases). Sometimes departments received the benefit of national experience by
importing chiefs who had been exposed to the ideas in other departments
(Colorado Springs, Fremont, Spokane, Riverside, and Albany). Other times,
the exposure came from deliberate efforts by local chiefs to learn about and
expose their staffs to the new professional currents. (All eight cases achieved
high levels of community policing, as well as Riverside.)

Ninth, it seems the pace of change (if not the level of achievement) can be
linked to the particular time in which a department initiated its reform efforts.
Those departments that began their changes long ago tended to move more
slowly to significant levels of achievement (St. Paul, Colorado Springs,
Knoxville, Portland, Spokane). Those that started later often made very rapid
progress simply by relying on the experience of those who had come before
(Lowell, Fremont, Savannah). In some cases, the "late adopters" may have
leaped ahead in terms of not only the rate of change but also the absolute level of
accomplishment (Lowell).

Accounting for High Levels of Achievement: The Role of Leadership

The final variable we consider important in accounting for observed levels of
achievement and rates of change is leadership: the decisions made and actions
taken by those with formal or informal authority over an organization. In some
ways, leadership is the most important factor for us to examine. This is true for
two reasons. First, it is this variable that is particularly well measured through
the use of case studies, since we can talk to the managers and find out what
they were thinking, and we can observe some of their more important actions
and initiatives over a period of time. Second, if we can learn what the most
skilled managers did to exploit the opportunity represented by a particular
context and a COPS grant, we might be able to improve the overall
performance of the COPS program by teaching managers to make better use of
the opportunities. 

In assessing the impact of leadership, the first job is to identify the locus of
leadership: who, or what team, took the initiative to make significant changes in
the department. The second, more elaborate job is to determine (to the extent
that our data permit) which managerial interventions seem to be necessary or
particularly powerful in producing high levels or rapid paces of change.

The impetus for change and the locus of leadership

Leadership begins with some individual or team taking the responsibility for
initiating a change process. Usually, this is also occasioned by some event or
shared understanding about why change is necessary: the "driver" of the change
effort. Some important possibilities include a fiscal crisis that forces a change in
the way that a department can operate; a political crisis involving the loss of
significant support for the police department and its leaders in the city at large,
in particular parts of the community, or among the officers themselves; or some
emergent problems that the police department finds difficult to handle. In some
cases, the impetus for change could come simply from a professional aspiration
for excellence. 

Our review of the 10 cases reveals evidence for all of these different forces for
change. Virtually all of the cases show that the departments had faced fiscal
crises earlier in the 1980s, but in the period in which rapid change occurred, the
departments had usually received a flow of fresh resources. Concerns about the
quality of community relationships were an important driver of change in 5 of the
10 departments. Concerns about crime control effectiveness were the important
drivers in only 2 of the 10 cases. One of these cases, however, achieved a very
rapid rate of change from a standing start (Lowell). This is one case in which
concerns for crime control animated an important shift toward community
policing. Surprisingly, however, one of the most important drivers of change was
professional aspiration. In 4 of the 10 cases, there was little else in the external
environment--no current fiscal crisis, no epidemic of crime, no flashpoint in 
police-community relations--to account for the initial decision to embark on
community policing. Two of these agencies (Colorado Springs and Knoxville)
went on to achieve high rates of change and institutionalization. 

Of course, many of these forces for change were just as visible in the agencies
that made less progress toward community policing as they were in the highest
achievers: It goes without saying that having crises in the environment, or having
professional aspirations, does not guarantee that an agency will successfully
make the transition to community policing. What is interesting is that among the
high achievers (and for that matter among all 10 agencies that tried to make the
transition to community policing), a variety of forces made up the initial impetus
to change. No one force dominated, and in a large share of cases, the decision
to embark on community policing involved the professional aspirations of the
agency, its managers, and sometimes its political leadership (who, as in the case
of Knoxville, wanted to restore pride in the innovativeness of its police
department) more than it involved any specific shock in environment, such as a
high crime rate or a community relations scandal.

Given a reason to change, one must look next at who takes it upon themselves
to make the change. The leadership could come from outside the department or
inside. The responsibility for change could be picked up within a police
department by an individual or by a team. The responsibility for driving the
change could stay in the same hands over a long period of time, or it could be
deliberately handed off from one person to another, or it could simply be picked
up by another person if one person or one team tires.

A review of our 10 cases showed that in no department did the initiative for
change remain entirely outside the department or stay entirely inside the
department. There always seemed to be some partnership between outsiders
and insiders. This is a natural result of the shared responsibility for running police
departments. A kind of team had to develop between those outside and those
within the department. By far, the most common pattern was for the initiative for
change to start outside the department (usually in the city's political leadership)
and then find some expression inside the department. This pattern, however,
produced both relatively high and relatively low rates of change. The pattern that
begins with strong internal advocates and reaches out to external support
occurred less frequently, and produced only medium rates and institutionalization
of change.

Managerial interventions 

Once a team exists, in order for it to affect the way a law enforcement agency
actually operates, it has to take action. The team members must undertake
concrete reforms of a police department's administrative systems in order to
advance community policing along the three dimensions we have identified. We
examined eight different kinds of managerial interventions, searching for the
kinds of interventions that seemed particularly important and helpful in making
organizational changes.

Political management. Among the most important managerial challenges facing
those who would manage change in a police department are the actions they
can take to influence the political environment in which they find themselves. Of
course, one could take the view that, from the perspective of a chief, or a
leadership team that included the chief, these features of the political
environment have to be viewed as fixed and unmovable. But that is not actually
true. When the leadership team includes the mayor or city manager, the political
environment can obviously be influenced by the chief. However, even when the
mayor or city manager is not central to the leadership team, the political
environment can be reached and influenced by police leaders.

The most dramatic examples of the role of external political management in
supporting the change efforts come from the cases of Colorado Springs and
Spokane. In both of these departments, the chiefs with their leadership teams
essentially built the political support necessary to pass bond issues that
increased the flow of resources to their departments.

More generally, the managers in our "high change" cases seemed to be
unusually interested in and adept at politics. Several took higher office at some
stage in the change process. Several others ran for office while continuing to run
their departments. Several focused on building connections with the business
community (St. Paul, Lowell). Others benefited from the existence of a dense
network of community groups to which they became responsive (Portland). Still
others showed a great deal of imagination in finding community support by
organizing it on different bases when geographically oriented citizen groups
concerned about crime did not appear (Fremont).

The net result of all of these political management efforts was to change the
image of the police department, and to build a wide network of support. That
network of support began with the mayor and city manager, but then also
embraced the Federal Government, the media, and various community groups.
This ensured continuing support for the process of change. In effect, the
political management efforts "capitalized" the change effort both by providing
resources and creating the room to innovate.

Defining mission, strategic planning. Another common managerial intervention
was to go through more or less elaborate, and more or less participatory,
efforts to define the mission and values of the organization and to develop a
strategic plan. One might think that this would be the first step in initiating a
reform effort. Interestingly, however, the strategic planning effort often came
after the organization had taken some unplanned community policing initiatives
(such as Portland's Overlook Neighborhood effort, Lowell's flagship precinct in
Centralville, and the Help-P Unit and Team Policing Pilot Project in St. Paul).[5] 

Still, at some stage, and usually fairly early on, all of these departments
self-consciously sat down to plan the remainder of their change efforts. The
sessions varied with respect to things like the extent of participation, the
explicitness of the plans they produced, and the assignments of accountability
that they made. (They varied also, of course, with respect to what direction
they proposed.) However, every agency went through some version of the
effort. The most effective efforts had three characteristics: They carried authority
to guide and coordinate future reforms, they were broadly participatory, and
they paid attention to a need to build planning capacity.

First, not all departments created plans that were equally elaborate or equally
powerful, and underdeveloped plans proved troublesome. Portland wrote
perhaps the most elaborate plan in the group, and in doing so, locked itself into
a detailed plan for reform. Drawing on massive input both inside and outside the
Bureau, it laid out several broad goals and hundreds of specific tasks. The
finished document was then used as the basis for a whole new structure of
resource distribution and accountability. By contrast, Albany's plan was fairly
minimalistic, and the department did not follow through on many elements of it
precisely because the steps were not clear, and accountability was not fixed.
That failure proved damaging to the overall reform effort.

With respect to participation, most agencies made extensive efforts to generate
participation from all ranks, hoping that the planning sessions would accomplish
the important cultural effect of getting the officers to understand and buy in to
the process of reform. Occasionally, however, planning had the opposite effect
by excluding a key group. Riverside is a case in point where the department
excluded sergeants from initial planning sessions, and many RPD members
report that this was one reason (though not the only one) that group never came
on board.

Finally, if a sophisticated (but not stultifying) plan is important, and planning
must be broadly inclusive, then it becomes important for agencies to develop
the capacity to engage in this complicated activity. In many of these agencies,
that task proved challenging. For example, in Knoxville, one department
member reports that the first strategic planning session was difficult: "None of us
had ever really done anything like that before, and we all were asked to come
up with goals and objectives. Well quite frankly, most of them didn't have a clue
what a goal and an objective was." 

