The Public Safety Partnership and Community Policing Act of 1994, as amended, authorizes grants to states, units of local government, Indian tribal governments, other public and private entities, and multi- jurisdictional or regional consortia for a variety of community policing- related purposes. Among other things, this includes the hiring and rehiring of law enforcement officers for deployment in community policing and developing and implementing innovative programs to permit members of the community to assist law enforcement agencies in the prevention of crime in the community. The act also requires that grantees not supplant state and local funding, but rather use the federal funds for activities beyond what would have been available without a grant. To administer the grant funds authorized by the act, the Attorney General created the COPS Office in October 1994. Since 1994, the COPS Office has awarded roughly $14 billion to advance community policing through its various grant programs. The COPS Office defines community policing in its CHP applications and Grant Owner’s Manual, issued annually, as “a philosophy that promotes organizational strategies, which support the systematic use of partnerships and problem-solving techniques, to proactively address the immediate conditions that give rise to public safety issues, such as crime, social disorder, and fear of crime.” The CHP grant applications describe some of these terms: community partnerships: collaborative partnerships between the law enforcement agency and the individuals and organizations they serve to both develop solutions to problems and increase trust in police; organizational transformation: the alignment of organizational management, structure, personnel and information systems to support community partnerships and proactive problem-solving efforts; and problem solving: the process of engaging in the proactive and systematic examination of identified problems to develop effective responses that are rigorously evaluated. A characteristic of community policing is its emphasis on proactive policing—an approach to preventing crime—which is contrasted with traditional, reactive policing—an approach that responds to crime—both of which the interactive figure 1 illustrates. Move the mouse over the icons to view more information. This additional information is also reproduced in appendix II for readers of printed copies. Reactive policing responds to crime after it has occurred. Proactive policing attempts to prevent crime from occurring. $ From fiscal years 2008 through 2012, the COPS Office managed 10 programs designed to advance community policing. As table 1 illustrates, these 10 programs provided funding to target crime issues, such as school violence, as well as to hire officers or develop crime-fighting technology, among other things. As table 1 indicates, CHP accounted for 68 percent of the funds awarded through the COPS Office’s various grant programs. The program provides these funds over a 3-year term, on a reimbursable basis, meaning that the COPS Office approves grants for a specified number of officer hires or rehires—in cases where officers have previously been laid off—but provides the funding to the law enforcement agencies once these officers are onboard. Grantees must use the funds to hire or rehire additional officers for deployment in community policing or can redeploy a commensurate number of experienced locally funded officers to community policing after the entry-level officers are hired with CHP funds. By law, each year CHP funding must be split in such a way that the total grant funding awarded to each eligible state—meaning the sum of the grants awarded to applicants in that state—equals at least one-half of 1 percent of the total CHP funding appropriated by Congress for that year. At the same time, the law requires that CHP funding be evenly split between entities serving jurisdictions with populations exceeding 150,000 people and those serving jurisdictions with populations of 150,000 or fewer. Specific award provisions, such as salary and benefit caps per officer funded; grantee fund-matching requirements; and other nuances, including a recent emphasis on the hiring of veterans, have varied each year since the CHP’s first authorization, in 1994. For example, in 2008 and 2012, pursuant to the statutory requirements for the grant program, grantees were required to match the CHP award with at least 25 percent of local nonfederal funds and salary caps of $75,000 and $125,000, respectively, applied. However, under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (Recovery Act) these requirements did not apply in 2009, 2010, and 2011. Table 2 highlights changes in the CHP during the past 5 fiscal years that affected the amount of funding available to applicants as well as which applicants received funding. To select grantees for CHP, the COPS Office requires applicants to respond electronically to closed-end questions and provide a narrative description of the crime problems they are facing, among other things, in their grant applications. For example, one of the close-ended questions asks applicants to add a check mark if their agencies’ strategic plans include specific goals or objectives relating to community partnerships or problem solving. Another close-ended question provides response categories for applicants to select the ways in which their agencies