America faces a cop crunch, just when we least need it. It amounts to a reckless and dangerous hollowing out of the nation's police forces -- at just the moment when crime rates are rising and homeland security is placing new strains on the existing force. With the nation under unprecedented threat of attack, and our police increasingly engaged in a two-front war on terrorism and crime, many big city departments are actually losing officers faster than they can replace them. To solve these problems, America needs a new vision of the post-Sept. 11 role of state and local law enforcement -- one that unites its traditional mission of reducing crime with the new challenge of homeland security.
These are among the troubling conclusions of a new survey by the Democratic Leadership Council of the nation's largest police departments. It is the first comprehensive study of the personnel shortfalls in our police forces since new domestic security demands were imposed by the Sept. 11 attacks.
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And where is President Bush? A year and a half after Sept. 11, not one penny of the $3.5 billion the president promised local governments for homeland security in January 2002 has made its way to police departments or other first responders. "We haven't seen any of that money yet," said Chuck Blanchard, Arizona's new chief of homeland security. "We appreciate the $10 million we expect to get in 2003, but it pales in comparison to our needs. It's just too small to meet the needs of Arizona."
This is especially troubling in the face of the economic downturn and subsequent budget crunch that has states and cities less able to meet the challenge on their own. Local governments are tightening the screws to make ends meet, and looking to Washington for help on important national priorities. This raises new questions about the Bush administration's budget priorities.
To determine the facts on the ground in America's war against terrorism, the DLC surveyed the budgets and force levels of 44 of the largest police departments. The report, "America's Cop Crunch: By the Numbers," will appear in spring 2003. Its findings, highlighted in this preliminary article, should cause concern to policymakers in Washington.
Several of the report's revelations are especially worrisome. An astonishing six out of 10 police departments face a cop crunch. Twenty-seven of the 44 police departments we surveyed were experiencing personnel shortfalls. Most of these departments reported they were struggling with increased overtime, inadequate budgets, and problems attracting new recruits. Others were losing experienced police officers faster than they could recruit new ones -- forcible downsizing.
With its police department more than 1,000 police officers short of its authorized strength, Los Angeles suffers from one of the worst cop crunches in the country. After growing more than 12 percent during the 1990s, the LAPD shrank 6 percent between 2000 and 2002, and the number of officers leaving the department outpaced new recruits by an average of 189 each year.
As the LAPD became smaller, however, its workload increased. The aftermath of Sept. 11 put the department at the center of local homeland security efforts, forcing it even to help out with increased security at Los Angeles International Airport for a time. A new wave of gang violence, which fueled a double-digit increase in the murder rate, has demanded more police resources, too. Concerned with the LAPD's competing priorities, City Councilman Nate Holden has expressed frustration: "The murder rates are going up. Major crimes are going up. ... Something has to give." Holden's district is caught in the crossfire of the gang wars.
To manage its cop crunch, Los Angeles has relied heavily on increased overtime, which has skyrocketed 86 percent since 2000. It also needed a cash infusion from the city's resource fund. Recently, it has redoubled its recruiting efforts and cut processing time for new recruits by about seven months, helping to add hundreds of new police officers. But the LAPD is still far short of its full complement of more than 10,000 officers, and may not make up the difference soon. With California anticipating a revenue shortfall of almost $35 billion, Los Angeles expects its share of the state budget to go down by $300 million over the next 18 months. The city's budget officer has suggested police hiring should be slowed down.
Of the remaining 17 police departments that technically have no cop crunch, 15 are in danger of being dramatically affected by military call-ups. About 5 percent of the officers in these departments are reservists or members of the National Guard -- and many are already being called up for service in the wars against terrorism, Afghanistan, or Iraq. On average, the activation of only 30 percent of these reserves would cause a personnel shortage in these departments.
Consider Baltimore. On the surface, its police department doesn't face a personnel shortage; it grew a respectable 4.6 percent over the past three years, and the recruitment of new officers remains strong (new recruits outpace departures by about 10 each year). To be sure, the department has its hands full with homeland security and drug crime remains a serious problem. But Mayor Martin O'Malley has worked to make Baltimore a national leader on both of these fronts.
Dig below the surface, though, and you learn that more than 150 of the department's police officers have been called up to serve in the military reserves or in National Guard units. "That's an entire police district," one police official lamented. It's also enough to cancel out all of the department's recent growth and leave it shorthanded just as the city shifted to high alert with the start of America's military campaign in Iraq.
Making things worse, the police department has had to bear most of the increased security burden by itself, diverting officers from other functions and mandating 12-hour shifts for everybody. There are too few state police to help guard vulnerable targets, police officials say, and by March 2003, the governor had yet to call out the National Guard for assistance. Moreover, since Sept. 11, the only new federal money to reach the department has been $500,000 for a police boat to patrol Baltimore's sprawling and vulnerable harbor complex -- a much-needed assist, but much less than Baltimore needs to keep its citizens safe.