To develop the needed capabilities, some agencies turned to outside
consultants for assistance. Importantly, they did not use COPS grants to fund
these activities, and indeed the bulk of COPS money could not be used for
these purposes. The exceptions were the relatively small DEMO and CCP
grant programs. Of the eight high-change agencies, only Knoxville drew on
COPS funding (specifically, a DEMO grant rolled over from BJA) to fund such
activity, hiring a consultant to help guide a midterm community planning effort.
So, while this was an important managerial intervention, and one where funding
did play some role, it was not one that was widely supported by COPS grants.

Organizational restructuring. Organizational restructuring played a central part in
most of these community policing efforts. Sometimes the reorganization focused
on the creation of special units, other times on changes within the existing units.

Every department except Knoxville created special units for problem solving
and fighting disorder, and most created other special units focused on specific
communities (such as schools) or specific crime problems (such as domestic
violence). Many of these units contributed to community policing by developing
experience with new skills and ideas, institutionalizing the precarious values of
community policing by giving them a protected space in which to grow.[6]
COPS funding was often central to their development, since the alternative was
robbing the patrol force at large to staff them. Doing that made an already
difficult reform even more difficult, since it inspired jealousy and complaints that
workload had been displaced. 

Nevertheless, if creating new special units with grant funding appeared to be all
but necessary for the most dramatic reform efforts, it was not sufficient for
them. Departments such as Albany and Riverside had some success with
special units but could not leverage their gains to catalyze change in the
department as a whole. We will return to this problem below.

In addition to special units, reorganizations of existing units--especially patrol
and investigations--also played a role in most of these efforts. Particularly
visible were efforts to decentralize patrol operations and create
quasi-permanent assignments for both officers and their supervisors. However,
interestingly, many of these departments already had something like "beat
integrity" for their patrol officers. The important new changes affected sergeants
and middle managers, who had formerly supervised officers throughout their
cities but now took on geographical assignments. 

In any case, the content of these efforts (for example, the size of beats or
districts) does not go very far in distinguishing the most successful cases from
the others, so geographical decentralization does not seem to be the magic
bullet for community policing that some have seen it as. Moreover, grant
funding played little role in them. They required more in the way of imagination
than funding, and the great bulk of COPS funding simply could not be used for
the sorts of "soft" expenses (like consultants) that could be useful to them. 

Reengineering the technical core. Three reforms to the technical core of
department operations also played a central role in most of the change efforts
described in these cases: those that affect the burden of 911 calls officers must
handle, provide structure for problem solving, and influence the ways in which
officers use their discretion. Where departments neglected these reforms, as in
Albany and Lowell, the agency either made some other reform designed to
compensate for them (as with Lowell's massive precinct system), or else
important aims of community policing simply were not realized (as with
Albany's failure to develop any significant problem-solving capacity). The other
agencies advanced their community policing efforts by finding new ways to free
up patrol officer time for problem solving, to recognize and give structure to that
work, and to recognize and encourage officer discretion. 

COPS funding played little role in most of these reforms, which again
demanded more imagination than funding. The main exception was in 
interventions that sought to affect the burden of 911 calls officers needed to
handle, to free up time for problem solving and other community policing
activities. Surprisingly, only two of the agencies studied used COPS hiring to a
significant extent for the explicit purpose of freeing up time for community
policing activities. The other departments either minimized hiring grants
altogether, targeted grant-funded hires in special units (as described above), or
used grant funding principally to meet traditional needs rather than explicitly to
free up extra time in the patrol force for community policing. Even if they did
intend the new hires to have more significant impacts, these agencies did not
take steps to identify the free time that these hires created, nor to ensure that it
would be used for community policing activities like problem solving.

Those departments that pursued nontargeted hiring grants did not flaunt the
COPS grants' community policing requirement. They reasonably claimed that
their entire patrol forces were committed to community policing in general (and
"interacting with the community" in particular), so they felt that any hiring
satisfied the grant requirement. And indeed it did. The questions here are
whether COPS money--in addition to putting more officers on the street--
necessarily catalyzes changes in organizational strategy, and under what
conditions it does so to the greatest extent. The answer is clearly that not all
uses of COPS money do lead to overall shifts in organizational strategy, and in
particular that there is little reason that the nontargeted hiring grants had this
effect in these cases.

In short, the nexus between general (as opposed to targeted) hiring and
organizational change is not tight: It seems to be neither necessary nor sufficient
to producing organizational change. First, it is not necessary because even if
workload is a problem in community policing, other reforms are available to
address it, such as call diversion and changes to deployment or scheduling; in
fact, widely available money for hiring may simply relieve pressure to focus on
those sorts of reforms in favor of hiring. Second, it is not sufficient because
there are many ways to use the free time workload reduction creates. 

Developing a physical infrastructure. Many departments also sought to give a
boost to their community policing efforts by developing a physical infrastructure
that both symbolized and supported these goals, such as the creation of new
neighborhood police stations, or storefronts. Other departments bought various
kinds of equipment (like new guns and vests for officers) to enhance morale in
the department while it was undergoing change. 

Given the expense of these efforts and the unavailability of general fund money
for them, one might expect grant money to play a large role. And indeed, places
like Fremont and Lowell did use grant money to help pay for some of their new
facilities. 

However, Title I COPS money could not be used for these expenses. In any
case, some agencies--like Fremont and Knoxville--are finding that they can
create a sense of organizational accountability to neighborhoods without
embedding it in physical structures. Others have found that while new physical
infrastructure and equipment have some potential to improve morale and build
support, it is not a silver bullet. Therefore, the lack of COPS funding for this
intervention probably did not hinder the progress of any of these agencies.

Information infrastructure. Improvements to a department's automated
information infrastructure can sometimes support community policing (when, for
example, it provides officers with cell phones that allow citizens and citizen
groups to reach them directly). However, it can just as easily be tangential to it.
For example, when tension is brewing in a department over the substance of
community policing, attempts to automate paperwork may not be the best use
of managerial attention, authority, and funding. This may have been the case in
Riverside's automation project. The difference lies in strategic use of this type of
intervention to address the central problems of reform. 

Several departments did target their information infrastructure reforms to
community policing, especially the development of analytic capacity for problem
solving by patrol officers. Upon embarking on community policing reform, these
agencies found that their information systems had basic problems that made it
almost impossible to undertake important analyses, and they embarked on
massive efforts to revamp their information systems. Even more advanced
departments, like Portland, felt that significant work remained to be done in
bringing sophisticated analytic capability to the patrol officer level. Work in
developing information systems never seems to be done, and agencies at every
level of sophistication had active wish lists that they plausibly claimed to be
important for community policing. MORE money fed directly into many of these
reforms.

The quality and utility of the information infrastructure depends not only on the
existence of information, but also on people who can and want to use the
information for purposes of analysis and evaluation. In terms of building the
human capacity for analysis, the preferred response turns out to be
civilianization and, therefore, hiring; COPS MORE hiring grants played
important roles in this area for at least two departments.

In developing both the information infrastructure and the people to use it, the
central managerial problem is money. Although in these cases, the cities' general
funds seemed to be more munificent for information systems than for buildings,
grant money still played an important role for many of them. The efforts the
COPS money funded did not always feed substantially into community policing
reform, as in the case of Riverside's automation efforts. However, the majority
of these cases used MORE money directly to advance important elements of
community policing--especially the development of analytic capacity necessary
for both problem solving and monitoring reform. Whether that is true of police
agencies in general is a question better answered elsewhere in this report.
However, in the most successful agencies described in these 10 cases, MORE
funding usually fed directly into important community policing reforms, and their
experiences offer examples of how that can be accomplished.

Human resources. Three aspects of the human resource system--hiring and
recruitment, promotions and evaluation, and training--play central roles in
supporting community policing reform. The agencies that neglected some of
them, like Riverside, Albany, and (for a time) Spokane, found their efforts held
back significantly. A number of the more successful agencies were able to
leverage COPS funding to advance this important category of reforms--
especially in the case of DEMO and regional community policing institute
grants, which enabled departments to fund new training efforts directly. 

The much larger pool of COPS money for hiring also played a role, albeit
through a more indirect route. It created a spike in national police hiring, and in
that way it opened a window of opportunity for important changes to personnel
systems. This pattern played out most dramatically in Lowell, where the
massive influx of new COPS hires throughout the State created a critical
opportunity for new training capacity. That opportunity enabled the LPD to
open up a new recruit academy that it was able to redesign almost from scratch
(previously all but the largest Massachusetts agencies had been required to use
State-run training academies). Moreover, many of these agencies report that
massive COPS hiring, together with extensive retirements of officers brought on
by Federal grants or for other reasons in the early 1970s, gave them uncommon
leeway to self-consciously shape the makeup of their forces through changed
hiring and recruitment practices.

