What we should do is to say, 'OK, we know what works. The Justice Department estimates Clinton's goal of 100,000 new police officers should be met by mid-1999. The president, meantime, hopes to raise the figure even higher. Under the balanced budget agreement reached by Clinton and congressional Republicans in 1996, COPS was to be phased out by fiscal year 2001. It was not immediately clear if the Clinton administration's plan to breathe new life into the program would be supported by the Republican majority in Congress.
Criminals have the best technology.
According to an advance copy of the Bureau of Justice Statistics' mid-year report, the 2.88 million serious violent crimes in the 1998 preliminary report compares to 3.04 million that the bureau reported in its final data for 1997. The number has been steadily dropping since a high of 4.19 million in 1993. The survey defines serious violent crimes as rape, robbery, aggravated assault and homicide. If simple assault is factored in, the 1997 total rises to 8.61 million. Property crime rates for 1998 are expected to be less than half of the 1973 rate of 520 per 1,000 households, according to the bureau's preliminary report.