share information with community members. According to COPS Office officials, in consultation with the Associate Attorney General and the Deputy Attorney General, they establish weights for (1) community policing questions, (2) questions pertaining to the applicants’ fiscal health, and (3) reported crime levels. They then score the applications and award funds to those applicants with the highest scores. For example, in fiscal years 2009 and 2010, fiscal health accounted for 50 percent, crime rates accounted for 35 percent, and community policing activities accounted for 15 percent of the total score. To monitor grantee performance, the COPS Office requires, as a term and condition of its grants, that grantees participate in grant-monitoring and -auditing activities, which can include programmatic and financial reviews of their funded activities. Accordingly, COPS Office officials stated that all grantees are required to submit quarterly progress reports that provide financial and programmatic information, such as their progress in implementing the community policing plan they described in their grant applications for utilizing CHP funds to advance community policing. According to the COPS Office, the goal of its monitoring is to assess grantees’ stewardship of federal funding, performance, innovation, and community policing best practices resulting from COPS Office funding. In addition, according to the COPS Office, because of the number of COPS Office grantees, the COPS Office selects a limited number of grants to monitor based upon a grantee’s level of risk. In addition to the size of the grant award, such risk factors include, but are not limited to, whether or not the grantee has prior federal grant experience, has submitted late reports of its progress or failed to submit progress has requested grant extensions. As the interactive map in figure 2 illustrates, CHP grant awards were distributed throughout the United States from fiscal years 2008 through 2012. The interactive map can be accessed here: http://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-13-521 As figure 3 illustrates, 48 percent of the funding was awarded to grantees in six states—California, Florida, Michigan, New Jersey, Ohio, and Texas. Across all the states, grantees in California received the highest level of total CHP funding from 2008 through 2012. Specifically, total CHP awards in California equaled approximately $360 million, or more than 20 percent of the total CHP funding awarded. Officials from the COPS Office cited several factors that influenced the allocation of grant funds across the states and territories. In particular, officials pointed to the population-based statutory provision described previously, which requires the COPS Office to allocate 50 percent of available grant funding to jurisdictions with populations exceeding 150,000 and 50 percent to jurisdictions with a population of 150,000 or fewer. Officials noted that some states—for example, California—have more cities with populations exceeding 150,000 compared with other states. This enables a smaller number of states to compete for half of the total grant funding, while a greater number of states without cities of this size compete for the remaining half of the total. Further, these large cities tend to receive larger awards because they deploy comparatively more officers than smaller cities. Apart from a separate statutory provision, also described previously, which requires that each state receive at least one- half of 1 percent of the total CHP funding appropriated by Congress each year, COPS Office officials emphasized that a grantee’s particular location is not prioritized over the application categories of community policing, crime data, and fiscal health. Regarding fiscal health, officials noted that certain states have been disproportionately affected by fiscal distress, a factor that is directly reflected in the fiscal health component of the CHP application. Finally, the number of law enforcement agencies— and thus potential applicants—varies across states, which contributes additional variation in how funding is ultimately distributed. For grantees awarded the same number of officers, differences were driven mainly by variation across grantees’ respective entry-level officer salaries and benefits—the only costs CHP allows. However, this variation was more prominent during years when salary and benefit levels were not statutorily capped: 2009 through 2011. Thus, during the period 2009 through 2011, grantees with higher officer salary and benefit levels generally received more CHP funding relative to other CHP grantees to hire, rehire, or prevent layoffs for the same number of officers. For example, in fiscal year 2011, a grantee in California received a CHP award equivalent to its entry-level officer salary and benefits level of $150,753 per officer. In the same fiscal year, a grantee in Connecticut received a CHP award—also based on its entry-level officer salary and benefits—of $64,459 per officer per year. As a result of these local variations in per officer cost, this particular Connecticut grantee received and used 57 percent less federal funding to support each officer it hired or rehired compared with its California counterpart in this example. According to COPS Office officials, geographical differences in the cost of living could partly contribute to wage differences.