Transforming the culture. Along with and underlying all these systemic
interventions, most of the change agents in these cases paid attention to what is
commonly called organizational culture: A department's perceptions about itself
and the world in which it is operating, about what are important and meaningful
tasks, and about what constitutes excellent performance. This overall cultural
change involved establishing new values and norms of performance--in effect, a
new understanding of the ends and means of policing, and a belief in their
desirability and efficacy. The COPS program probably made a major 
contribution to this effect simply by including language in the 1994 crime bill and
earlier legislation that put its weight and prestige behind the concept of
community policing.[7] In various ways, many of the managers in these cases
took advantage of that fact to leverage their own efforts at cultural change. For
example, a progressive captain in Lowell was able to experiment with
community policing despite the fact that his chief positively opposed it, in part
because he was able to point to grant requirements that required him to do it
(the chief had assigned the captain to find grant money because the city's own
economy was faltering at the time). In this case, Federal policy gave community
policing an air of inevitability even to a hardened opponent, and it contributed to
the legitimacy of the captain's effort.

The cultural change efforts in these agencies were also helped by all the other
interventions laid out above: by efforts to create a political environment that
either demanded or was open to the new strategy of policing; by the strategic
planning processes that engaged officers in discussions of why the change was
important and what it required of them; in the efforts to reengineer the technical
core that changed the working conditions that officers encountered and the
relationships that became important to them in doing their work; in
demonstrations of the efficacy of community policing through new special
projects; and in all of the new efforts made at recruiting and training officers.
Thus, COPS funding contributed to cultural change to the extent that it
contributed to all those other reforms, as we have already described.

Conclusions

Given these 10 stories, what can be concluded about the impact of the COPS
grants on the field of policing, and more particularly on how the grants can be
used by police managers in changing police departments?

First, COPS grants did make important contributions to the goal of producing
organizational change. We do not know from our cases how common the
important changes were across all departments that received COPS grants, but
we have some clear examples of significant change. In some cases, COPS
grants allowed departments that were pretty far down the path toward the
implementation of community policing to get even further along, and these cases
show us and the rest of the field what advanced forms of community policing
look like. In other cases, COPS grants allowed some departments with limited
experience in community policing to make rapid progress--in some cases to
leapfrog the field.

Second, although a favorable environment and organizational history seem to
improve the odds that community policing will succeed, they do not explain
success completely: Effective management--including strategic use of COPS
money--can overcome serious obstacles to community policing. Consequently,
although it is true that the impact of the COPS grants on organizational change
varies as a function of where the grants are used (i.e., whether or not they land
in favorable environments), it also depends on how management uses them.

Third, successful community policing efforts focused on several key interventions
that go beyond the usual program of decentralization and training. These
interventions include building political support for change, creating a coherent
leadership team, planning the course of reform, redesigning organizational
structure and the organization's technical core, building a supportive physical
infrastructure, building a supportive information infrastructure, altering human
resource systems, and instilling new cultural ideals. Difficulties with community
policing can usually be traced to the failure to attend to one of these managerial
tasks, or inability to handle the distinctive challenges each one raises. This fact is
important for the COPS programs, because their impact on organizational
change lies in their ability to help managers solve these distinctive challenges.

Fourth, for some of these key interventions, the distinctive challenges centered
on getting resources for hiring and technology, and COPS played an important
role in them--especially creating special units as part of organizational
restructuring, improving the information infrastructure, and, to a lesser extent,
freeing up time for community policing (part of redesigning the technical core)
through general-purpose hiring. Used strategically, COPS funding helped many
agencies make these important reforms. Thus although there have been
concerns expressed that grants focused only on hiring more officers would not
be helpful in shifting the style of policing, it seems clear from these cases that
such grants can be useful in helping departments make the shift to community
policing. 

Fifth, other key interventions raised challenges that COPS could not entirely
solve. Elements of reform like planning, cultural change, and administrative
decentralization required more imagination than funding; and expensive
interventions like physical decentralization, training, and new equipment did not
qualify for most Title I money. Smaller COPS grants like DEMO and the
regional community policing institute grants did usefully advance some of these
reforms, but most departments accomplished them with other resources.

Sixth, COPS still played an indirect role in some of those reforms--especially
by creating a spike in national police hiring that opened a window of
opportunity for making important changes to personnel systems. For example,
COPS hiring put enough pressure on the State training system in Massachusetts
that one department was able to gain the support needed to open a new,
nontraditional recruit academy. Many other departments rethought recruitment
and hiring practices as they found themselves hiring many new officers (in part
because of COPS, but in part because of abnormally high turnover, as hires
from LEAP and other sources in the early 1970s began to retire in recent
years).

Finally, in all of these impacts, COPS interacted with local forces to produce
important changes. As a rule, COPS grants did not necessarily require or
specifically support the key managerial interventions. But they did enable them.
And enabling change turns out to be particularly valuable when the field as a
whole is already inclined in a particular direction.

Notes

1. Eight of these departments seemed to be "high achievers" that would
hopefully reveal much about what the most successful change efforts might look
like. The other two had clearly taken community policing seriously, but their
progress seemed to be somewhat slower, and more typical of police agencies
around the country: They were chosen to provide fit comparisons to the eight
high achievers, so that we could learn something about the factors that
distinguished extraordinary achievement from the more usual pace of progress.
The appendix to this chapter describes in more detail how these 10
departments were selected, as well as how the case studies were developed.

2. John E. Eck and Daniel Stern. "Revisiting Community Policing: A New
Typology," paper presented to the National Institute of Justice, 1992.

3. On the analysis of causation within cases, and an argument about the limits of
comparative analysis, see Lawrence Mohr, The Causes of Human Behavior,
Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996.

4. John E. Eck and Daniel Stern. "Revisiting Community Policing: A New
Typology," paper presented to the National Institute of Justice, 1992.

5. Students of organizational change have long recognized the uses of this
approach. For example, Phillip Selznick wrote in 1957 that the formulation of a
clear and useful mission "demand[s] a period of actual experience during which
the capabilities of the organization and the pressures of its environment may be
tested. If this is so, then prior definition of mission . . . is not an indispensible
step in organizational planning and, indeed, may result in undue rigidities if
prematurely attempted." See Leadership in Administration: A Sociological
Interpretation, New York: Harper and Row, 1957: 67.

6. Philip Selznick again gives the best general treatment of this strategy for
instituting change, and the term "precarious values" comes from him. See
Leadership in Administration: A Sociological Interpretation, 126 ff.

7. Aaron Wildavsky argues that all policymaking is about "creating culture." See
Speaking Truth to Power: The Art and Craft of Policy Analysis, New
Brunswick, New Jersey: Transaction Books: 41.

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

Appendix 7-A. Empirical Methods

It is worthwhile to say a few words here about the case studies that underlie this
analysis. Two methodological issues are particularly important for a proper
appreciation of the scope and limits of this analysis: How we selected the 10
cases discussed here, and how we developed our portraits of each of them.

Site Selection

The case studies aim to understand at a more detailed level than the surveys can
what factors enable COPS-funded police departments to change into
community-oriented police departments. Out of the thousands of
COPS-funded departments across the country, our challenge was to select 10
that would provide the most evidence for answering that basic question.[1] 

At the outset, however, there were a few practical constraints. Because part of
our mandate for the evaluation was to help get at the "ground truth" behind the
survey of COPS-funded agencies (described elsewhere in this report), we only
considered the approximately 1,600 COPS-funded departments that were
surveyed. Because we judged that a single case writer could not do a good job
investigating how an entire organization changed if that organization were very
large, we zeroed in on medium-sized municipal departments (those serving
cities of 100,000 to 500,000 population). And because we thought that
changes beginning too recently would likely not be far enough along to be
interesting, we decided to focus on departments where change had started
some time ago. However, because we were dependent on interviewee
recollections, and judged that interviewees might have trouble recalling change
in the distant past, we wanted departments that had changed relatively recently.
Consequently, we limited our attention to organizations that had changed in the
recent but not-too-recent past (those where change commenced between 1992
and 1994).[2] These three criteria define the population from which we chose
our sample of 10.

Site selection for comparative analysis

The study was designed as a comparative analysis, one that, in the words of
Theda Skocpol, "tries to establish valid associations of potential causes with the
given phenomenon one is trying to explain."[3] Specifically, we want to
demonstrate that a certain style of leadership--including certain ways of using
Federal funding--is necessary if a police department means to effect
organizational change.[4]

The comparative method is at its strongest when it relies on two complementary
sorts of comparisons. First, Skocpol explains, "one can try to establish that
several cases having in common the phenomenon one is trying to explain also
have in common a set of causal factors, although they vary in other ways that
might seem causally relevant." To facilitate this comparison, we chose eight
departments that seemed to have changed a great deal, but that varied in many
other ways--often in ways that might seem to make change impossible.[5] In our
analysis, we have tried to show that competent leadership is a common factor
that underlies change in these otherwise diverse departments, and we have tried
to explicate what it consists of.