On top of these challenges, nine of 10 police departments experienced crime increases after Sept. 11. There is no certain way to know how the terrorist attacks may have affected crime rates, but about 90 percent of the police departments we surveyed saw their crime rate go up an average of 17 percent faster during the second half of 2001 than during the first six months of that year. In Washington, D.C., where security needs were especially high because of the presence of the federal government and foreign dignitaries, crime soared more than 40 percent in the months that followed Sept. 11: murder, 68 percent; rape, 27 percent; robbery, 34 percent; aggravated assault, 88 percent; burglary, 49 percent; larceny, 7 percent; and motor vehicle theft, 17 percent. Charged with helping safeguard the nation's capital, the Metropolitan Police Department had to pull police officers from neighborhood beats and reassign them to high-alert areas.
Experts offer many reasons why the number of crimes increased in 2001 for the first time in a decade -- the deteriorating economy, the growing number of released prisoners, and a surge in the population of crime-prone teenagers. But most agree that whether crime continues to rise, and by how much, will depend on our response. In the 1990s, the Clinton administration made crime reduction a national policy priority, and crime declined. Since 2001, the Bush administration has neglected crime, undercut crime-fighting budgets, and put crime-reduction policy on the back burner. Perhaps the administration is too focused on the threat of terrorism to tackle the problem of increasing crime head-on. The FBI and DEA, for example, have pulled more than 300 agents off state and local drug cases to reassign them to anti-terrorism. Clearly, we'll never keep crime rates in check without adequate focus and resources.
Still another aggravating factor is that police hiring is practically at a standstill. According to the Justice Department, from 1990 to 2000, the number of local police officers in our cities grew by about 2 percent per year. From 2000 to 2002, by contrast, the number of police officers at the departments we surveyed grew by only about two-tenths of one percent annually. Even in departments that were growing, police hires did not keep pace with the overall population increases.
Since completing our survey in January 2003, however, state and local budget crises have cut further into police force levels. Departments that were understaffed and overwhelmed by homeland security in fall 2002 were being forced to lay off police officers by spring 2003. In Minneapolis, for instance, a hiring freeze from 2000 to 2001 contributed to a 2.6 percent reduction in the police force. In 2003, 80 to 100 police officers -- about 10 percent of the entire force -- will have to be laid off because of state and city budget cuts.
As America's cop crunch has worsened, and its communities have become less safe, the federal government has stood on the sidelines. Too focused on the new Department of Homeland Security, the president has failed to make beefing up state and local law enforcement a priority. Congress finally approved $1.3 billion of Bush's homeland security request, so funds may start to trickle down through the bureaucracy soon. However, that's only about one-third of the amount Bush pledged, and much less than the $3 billion to $4 billion cities and states say that increased security has cost them.
Moreover, local police departments may never see the rest of the promised funding. There's cruel math at work here: To fully fund his $3.5 billion initiative for first responders, Bush wants Congress first to slash $2.2 billion from other state and local law enforcement programs. If Bush has his way, state and local police departments will be forced to dig into their own pockets to pay for increases in homeland security. (Republicans in Congress haven't taken the bait on these cuts, at least not yet; but neither have they generated savings anywhere else in the budget to fulfill Bush's $3.5 billion pledge.)
This isn't the first time the president has been duplicitous on funding for state and local law enforcement. While talking a good game -- pointing to his request for $3.5 billion for first responders -- he has tried to cut these funds in each of his budgets. His number one target: the Community Oriented Policing Services program (COPS) started by the Clinton administration. Bush has slashed the roughly $1 billion it provides police departments each year to hire more officers and expand community policing. His budget axe has cut a host of other state and local anti-crime programs, too, from grants to improve law enforcement technology to funds for anti-drug programs.
As the DLC survey shows, 60 percent of America's big city police departments are stretched so thin that instead of gearing up and pitching in for the long battle against terrorism, they're being forced to pull back or go slow because of limited resources. Bush's neglect has undermined the readiness of our police, weakening the home front just as America is taking on more responsibilities overseas.
Undoing the damage of Bush's cop crunch shouldn't be controversial. But more funds are only a first step. Across the nation, state and local police are looking for direction from Washington, not just for more funds. Yet the Bush administration has failed to provide leadership on everything from establishing uniform training and equipment standards to more daunting tasks like developing a national strategy to deal with call-ups of first responders.
Why the need now for national leadership on an issue traditionally seen as a state and local matter? Because the world has changed since Sept. 11, and a new vision of law enforcement is called for. Our police departments must become more than crime-and-safety services. We must quit viewing them simply through the lens of first response and increased security, and start realizing their potential as full and proactive partners in the war on terrorism. Police officers who walk a beat should be a natural extension of our homeland security efforts. They process critical information about the neighborhoods they patrol, and with 103,000 of them nationwide, they represent a force nearly 10 times the size of the entire FBI.
For years, the test of America's military readiness has been whether we could fight two major wars simultaneously. In 2000, candidate Bush said: "Our military is low on parts, pay, and morale. If called on by the commander in chief today, two entire divisions of the Army would have to report, 'Not ready for duty, sir.'" Yet now, the president has let our police forces fall into a similar trap. Due to his lack of leadership and commitment, they are low on manpower, equipment, and training. If called on by the commander in chief, 60 percent of them would have to report, "Not ready for duty, sir."
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