As The Washington Post noted today, the signature Clinton administration COPS initiative, which placed 100,000 police officers on the streets and helped make community policing the reigning law enforcement strategy of the land, is being starved to death by the GOP. After four straight years of deep funding cuts urged by the Bush administration and implemented by the Republican-controlled Congress, the program has run out of money to help local law enforcement agencies hire cops. The president's budget for next year would formally shut it down, and if Republicans control Congress after November 2, they will gleefully give it the last rites.

Their glee comes from a combination of ideological and partisan motives. Many conservatives have long hated COPS because it violates a purist conception of crime-fighting as a purely local responsibility, and because they can't bring themselves to admit that anything other than tougher sentencing was responsible for the historic reductions in crime during the 1990s. Never mind that many of these same conservatives have no problem with efforts to federalize criminal law in a vast array of areas, or that the Bush administration has supported an enormous expansion of federal law enforcement powers.

The partisan motives are even simpler: like AmeriCorps, COPS was near and dear to the heart of Bill Clinton, reflecting a New Democrat idea he embraced even before becoming president. If that wasn't enough to ensure a vengeful Republican determination to kill it off, Sen. John Kerry's key role in making a robust COPS program part of the landmark 1994 crime legislation was the clincher.

The timing of COPS' well-planned demise is just bizarre. All over the country, local governments are struggling with a "cop crunch" caused by a combination of federally imposed homeland security responsibilities, an ongoing fiscal crisis intensified by the administration's budget and economic policies, and the call-up of many cops to serve in the National Guard and the Reserves. And it's certainly hard to justify the starvation of COPS on federal fiscal grounds, with the president's party on an election-year spending binge so wild that Congress can't even bother to enact a budget.

Ed Mosca, legislative chairman of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, and himself the police chief in the kind of small community that benefited so much from COPS, told The Post: "The demise of the program will certainly have an impact on us, and I'm fearful of what that will mean."

Like the recent decision by the Republican congressional leadership to let another initiative strongly supported by police officers, the assault gun ban, go to its grave (with the hypocritical acquiescence of an administration that claimed to support it), the assault on COPS represents the triumph of ideology over ideas, and of partisanship over policies that work.