Skocpol explains the second type of comparison as follows: "One can contrast
the cases in which the phenomenon to be explained and the hypothesized
causes are present to other cases in which the phenomenon and the causes are
both absent, but which are otherwise as similar as possible to the positive
cases." Taken literally, this description calls for a comparison of success versus
failure; but it is also possible simply to compare various degrees of success,
which is the strategy we have chosen.[6] Our eight high-achievement cases are,
in fact, among the most progressive police agencies in the Nation. As realistic
foils for these eight, we sought to identify two departments that would be
representative of community policing in most midsized American police
departments. These departments provide fit comparisons to the eight high
achievers. Regardless, the two comparative cases are decidedly not the "usual
suspects" for studies of community policing, and case studies of them can
hopefully help expand the field's view of what community policing involves.

Looking for variety in community policing

So far, we have talked as if "change" was a unidirectional thing: Everyone is
moving in the same direction, if not at the same speed. However, police
departments change in different ways. The most notable typology is the one
some have drawn between problem-oriented policing and community
policing.[7] On one hand, there are departments that emphasize problem solving
without necessarily involving the community in the definition and solution of
problems. On the other, there are departments that emphasize community
involvement without necessarily focusing on problem solving. (As stated this
distinction implies a third logically possible type: the mixed department that does
both.) Whatever the actual variety of community policing is, we can summarize it
abstractly: Organizational change toward community policing can be described
as a vector of a certain magnitude (how much change occurs) and direction
(what type of community policing the department is trying to implement).

In any case, lessons about changing a department in the direction of one form of
community policing may not apply directly to departments that aim in a different
direction. Some forms may be easy to implement, others hard. Some forms
may require special resources or environments, and so on. Consequently, in
order to make the cases useful to a variety of departments moving in a variety
of directions, we tried to select departments that represent the full range of
community policing. In other words, we overlaid another criterion over those
described in the previous section. Within our three categories of sites (positive
cases with benign environments, positive cases with hostile environments, and
representative cases), we tried to vary the direction of change (or intended
change).

Applying the criteria

The discussion to this point has assumed that we could know in advance what
sort of changes occurred and why, which of course is not true. But two sources
of information helped us approximate such prior knowledge: (1) the Urban
Institute's survey of some 1,600 COPS-funded police departments (which was
undertaken as part of the evaluation effort, and asked a number of questions
about what the department is doing as well as the history of its changes); and (2)
a number of experts in policing who are familiar with the national scene.[8]
Though neither of these sources of information is perfect, some of their
weaknesses are complementary.

The survey was used to create a crude and simple index that sought to capture
how completely a department had implemented community policing.
Specifically, the index reported how many of the following four key reforms had
been accomplished: designating certain recurring patterns as problems; using a
team approach for problem solving; maintaining beat integrity in dispatching
officers; and providing some inservice training on community policing. We used
this index for two purposes. First, we chose our two "representative"
departments by taking a random sample of all agencies that had implemented
either two or three of these reforms.[9] Second, we generated a list of high
achievers by selecting those departments that had implemented all four reforms.

The second list was supplemented with nominations from our experts--unlisted
departments which they believed had undergone the most change in recent
years. The resulting catalog contained dozens of potential candidates. To whittle
it down to the eight sites we needed, we looked to three goals.

First, as explained above, we wanted to select high-change departments with
maximum variance on potentially important causal factors, so that we would be
able to apply Mill's method of agreement. To this end, we used additional
information from the survey to classify the high-change candidates into three
categories based on the nature of their "environments" (the three categories
were unpromising external environment, unpromising internal environment, and
benign environment).[10] By selecting sites from all three of these categories, we
tried to ensure variation with respect to potential causes of change.

Second, we wanted to maximize our probability of selecting truly outstanding
departments. To do this, we supplemented the survey information with our
experts' advice, asking them what they knew about those candidates that they
themselves had not nominated. We then selected the two to three candidates
we needed from each category by choosing the departments that we knew the
most about. We had the most confidence in departments about which the
experts and the survey agreed. However, we also felt confident about
departments if an expert was particularly enthusiastic about it, or if multiple
experts nominated it. (In order to select some departments outside the national
networks, we chose one department that our survey screen identified but that the
experts reported that they had heard little or nothing about.)

Third, as described above, we wanted to capture maximum variety in the types
of community policing. To realize this goal, we used the survey to gauge
community policing "style" in our preliminary list of eight candidates (mostly by
guessing at the relative emphasis each department seemed to place on problem
solving versus community participation). If all the departments in a particular
category reflected the same "style" of community policing, we threw one out and
substituted another that reflected a different style (returning to the original list to
do so).

Now that the departments have been visited, these "guesses" about their
experiences are no longer the best sources of information we have about them-
-our analysis must rest on the case studies themselves. It is important, however,
to keep in mind what these cases do and do not represent. They are not a
random sample of all police agencies, so they do not accurately portray the
typical experience of community policing today. In some ways, the two
"representative" departments do get at that mythical mean, in that we randomly
selected them from departments whose progress appeared to be about the
norm. However, the eight "high achievers" are just that--departments chosen
precisely because they have distinguished themselves in some way (and
furthermore because they did so against varying backgrounds). The analytic
task is to determine what these eight cases have in common, and what
distinguishes them from the other two (and by implication, from the bulk of the
field).

Developing the Case Studies

What we can expect from our research is further constrained by the methods
we used to produce each case study. For each department, we tried to
understand how the organization changed and why. Thus, the cases try to
characterize any changes the departments went through and a variety of factors
that may have led to those changes. The categories we used in each of these
areas developed to some extent as we went along, but many were settled early
on--after our pilot case (of Lowell, Massachusetts), considerable background
reading in community policing and organization theory, and much discussion in
the research team. They are described in the text where we fill out the details of
our conceptual framework.

The concepts we have used are complex--things like "the technical core of an
organization," "administrative systems," or even "leadership." They cannot, as a
result, be completely captured through standardized instruments or quantitative
summaries. Instead, we have turned to case study research based on indepth
interviews, direct observation, and primary documents to create a detailed
portrait of how certain events transpired and what effects they had.[11] Though
we believe that this approach is appropriate, given the conceptual framework we
are using and the complexity of the phenomena we are studying, it is appropriate
to mention its limitations.

In particular, by relying heavily on indepth interviews with participants, we risk
missing the same things that they themselves missed, and being caught up in their
enthusiasm. Where possible, we have tried to guard against these potential
problems by pressing our respondents to be concrete, verifying their impressions
with archival data, and fully considering the range of opinions that differently
situated informants provide us (no generalization in the cases is based on the
opinion of a single interviewee). Finally, to reduce the even greater possibility
that we misunderstood our informants, we have insisted that they comment on
our drafts at various stages.

Despite these strategies, qualitative case study research is inherently limited in
the firmness of the causal connections it describes. We will, of course, try to
make some statements about the power of the COPS grants, contextual
factors, and various management strategies to influence change, and our
comparative research was designed to give us some ability to do this. First, we
can avail ourselves of Mill's method of agreement: There is some reason to
believe that combinations of strategies and factors present across all eight of the
overachievers are loosely associated with change, or at least that combinations
of strategies and factors not present in very many of them are inessential (in that
some departments were able to succeed without them). Second, we can avail
ourselves of Mill's method of difference: The combinations of strategies and
factors that seem to distinguish the overachievers from the more representative
departments have some tentative claim to the status of key causal factors. All
else being equal, departments that have or use them seem to do better than
those that do not.

Nevertheless, given the basic vulnerability of small-n comparative research, it is
worth stressing that an equally important and more firmly based contribution we
hope to make involves not causation but explication. Through detailed portraits
of these 10 intriguing cases, it is possible to enrich our understanding of what
things like "effective management," "contextual constraints," and even the COPS
grants themselves consist of. In this way, the analysis helps to stimulate our
imaginations as well as discipline them.

Notes

1. Our initial plans called for 12 cases rather than 10, but we were forced to
abandon our final 2 sites for reasons of timing and funding. Consequently, the
site selection description that follows is slightly inaccurate: In fact we chose 12
cases (9 high achievers and 3 representative cases), and we simply did not get
to the final 2 (1 high achiever and 1 representative case). For clarity of
exposition, this section focuses only on the 10 selected cases that we actually
carried out.

2. This timing criterion is somewhat problematic: First of all, we mostly used
survey information to gauge the onset of change, and in several cases this
information turned out to be misleading--thus we wound up with several
departments where change got started before 1992. Second, the 1994 cutoff
date all but ensured that COPS itself (which began in 1994) would not "cause"
change in the sense of exerting the first push down the road of community
policing. This latter problem is serious but, we felt, unavoidable. We had no
good way to identify more recent reformers; and in any case, we felt that it
simply would not be productive to guess at the extent and causes of change in
young efforts that might well die off before taking root. To mitigate it, we hope
the reader will indulge us in speculation about the effects that other Federal
grants had on our agencies when their reforms were young--effects that COPS
may well have duplicated in newer change efforts that we excluded from our
sample. In any case, we believe that the major role of a Federal funding
program is not that of the initial catalyst but that of a booster to locally driven
efforts; thus, it is wrong to dwell too much on the possibilities for Federal
funding to set change in motion.

