Federal police grants

The professional antiwar gripers of International A.N.S.W.E.R. had all their ducks in a row ready to protest and were prepared to surround the White House on April 12 to teach President George W. Bush and the nation a lesson in high-minded pacifism. On April 9, however, a new member to their cause emerged when Iraq's ambassador to the United Nations, Mohammed Al-Douri, was converted by events and declared his "work now is peace." For such members of the political and polemical classes, even the dramatic scenes of Iraqis taking their first breath of freedom after more than 20 years in the chokehold of Saddam Hussein merited little notice, and certainly not an admission that their kafkaesque predictions of a Midge Eastern quagmire to rival Vietnam were dead wrong.

As the armed forces of the United States and the United Kingdom impressively demonstrated their authority, precision and flexibility, the unarmed farces showcased the agility of their own game plan. An antiwar march quickly morphed into a rally against the "corporate profiteers, Fox News and the pro-war media" who were said to be celebrating the use of "brutal military power to crush resistance to their invasion of Iraq."

The emerging liberation of Iraq also has been causing Democrats to reassess their game plan while fumbling for field position in the national-security debate. Addressing a Children's Defense Fund dinner, Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio) fumed, "We're blowing up bridges over the Tigris and Euphrates and not building them here." Having grown accustomed to reassessing his positions on the war, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) raced ahead to post-Saddam criticism, charging that the administration has been "laying out enormous plans" abroad and proclaiming that "it is time for us to demand that they lay out a plan for us here in America."

The strategy of shifting criticism from the administration's foreign-policy successes is not new. In recent weeks, Sen. Joe Lieberman (D-Conn.) has been moaning that firefighters have "been left holding the ladder," a theme echoed by Sen. John Edwards (D-N.C.), who claims Bush is "withholding funds that first responders need."

This approach is not limited to presidential candidates. "The thin blue line is getting thinner, not stronger" asserted Bruce Reed, a former Clinton domestic-policy adviser and president of the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), upon the release of a new DLC study. Cop Out: The Soldiers Bush Forgot was authored by Jose Cerda III, a former special assistant for crime policy in the Clinton administration who helped develop Bill Clinton's proposal to hire 100,000 new cops. Cerda claims Bush's tight budget is having dramatic effects on local police departments.

Based on a survey of 44 law-enforcement agencies representing cities with populations of 250,000 or more, the study found 60 percent of police departments were facing a "cop crunch" while 35 percent were identified as vulnerable. Upon closer inspection several cities, including Miami, were so listed without having responded that a problem exists. Cerda simply argued that departments that lost more officers than they recruited were "in danger" though he admitted, "There are other departments since 2000 that have found themselves having more problems recruiting personnel because of deeper problems, which is why I don't think you are going to solve the problem just with resources." Retirements, personnel leaving for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and other federal agencies, and military deployments all have affected personnel levels, Cerda says.

The cause may be complex, but Reed contends the result is not rocket science, since "fewer cops means more crime" and "the crime rate is going up." Reed may be correct in stating that crimes rates have increased, but his politicized correlation may fit better on a bumper sticker than a scholarly report. According to Gary LaFree, a professor in the University of Maryland's Department of Criminology and Criminal Justice, the murder rate increased from 5.5 per 100,000 people in 2000 to 5.6 in 2001, while the robbery rate increased from 145 per 100,000 to 148, which he said was so marginal it is, "if anything, flat."

Approached from a "front-end (police)" and "back-end (prisons)" perspective, LaFree says, the connection with crime rates "is probably closer to backend things like prisons than police." While there is no disputing the historic decline in crime in the 1990s, it is too soon to draw any causal relations to explain the increase. "The difficulty in trying to look at all of the various things that could affect crime rates and then try to single out one is that we never have an experimental situation where we could change one thing" LaFree argues.

Asked if the Clinton cops program ever reached its goal of 100,000 new hires, Cerda said that grants to fund the new hires were awarded but a hiring "lag" has not resulted in actual feet on the pavement.

This year alone, the DHS has made as much as $9 billion in financial support available to the states and, on April 8 announced that seven cities would receive $100 million in federal funds for equipment and training. That is on top of the $566 million awarded by the Office for Domestic Preparedness (ODP) in fiscal 2003 first-responder aid. Funds will be released once localities detail how the funds are to be dispersed.

In testimony before the Senate on April 9, DHS Director Tom Ridge said his agency will lead the charge, but fighting terrorism requires policymakers at all levels to make "difficult decisions, critical assessments, and work to find the elusive balance point between the substantial and measurable costs of security and even more substantial and immeasurable costs of insecurity." Those difficult decisions will have to begin with the critical assessment of funding, which was increased further by more than $4 billion in the emergency wartime supplemental bill. Democrats, however, have demanded about $8 billion more, including $4.3 billion for first responders and $1 billion for port security.

According to the ODP, between 1999 and 2002, states and localities received more than $494 million for preparedness measures, but only one-third of those funds have been spent. Delaware and Hawaii are the lone exceptions. On the flip side, as of March 2003, ODP statistics show that of the $3.6 million awarded to Washington, D.C., $3.6 million remains unspent.

Part of the problem lies with state budget mechanisms, witnesses told an April hearing of the Senate Governmental Affairs Committee. Representing the International Association of Fire Fighters (IAFF), Capt. Chauncey Bowers of Prince George's County, Md., told the panel that "filtering [first-responder program] funds through the states and allowing broad discretion has slowed getting funding to firefighters." The IAFF has called for $3 billion more, but Bowers expressed concern that under the administration's overly broad definition of the term "first responder," veterinarians and utility workers would qualify.

Committee Chairwoman Susan Collins (R-Maine) said Congress should "make sure that federal assistance is sufficiently flexible to meet [first-responder] needs" and is set to introduce a bill allowing DHS to grant waivers to states so they can transfer funds to where they have the greatest need.

Showing the flexibility of the term "homeland security," a number of legislators used the war supplemental, to protect their respective "homelands." In legislative haste, millions of dollars worth of pork, such as the $98 million for agriculture-research labs in the home state of Sen. Tom Harkin (D-Iowa), were sneaked into the wartime supplemental, according to the fiscal watchdog group Citizens Against Government Waste (CAGW). And that is but one example of where some of the additional "emergency" funding would go.

Joined by Sen. John McCain and Rep. Jeff Flake, both of Arizona, and fellow Republican Rep. Pat Toomey of Pennsylvania, CAGW President Thomas Schatz said terrorism has been used to justify any project, as was exemplified by fiscal 2003 appropriations, which included $22.5 billion in pork projects. "We've got huge needs for defense and homeland security. This is precisely the time when it is most important to rein in wasteful spending," Toomey said. Schatz noted nondiscretionary defense spending fell 22 percent during 1942, while a similar 25 percent decline occurred during the Korean War.

Asked if the House leadership is responsive to cuts in pork-barrel spending, Toomey said no. "In fact, when I brought it up last time, a member of the leadership stood and said the notion that you can actually save money by cutting this stuff is a McCain canard," Flake said. Both Arizonans noted the House version of the war supplemental was relatively clean.