3. For simplicity, this discussion will rely on Theda Skocpol's description of the
comparative method (which is based on the ideas of John Stuart Mill) in her
States and Social Revolutions, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979:
33-43; all the quotations are on p. 36. But the logic is mostly compatible with
other treatments of the case study method, e.g. Robert K. Yin's description of
multiple-case research in his Case Study Research: Design and Methods,
Beverly Hills: Sage, 1984: 47-53. The major caution against it comes from
Charles Ragin, who rightly argues that causal complexity (e.g., the interactions
among causes to produce an outcome) undermines a literal application of Mill's
methods: Rather than comparing cases with respect to individual variables, they
must be compared with respect to combinations of variables (and it is possible
to benefit from this insight without necessarily using Ragin's own formalization of
the comparative method). Indeed, a major thrust of our argument above hinges
on the interaction of distinct "causes." See Charles Ragin, The Comparative
Method, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

4. The phrase "means to," though somewhat ambiguous, is important: We only
intend to study departments in which some influential group sincerely intends to
change the organization. The study does not, therefore, ask the academic
question "what makes organizations change?"--a question in which individual
intention need play no role at all. Instead we ask the practical question, central
to public administration, "how and under what conditions can a leader who
wants to change an organization succeed?"

5. For some, external environments seemed ambivalent to change or even
hostile to it, in that they exhibited low "social capital," weak ties to national
policing networks, or simply lukewarm support from city government,
community organizations, and other local partners in surveys. Other
departments seemed to face an unpromising internal environment, beginning
their attempts to change with conservative cultures and structures (something
we gauged from survey responses about the degree of internal resistance, and
also from regional location: For example, West Coast departments, which
started late, tend to be more "progressive" than their counterparts in some other
parts of the country). Others did not seem to face any of these problems to any
great degree. By choosing three cases in each category, we have tried to select
eight high-change cases with maximum variance on potentially important causal
factors. We then use Mill's method of agreement to identify the common factor
all share.

6. As Charles Tilly puts it, the basic imperative involves "finding variation"; see
his Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons, New York: Russell
Sage, 1984.

7. Cf. Eck and Stern, "Revisiting Community Policing."

8. Specifically, we wish to thank William Geller, Herman Goldstein, George
Kelling, David Kennedy, and Rana Sampson for their generous help selecting
sites. 

9. The mean number of reforms implemented among departments in our
population was three, so as a whole, our candidates had implemented slightly
fewer reforms than average. We chose to undershoot the mean in order to
ensure that our comparisons would have enough variation to exploit effectively.

10. The survey contained several questions about external and internal support
that made this classification fairly straightforward. But we also used expert
knowledge--or rather, lack of knowledge--to identify cases with unpromising
external environments. Specifically, if the experts knew nothing about a
department, we took this as evidence that it had weak ties to the national
policing network--which is an important force for change through the support
and guidance it offers police agencies as they reform. We do not mean to argue
that the five experts we spoke with are themselves the only source of change in
the police profession: We are simply arguing that if none of these five people
have heard much about a department, it is likely that other "experts" would not
have had contact with them either (the experts do, after all, talk to each other);
thus the agency is likely to be somewhat peripheral to the national network. In
any case, we selected two departments identified by the survey as
"overachievers" but that the experts reported that they had heard
little or nothing about. At best, such departments present an interesting puzzle:
How could a place with such apparently minimal connections to national circles
change as much as the survey suggests it did? At the very least, this strategy
offers one more way to avoid rounding up the usual suspects. In the end, one of
these two departments was among our casualties of timing, so we only studied
one department chosen because of its apparently weak ties to national policing
networks.

11. In each site, we carried out from two to three dozen interviews and focus
groups with relevant individuals, including various police employees (focusing
on groups like officers, managers, civilians, union representatives, and those
who resisted community policing) as well as important outside groups (including
employees of outside agencies, elected officials, and community
representatives). We also tried to observe patrol activities, management
meetings, interdepartmental meetings, and community meetings at each site (and
in no case did we fail in more than one of these categories). Finally, we made
the same document request of each department, asking for grant applications,
annual reports, strategic plans, budgets, personnel sheets, and general orders
and other policies or bulletins relevant to community policing. Many
departments were still willing to cooperate after this barrage of requests, and
provided us with considerably more idiosyncratic but eminently useful
documentation. In any case, the site visits were guided by a rough protocol that
left room for serendipity. The overriding aim was to understand what had
changed in a department and why.

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

Methodological Appendix

The empirical basis for many findings reported in chapters 3-6 is a series of
three telephone surveys of law enforcement agencies. The designs of these
surveys are complex and reflect adaptation to events in the life of the COPS
program and to new questions raised by those events.

Our original study plan called for a straightforward two-wave survey, with the
second wave completed 14 months after the grant award. The purposes were:
(1) to measure differences between COPS grantees and nongrantees at the
time of application; (2) to measure changes over time in grantee agencies; and
(3) to compare changes over time between grantees and nongrantees. For
reasons described in chapters 2 and 4, it quickly became clear that the
14-month data collection schedule was too short to measure meaningful change
over time in even the first cohort of COPS grantees. Under that plan, for
example, the sample would have been selected during the Federal Government
shutdown in February 1996; at that time only a handful of Universal Hiring
Program grants had been awarded, and less than half of the COPS MORE
1995 grant awards had been announced. All survey work would have been
completed in December 1996, about the time that the first cohort of COPS
grantees finished deploying their officers funded under FAST and AHEAD and
well before all 1995 MORE awardees had even accepted their grants.

Given uncertainties about the possibility of supplemental extensions of the
original grant, a decision was made early on to delay survey data collection
rather than risk completing it with an incomplete 1995 sample and before there
was any possibility of observing the changes intended under the COPS
program. Therefore, the Wave 1 survey was delayed until October 1996. Its
objectives were to compare 1995 grantees with nongrantees, describe hiring
and deployment processes among hiring grantees, and measure
grantee/nongrantee differences in the rates of adoption of community policing
tactics during the first year of COPS funding. We selected a representative
sample of all law enforcement agencies in the United States, stratified to
maximize statistical power for pursuing those objectives.

As planning for the Wave 2 survey progressed during 1996, three events
shaped the design: (1) recognition that few agencies received their first COPS
grants in 1996, so that our Wave 1 nongrantee sample was still adequate for
comparison with grantees; (2) discovery in other phases of the project that
MORE grantees were experiencing implementation problems with mobile
computers, which accounted for most of the projected FTEs from COPS
MORE; and (3) receipt of supplemental funds for a third survey of a subsample
of the Wave 1 respondents. For these reasons, the Wave 2 survey interviewed a
new sample of agencies that received their first hiring grant in 1996 and
reinterviewed only the Wave 1 MORE respondents that had been funded for
mobile computers. The purposes were to expand the sample of grantees for
measuring adoption of community policing tactics over time and to investigate the
implementation process for mobile computers.

Because resources for the Wave 3 survey were intended to support
reinterviewing only about half the previous (Wave 1 and Wave 2) respondents,
we faced a choice between randomly selecting that subsample with equal
probabilities across all sampling strata, or focusing resources on strata of
particular interest. After running several power analyses, we chose to limit the
Wave 3 survey to two subgroups of municipal and county police agencies,
which had received more than three-fourths of all COPS funds: MORE
grantees of all sizes, to measure implementation progress and redeployment;
and grantee and nongrantee agencies serving jurisdictions larger than 50,000,
which account for most of the Nation's crime problem. The Wave 3 survey
data were collected in June-July 1998 and used heavily in preparing this report,
and most analyses are limited to those categories of agencies.

The exception is in chapter 5, where we present preliminary estimates of the
total number of officers and full-time equivalents funded by the COPS program.
Because of the great current public interest in that question, we chose to include
the preliminary estimates in this report, clearly labeling and raising cautions about
a small number of factors that we applied to all types of agencies even though
they are based on the samples of municipal and county police agencies
described above. These estimates are to be updated late in 2000, based on the
Wave 4 reinterviews of all respondents to the previous surveys.

During 1997, we applied for and received funding for Wave 4 of the survey.
There were five motivations for Wave 4: (1) interest in updating the chapter 5
projections based on a sample that represented agencies of all types; (2)
COPS Office interest in measuring agencies' typical hiring and retention
practices, regardless of the COPS program; (3) interest in measuring agencies'
plans for retaining the COPS-funded officer positions after grant expiration at a
point in time after the required retention period had been announced and after
significant numbers of grants had expired; (4) interest in measuring progress after
the Wave 3 survey in implementing MORE-funded technology; and (5) interest
in comparing grantees' and nongrantees' adoption of community policing tactics
since the Wave 1 survey in 1996. The Wave 4 survey is in the field as this
report is being prepared for publication and will be used to address these five
questions in future publications.

The foregoing paragraphs are written as if the population of COPS-eligible law
enforcement agencies were known at the outset of this study. It was not. The
task of defining that population broke down into four steps: (1) Locating all law
enforcement agencies in the United States; (2) excluding from the sample frame
all agencies that were clearly ineligible; (3) coping with the fact that for several
agency categories including sheriffs' offices, the COPS Office determined
eligibility on a case-by-case basis, so that eligibility status was not easily
knowable before an application was submitted; and (4) including certain
categories of "pseudo-agencies" that were administratively eligible for COPS
grants but do not fit most intuitive notions of what a law enforcement agency is.
Examples include consortia of agencies formed for grant application purposes
and "agencies" with no officers that contract with other agencies for law
enforcement services.

As we began work in 1995, the most authoritative source was the Justice
Agency List (JAL), maintained by the Census Bureau for the Bureau of Justice
Statistics (BJS), that contained approximately 17,000 agencies. We augmented
the JAL with a list of additional agencies gleaned from the automated address
list of law enforcement agency terminals authorized to communicate with the
FBI's National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Therefore, in the course of
our work, we identified three larger populations that were useful at different
stages. First, we found 19,175 agencies recognized by BJS that we considered
"potentially eligible" for COPS grants. Second, our sample frame of 20,894
entities was obtained by expanding the list of 19,175 with "likely eligible"
nongrantees and pseudo-agency grantees listed in COPS Office records. Third,
we created a National Law Enforcement Agency List (NLEAL) of 22,923
agencies that contains additional agencies with uncertain COPS eligibility status.
We shared early versions of the NLEAL with the Bureau of Justice Statistics,
to assist in its update of the Justice Agency List for the 1997 Law Enforcement
Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey; the final version is
being deposited in the National Archive of Criminal Justice Data at the
University of Michigan. Details regarding construction of these populations
appear in a later section of this appendix.

Survey Objectives

In preparing for Wave 1 of data collection, our goal was to select a nationally
representative sample of law enforcement agencies, stratified to provide
sufficient statistical power for the following purposes: comparing
characteristics of COPS grantees and nongrantees; performing separate
analyses of agencies serving jurisdictions of less than 50,000 population ("small"
agencies) and larger than that threshold ("medium" agencies between 50,000
and 150,000 and "large" agencies with jurisdictions of more than 150,000);[1]
and conducting separate analyses of the hiring and COPS MORE programs.
As we designed the sample in early 1996, we were aware that approximately
half of all eligible agencies had already been awarded at least one 1995 COPS
grant. Reasoning that most of the interested agencies were likely to have
applied in the first year of the program, we allocated our planned total of 1,800
completed initial interviews as follows: 999 COPS grantees as of April 1996,
when the COPS Office created our first database; 336 nongrantees as of that
date; and 465 reserved for a Wave 2 sample to be defined in 1997.

To assist in survey administration, we selected a sample that would meet the
target number of completed interviews with a completion rate of only 65
percent, even though we had set a target completion rate of 80 percent.
Specifically, we drew a stratified random sample of 2,098 agencies (stratified by
funding status and population category). The sample included 561 agencies that
had not received COPS funding and 1,537 agencies that had been funded under
one of the four programs we were evaluating--i.e., FAST, AHEAD, Universal
Hiring Program (UHP), or MORE. These agencies were contacted for initial
telephone interviews (Wave 1) in October 1996. Followup interviews with
subsamples were completed in September 1997 (Wave 2) and May 1998
(Wave 3). To obtain official responses, interviews were conducted with either
the agency chief executive or a designated alternate authorized to speak on
behalf of the agency.

The Wave 1 sample was used to collect data that would enable us to describe
the application process and experiences of funded and nonfunded agencies, to
assess the status of sworn and civilian hiring and technology implementation,
and to compare funded and nonfunded agencies in terms of policing practices at
the start of COPS (1995) and in terms of post-1995 changes.

More specifically, the instrument requested the following information from all
agencies interviewed:

--Agency characteristics: type and size (sworn/civilian), annual budget, tenure
of current chief, and so forth.

--Jurisdiction population, crime trends, and so forth.

--Implementation status of "community policing" as locally understood,
including approximate date introduced, types of support received from
community, etc.

--Implementation status of 47 community policing practices, as of 1995 and as
of data collection.

Additional topics surveyed for nongrantee agencies included reasons for not
applying for or withdrawing from a COPS grant and conditions under which the
agency might apply for a COPS grant in the future.

Grantee respondents were asked about the following additional topics:

--Key players involved in the application process (e.g., lower-ranking agency
staff, the mayor's office, community leaders/residents).

--Non-COPS sources of funding to support local community policing.

--Status of officer and civilian hiring and deployment for Year 1 hiring grants.

--Customer satisfaction with the application process.

The Wave 2 sample had two components. The first component was "new
UHPs": a group of agencies funded by the COPS Office for the first time in
1996 and for whom the first grant was awarded under the Universal Hiring
Program (UHP). Because of our interest in both the first year holdouts and the
newly created UHP, we took the opportunity to use the sample to collect
information comparable to the Wave 1 grantee information. The second
component of the sample is the entire set of Wave 1 MORE respondents that
reported using their grants to purchase mobile computing technology. Given the
potential impact of redeployed officers resulting from technology procurement,
we decided to use this sample to closely track technology implementation.
Specifically, we collected information regarding each stage of the procurement
process through having the product fully implemented or in the hands of end
users, planned uses of the computers, and implementation problems
encountered and solved, and unexpected costs.

The Wave 3 survey reinterviewed municipal or county agencies that completed
interviews in Wave 1 or Wave 2. For nongrantees and agencies with hiring
awards, only medium and large agencies were reinterviewed; MORE grantees 
of all sizes were reinterviewed.[2] The population represented by this subsample
accounted for a disproportionate share of all COPS funding and more than 75
percent of MORE funding awarded through 1997. We used the sample to
collect information on the progress (since Wave 1) of hiring officers, procuring
technology, and redeploying officers through technology implementation.
Because many of the hiring grants were approaching expiration, we also
collected information on expected postgrant retention of COPS-funded
officers. Finally, as appropriate, we collected information about decisions to
withdraw from COPS-funded programs.

The Sample Frame and the National Law Enforcement Agency List

We created two lists of law enforcement agencies in the course of this project.
The first, our agency sample frame, was created in April 1996 when we first
obtained the current grants management database from the COPS Office. The
sample frame lists all 20,894 organizations that were "probably eligible" for
Federal funding of police officers at some point between June 1993 (2 months
before announcement of the Police Hiring Supplement program) and April
1996, when the COPS Office resumed full operation following a shutdown by
the Federal Government. The second, the National Law Enforcement Agency
List (NLEAL), was created in July 1998 as a supplemental product of this
study and lists 22,923 agencies. We believe it contains the most comprehensive
list of law enforcement agencies in existence at some point between June 1993
and June 1997. This longer list was informed by the new Justice Agency List,
which the Bureau of Justice Statistics had recently updated for the 1997 Law
Enforcement Management and Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) survey. For
each agency, the NLEAL contains several indicators of potential eligibility for
COPS grants.

The variation in counts reflects the wide range of "eligible agencies." Early grant
application kits listed State, local (including county), tribal, and public law
enforcement agencies. Jurisdictions serving special populations (e.g., transit,
university, public housing, schools, and natural resources) were eligible.
Jurisdictions wishing to establish or reinstate law enforcement agencies were
eligible, as were consortia of agencies. Consistent with its community policing
orientation, the COPS Office reviewed applications to ensure that law
enforcement take place in the community. Therefore, sheriffs' offices that
enforced laws only within jails were not eligible, as were regulatory agencies
that enforced only laws applying to alcoholic beverage vendors, licensed
professions, or specialized activities.

The list of COPS grantees includes several categories of organizations that BJS
does not recognize as agencies. These include: contract agencies (which have
few if any officers, contract with other agencies for law enforcement services,
and may use their COPS grant to support an officer dedicated to their
jurisdiction); and consortia of agencies formed to apply for a COPS grant,
usually to support technological devices that serve all members of the
consortium. Further, tribal and private university police departments that BJS
excludes from LEMAS were eligible for COPS grants. Finally, like the FBI's
UCR database, COPS Office records were organized by agency origin (ORI);
therefore, the office created synthetic ORIs, prefixed by "ZZ," for applicants that
the staff did not recognize from the other databases. The "ZZ agencies" 
include the contract agencies and consortia, startup agencies created at about
the time the COPS program was announced, and erroneous duplicates of
agencies that were difficult to match in the other lists. All these categories of
agencies tend to make the sample frame and NLEAL larger than other lists.

Nongrantees were identified from the UCR and NCIC files. As with the
grantees, defining agencies and assessing eligibility were less than
straightforward. We made special efforts to drop ORIs that were "nested"
within other agencies, such as State police barracks that report separately to
UCR, bureaus of larger agencies with their own NCIC addresses, and agencies
with jurisdiction over subareas of other agencies (e.g., a unit of a campus police
agency that patrols only a building that houses classified research projects).
Finally, because the COPS Office determined eligibility of sheriffs' offices and
special-jurisdiction agencies on a case-by-case basis, discretion was needed to
impute the eligibility status of nonapplicants in those categories. For example, a
park police agency that enforced all laws on designated parklands would
normally be eligible, while an agency that enforced only fish and game laws
would be ineligible, even if it had jurisdiction throughout an entire State. For such
agencies, where we could not be certain of eligibility in advance, the NLEAL
record includes multiple "possibly eligible" indicators constructed under narrow
and broad interpretations of available information.

The following sections explain how we constructed the sample frame in light of
these complications.

Creating the sampling frame

To produce the sampling frame, we constructed a grantee component
consisting of agencies that had received funding during 1995, and a nongrantee
component consisting of agencies that appeared potentially eligible but remained
unfunded through 1995. The two components were merged to create the
sampling frame we used to draw the national sample of law enforcement
agencies. 

Grantee component of the sampling frame. The grantee component of the
sampling frame was created from databases received from the COPS Office in
April 1996. Specifically, the COPS Office provided databases for the FAST,
AHEAD, UHP, and MORE programs that included among other things the
applicant's agency ORI and the status for each submitted application. We
counted an application as funded if the status variable indicated that the
application was accepted by the COPS Office for funding by December 31,
1995. Because an agency could have applications accepted in multiple
programs, the databases were flattened so that each agency represented a
single record. Table MA-1 shows the distribution of awards through 1995 by
program, before flattening the database. An agency was added to the grantee
component of the sample frame if at least one of its applications was counted as
funded. This component contained 8,046 agencies.

Nongrantee component of the sampling frame. The eligible nongrantee
component of the sample frame was completed in the following steps:

--Compile a master list of 43,255 candidates for inclusion as eligible
nongrantees.

--Remove 14,266 agencies that could be classified as "clearly ineligible" using
automated algorithms, leaving 28,989 potentially eligible agencies on the
reduced master list.

--Match the reduced master list against the grantee list, repair erroneous ORIs,
delete 1,112 records with duplicate ORIs, and remove 6,983 records of
agencies that we classified as "probably ineligible" based on a combination of
visual inspection and computer matches.

--From the 20,894 remaining agencies, remove the 8,046 grantees, leaving
12,848 agencies in the "eligible nongrantee" component of the sample frame. 

Table MA-2 summarizes the contributions of the two source lists to the
reduced master list and the sampling frame. The following subsections explain
the process of elimination.

Excluding ineligible nongrantee agencies: First iteration. To reduce the master
list to a sample frame, we needed to filter out agencies that were ineligible for
COPS grants. During the first iteration of filtering, we applied five screening
criteria in the following order:

--Agencies with "SP" or "99" in the sixth and seventh bytes of their ORI codes:
These are substations or county offices of the State police or highway patrol.
These "nested" substations are not eligible to apply for COPS grants, even
though they may report crimes to the UCR and they generally do have NCIC
terminals. Only State police headquarters offices are permitted to apply for
COPS grants.

--Agencies with letters in the sixth byte of their ORI codes: According to
NCIC documentation, the sixth byte of a law enforcement agency's ORI code
should be a number. Preliminary inspection of ORI codes revealed that many
agencies with a letter in this position of their ORI codes were regulatory 
agencies with administrative enforcement authority, such as departments of
welfare, fraud investigation units, etc. Some of these agencies, however, were
determined to be eligible law enforcement agencies. Therefore, the sixth byte
criterion was not sufficient to classify agencies as eligible or ineligible; followup
checks were done during the second iteration of filtering.

--Zero population State agencies: In the UCR database, zero population
agencies are those without resident population or those whose population can
be determined by summing the population of the county units within a State.[3]
Among this group of agencies were State police agencies, which are eligible for
COPS funding and were kept in the sample frame. Other State agencies with
zero resident population are transit police, harbor police, park police, and so
forth, which seemed unlikely to have general law enforcement functions and
were therefore excluded from the sample frame.

--For the agencies that were in the NCIC-only category, county/parish and
local agencies were reviewed for eligibility to remove local and county
administrative agencies and "nested" substations of eligible local and county
agencies. In addition, this step filtered out some previously unrecognized State
police substations and suboffices of State administrative agencies. Because
there was no other method to distinguish potential ineligibles from eligibles in the
NCIC-only list, all of these nested State agencies were also reviewed and
eliminated at this point.

--Sheriffs' agencies: County sheriffs' functions vary State to State. In most
States, sheriffs' agencies maintain day-to-day operations and law enforcement
within county jails. In some, sheriffs' offices also provide general law
enforcement functions throughout the rest of the county. The COPS Office
accepted applications only from the latter category; sheriffs' agencies without
general law enforcement responsibilities in communities outside jails were
ineligible. Lacking information on the functions of sheriffs' offices that had not
applied for grants, we took a conservative approach and counted all sheriffs'
offices in a given State as "ineligible" if no sheriffs' office within the State had
been funded. We believe that this conservative approach probably led to an
undercount of eligible sheriffs' offices. Actual eligibility determinations were, of
course, made by the COPS Office when applications were received; therefore
some agencies that we had excluded may well have later received COPS grants.

Using the above criteria, we deleted a total of 14,266 ineligible nonfunded
agencies on the first iteration of filtering.

Excluding ineligible nongrantee agencies: Second iteration. Table MA-3 shows
the number of ineligibles by source identified during the first iteration. The totals
from the second iteration are also shown in table MA-3 and are the results of a
more refined inspection process that relied on the above criteria and additional
criteria developed subsequently in consultation with policing experts.

The second iteration involved visual inspection and computer matching. Visual
inspection was used to examine the NCIC and UCR and UCR-only lists;
computer matching was used only with the NCIC-only list. Two reviewers
independently examined the lists and classified agencies into one of three
categories: (a) eligible, (b) ineligible, or (c) unable to determine. The reviewers'
codes were compared, and the cases in which they disagreed or were unable to
determine eligibility were identified. These cases were reviewed by the
coprincipal investigator with practical policing experience. His decision
determined the final classification for an agency.

For the NCIC-only list, a reviewer classified the agencies as above. Following
the classification phase, the reviewer conducted character string searches using
words or phrases commonly found in the names of ineligible agencies. For
example, "wildlife" agencies and "constable precincts" were generally ineligible.
Therefore, these strings were used as a search criteria, and all the records not
originally flagged as ineligible were searched to find additional agencies that had
these strings in their names. The search procedures generated an additional 182
agencies, which were visually reviewed to make the final eligibility determination.

The final step: Compiling the list of eligible agencies (grantee and nongrantee).
The list of eligibles was merged with the flattened sampling frame of grantees.
Agencies appearing in both lists were removed from the nongrantee sampling
frame. The final compilation included 20,894 eligible agencies (12,848
nongrantee and 8,046 grantee agencies). These agencies comprise our sampling
frame.

Sample Strata and Designed Sampling Fractions

The survey samples were drawn from the list of 20,894 eligible law
enforcement agencies--the sampling frame (see table MA-4). Our objective
was to draw a sample that represented the Nation's COPS-eligible law
enforcement agencies and that had sufficient statistical power to compare
grantees and nongrantees, describe two population groups separately, and
support separate analyses of hiring grantees and MORE grantees. In addition,
as the sample was being designed, the COPS Office announced that the UHP
was to replace the FAST and AHEAD hiring programs in the future. Also, of
the 12,848 eligible nongrantees, we lacked population data for 4,208. Using
power analyses it became clear that there was a need to oversample agencies 
in the larger population category, especially nongrantees, UHP grantees, and
MORE grantees. Therefore, we stratified the sampling frame by COPS Office
grantee/nongrantee status, grant programs of awards, and population category. 
As a result, we had three program strata, which represented the four COPS
programs and the nongrantee stratum,[4] and two population strata, which
divided agencies with jurisdiction population above and below the 50,000
population level, and missing population. For sample selection purposes, we
treated the missing population agencies as a separate stratum; however, because
inspection indicated that a large majority served jurisdictions of less than 50,000,
they were analyzed in that population category.

To accomplish our goal of selecting a representative sample of law enforcement
agencies, we sampled 2,098 agencies across funding status and population
category (see table MA-5). The size of the sample (within each stratum and
overall) was based on power analysis using conventional levels for the
probabilities of type 1 and type 2 errors, .05 and .20 respectively; we also
assumed an 80 percent response rate in the survey. As a result, we sampled
roughly 280 agencies in each cell, except for large nongrantees and UHP
grantees, which were sampled with certainty. Even though we oversampled
grantees, the nongrantee stratum is sufficient for comparative analyses with
grantee agencies; similarly, although we oversampled agencies serving
jurisdictions of more than 50,000, the population of smaller agencies is so large
that they, too, can be analyzed separately.

Table MA-6 shows the designed sampling fractions for Wave 1 based on our
target sample. These fractions highlight the disproportional distribution of the
sample with respect to the funding status and population category strata.
Further discussion of the sampling fractions for the three waves of survey
implementation and the implication for survey weights is provided below.

Survey Completion Rates

The National Opinion Research Center (NORC) was subcontracted to
administer the Wave 1 survey with the target of achieving an 80 percent
completion rate. We submitted to NORC our sample of 561 nongrantee
agencies and 1,537 grantee agencies. NORC began the interview process by
treating the nongrantee component and the grantee components as four
independent strata, one for nongrantees and three for grantees respectively. For
each funding status/program category, NORC randomly assigned sample units
of 100 agencies to a replicate, without regard to population category.
Interviewers were instructed to work within a single replicate until each agency
had been contacted. Once all agencies within a replicate were contacted,
interviewers move on to the next replicate. Any replicate touched did not expire
until every agency within the replicate had been contacted.

Because NORC randomly assigned agencies within a stratum to a 100-unit
replicate, each agency within a given stratum had an equal probability of
selection; and each agency within a cell had the same weight. (See following
section for further discussion on weighting.)

Wave 1 survey

Table MA-7 shows the response rates by funding status and population
category strata. Not surprisingly, response was higher for the grantee strata
than for the nongrantee strata because most members of the nongrantee strata
had decided not to apply to the program, had applications rejected, or had
withdrawn from the program.[5] In contrast, the response rates for grantee
agencies hovered around 80 percent.

Wave 2 survey

The Wave 2 sampling frame included two groups of agencies (see table MA-
8). The first group consisted of "new UHP" agencies not funded during the first
year of the COPS program, whose first COPS funding was a UHP grant
awarded after April 1996. These are agencies that received their first COPS
Office funding after April 1996. The second "MORE (MC)" group consisted of
all MORE grantees in the Wave 1 sample that reported on their grant
applications that their MORE grants would be used to purchase mobile
computers.[6] 

The following tables show sample size (table MA-9) and response rates (table
MA-10) for the new UHP and MORE (MC) strata. We selected certainty
samples of the MORE (MC) category and the new UHP large-population cell.
The sample size for the new UHP small-population cell was based on power
analysis using conventional level for the probabilities of type 1 and type 2
errors, 0.05 and 0.20 respectively. The overall response rate was 85 percent. 

Wave 3 survey

The Wave 3 sample frame included 1,724 agencies previously interviewed in
Wave 1 and/or Wave 2; however, the supplemental funding that we obtained
for Wave 3 was intended to support only 750 completed interviews. Because
municipal and county police agencies serving jurisdictions of more than 50,000
received a disproportionate share of COPS dollars and account for a
disproportionate share of crime and because projected MORE-supported
productivity increases accounted for such a large share of total officers and
full-time equivalents, we focused Wave 3 on those two groups. In the hiring
program and nongrantee categories, we sampled all municipal and county
agencies serving jurisdictions of more than 50,000 that had responded in Wave
1 or Wave 2. In the MORE category, we sampled all previous municipal and
county respondents, regardless of population category. As shown in table
MA-11, the resulting sample size was 766 agencies.

Response rates were higher in Wave 3 than in Wave 1, exceeding 90 percent
for all grantee strata (see table MA-12). This may reflect greater experience
with our survey protocol, greater interest in the issues being addressed among
large municipal and county police agencies, or some other factor. The response
rate in the nongrantee cell also increased to 86 percent. We believe this reflects
the sizable share of agencies that received COPS grants after being selected as
nongrantees based on their status as of May 1996.

Weights and Sampling Errors: Accounting for Multiple Selection Probabilities 

The complexity of weighting our samples arises from the fact that the samples
are stratified by grant program[7] and population category. Additionally, we
drew a sample within each grant program stratum to provide each agency
within the stratum an equal probability of being selected and each agency within
a population category cell an equal weight. This approach is not problematic for
agencies funded under only a single grant program. However, an agency that
received funding for multiple grant programs will have a selection probability
and sample weight for each program, and the probabilities will differ across
programs.

The weight(s) assigned to each agency in our sample account(s) for differential
probabilities of selection into the sample, adjusting for nonresponse and aligning
the weighted distribution of agencies in the sample with the distribution of
agencies in the U.S. population. In the simplest case, each agency in the same
grant program and population category has the same weight. If j is the index for
grant program and k is the index for population category, then the weight, Wjk
for a particular grant program and population category is

Wjk = Ujk / Sjk

where Ujk is the number of agencies in the population and Sjk is the number of
agencies with completed interviews in the sample. The weight is roughly
inversely proportional to the probability of selection into the sample (adjusted
for nonresponse). This weighting scheme would be adequate if all agencies
belonged to precisely one stratum defined in terms of k and j. However, this
weighting scheme is inappropriate for analyses that include agencies in more
than one grant program stratum j. Because many agencies received an award in
more than one program category, our sample selection and weighting scheme
must take into account the multiple probabilities of selection associated with each
grant program.

To address this problem, multiprogram agency weights were constructed as the
arithmetic average probability of being selected into the sample. For
multiprogram agency i,

[See pdf file for equation.]

where G is the number of grant programs from which agency i received an
award. The weight is a simple average of its weights for each program.

These weights were used for statistical analyses. Scaled weights, normalized to
sum to 1.0, were used to provide corrected standard errors of estimates.

Notes

1. At the time of sample design, the COPS Office was operating two hiring
programs: COPS FAST for jurisdictions smaller than 50,000 and COPS
AHEAD for larger jurisdictions. The two programs were created to comply
with the Title I requirement of simplified application procedures for the small
jurisdictions, and we wished to be able to compare the two grantee categories.
Title I also required that jurisdictions of less than 150,000 and jurisdictions over
that limit each receive half of all awards. Because the 150,000 line did not seem
relevant to grantees' behavior, we decided not to use it to stratify the sample.

2. As explained more fully in the discussion of sampling, all Wave 1 survey
strata are defined in terms of status in May 1996. Grantee strata names refer to
the program lists--FAST, AHEAD, UHP, or MORE--from which sample
members were selected, and the selection probabilities (i.e., sampling weights)
for grantees with awards from multiple programs were adjusted to compensate
for the multiple probabilities of selection. Therefore, for example, agencies in
the FAST cell were asked about their UHP and/or MORE grants, and agencies
in the nongrantee cells were asked about grants, if any, that they received after
sample selection. 

3. The UCR population data are reported in a manner that permits the UCR to
aggregate population to the county level without double counting the population
of a city within a county and that county. Population is first distributed among
the city and subcounty units within a county. The residual is allocated to the
county. A county's total population is the sum of the population of the units in
the county. Similarly, state agencies are given zero population also to avoid
double counting. State population is the sum of the population of the counties
(aggregated from the subcounty units) in the State. 

4. The FAST and AHEAD programs are part of the same program stratum
because they split on the population stratum. In fact, FAST and AHEAD are
both accelerated hiring programs for small and large agencies respectively. 

5. Based on survey responses, about 1.8 percent of agencies in the nongrantee
strata were ineligible. Therefore, in each cell, response rates as a percent of
eligible nongrantees are about 1 percentage point higher than those reported in
table MA-7.

6. In a separate data collection effort, limited information including technology
types and civilian positions was coded from the hardcopy MORE grant
applications of all agencies selected for the MORE sample. 

7. Agencies in our sample could have been selected for only one grant type
though the agency may have had other grant types. For example, an agency
with a FAST and MORE grant could have been selected in the FAST stratum,
MORE stratum, or both. Each stratum was drawn independently of the other,
and selection in one did not preclude selection in the other.

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

About the Authors

Michael E. Buerger, Ph.D., Associate Professor, College of Criminal Justice,
Northeastern University.

Catherine M. Coles, J.D., Ph.D., Research Associate, Program in Criminal
Justice Policy and Management, John F. Kennedy School of Government,
Harvard University, and School of Criminal Justice, Rutgers University-Newark.

Stephen J. Gaffigan, B.A., Senior Executive, Metropolitan Police of the District
of Columbia.

Francis X. Hartmann, M.A., Executive Director and Senior Research Fellow,
Program in Criminal Justice Policy and Management, and Malcolm Wiener
Center for Social Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard
University.

Daryl Herrschaft, B.A., Research Coordinator, Human Rights Campaign.

Calvin C. Johnson, Ph.D., Research Associate, The Urban Institute.

Christopher S. Koper, Ph.D., Research Associate, The Urban Institute.

Elizabeth A. Langston, M.A., Consultant.

Edward R. Maguire, Associate Professor, Administration of Justice Program, 
George Mason University.

Gretchen E. Moore, M.A., Research Associate, The Urban Institute.

Mark H. Moore, Ph.D., Guggenheim Professor of Criminal Justice Policy and
Management, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University.

Jan Roehl, Ph.D., President, Justice Research Center.

Jeffrey A. Roth, Ph.D., Director of Crime Control Policy Studies, The Urban
Institute.

Joseph F. Ryan, Ph.D., Chair, Public Administration and Criminal Justice
Departments, Pace University.

Peter M. Sheingold, M.P.P., Research Assistant, Harvard University.

Mary K. Shelley, B.A., Research Associate, The Urban Institute.

David Thacher, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Urban
Planning, University of Michigan.

Ruth M. White, M.A., Research Associate, The Urban Institute.

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

About the National Institute of Justice

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