The Gamble Is $9-Billion Program Will Take Sting Out of Crime : Congress is set to approve Clinton-backed initiative to add 100,000 police officers in U.S. But experts worry it may not be enough to do the job.

Will more cops mean less crime?

In a law enforcement experiment of unprecedented cost and ambition, President Clinton and Congress are about to gamble almost $9 billion on the proposition that thickening the thin blue line will ease the sting of crime in big cities and small towns alike.

Fulfilling one of Clinton’s most specific campaign promises, Congress is poised to approve a massive new matching grant program that will help communities deploy 100,000 new police officers through the end of the century. That would represent a dramatic 16% increase in the roughly 600,000 police on America’s streets--and offer a lifeline for mayors scrambling for the funds to respond to public demands for tough measures against crime.

“Basically, the federal government is a gigantic bank, and we want them to make their deposits in the right places,” says Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, who has promised to add almost 3,000 new police officers over the next four years. “The super right place is for police officers. We need the fiscal help.”

When it returns from its Easter recess, Congress still faces many knotty questions on exactly how to structure the assistance. At the top of the list is how many police officers to fund: While the Senate has backed the 100,000 figure, the House last fall approved funds for only 50,000 new officers. But with Clinton crusading for the higher figure, and public anxiety about crime at a piercing pitch, House aides say the chamber is virtually certain to accept the higher number.

But, even as the police program marches toward Clinton’s desk, some mayors and law enforcement experts worry that it may not take as big a bite out of crime as supporters hope. With thousands of jurisdictions likely to seek aid, they reason, the new cops may be too widely diffused to help the most beleaguered areas.

Critics also worry that gains could prove short-lived if cities lack the financial resources to assume the costs of the new officers after the federal subsidies expire, five to six years after each officer is hired. With the legislation demanding substantial local cost-sharing, some cities may be unable to afford new officers even with the subsidies.

Above all, many experts note, there is no consistent evidence that adding police officers, by itself, reduces crime. “To assume additional officers alone can make a difference in the crime rate oversimplifies the problem,” says St. Petersburg, Fla., Police Chief Darrel Stephens.

But supporters of the new program point out that the police officers are only one component of a legislative package that includes tougher sentences, new funds for prison construction and--especially in the House bill--significant sums for crime prevention programs. And the police funds are intended to leverage local law enforcement departments toward reforming their operations to work more closely with local neighborhoods in a strategy known as “community policing.”

“We ought to work at the front end to prevent crime, and good police work can prevent crime,” says Patrick V. Murphy, director of the police policy board at the U.S. Conference of Mayors. “With the level of violent crime we have in our cities, we can use more police.”

Amid this debate about the value of more cops, hundreds of mayors effectively have cast their ballots by seeking their share of a pilot police-funding program Congress approved last year.

With about half of the $150 million in available funds distributed so far, the Justice Department has awarded grants to 108 communities--ranging in size from Los Angeles, which won $4 million to hire 54 new officers, to San Juan Bautista, Calif., which was awarded $75,000 to rehire its solitary sheriff’s deputy. But those receiving funds have been a fraction of the more than 2,700 communities submitting applications.

There’s no question that, in the aggregate, the crime legislation likely to emerge from Congress will substantially increase the nation’s total deployment of police officers.

In addition to the 100,000 additional officers funded in the Senate bill, the legislation would create a national police corps similar to Clinton’s national service plan. Under the program, young people would receive grants for college in return for agreeing to serve four years as police officers; communities would receive $10,000 annual subsidies to help pay their salaries over that period.

The House Judiciary Committee dropped that provision in the crime bill it approved last month, but supporters are optimistic about their prospects of restoring the funds when the bill reaches the House floor, probably sometime this month.

If Congress fully funds the police corps--which would require about $1 billion in yearly expenditures--the program could funnel another 50,000 officers annually to local departments within four years of operation, the Congressional Budget Office has estimated.

But some analysts warn that these apparently impressive increases in police deployments wilt when brought down to the precinct level. Vacation time, sick time and other considerations mean that police departments must hire between five and six new officers to keep a single additional body on the street 24 hours a day year-round, Chief Stephens says. Adding 100,000 new cops nationally “turns out to be 20,000 patrolmen or less on the street,” he says.

Given that reality, law enforcement experts like James Q. Wilson, a professor of management at UCLA, say the new officers could do the most good if they were concentrated in the few cities confronting the most violent crime. But the political current runs toward fragmentation: Both houses of Congress have designed allocation formulas that guarantee cities under 150,000 a majority of the new police officers.

Finding ways to “target the resources where they are needed,” promises to be the most difficult challenge in the final negotiations over the bill, one Administration official said.

For Wilson and other experts, the question of how the new officers will be used is even more important than how they are distributed.

Clinton and Congress want to use the new funds to leverage cities toward community policing: Only cities committed to that strategy will be eligible for the aid.

But, although almost every major city claims to be embracing community policing, they have advanced a diverse assortment of strategies that range from fundamental reform to what many consider cosmetic change.

Although the public image of community policing centers on officers walking a beat rather than patrolling in squad cars, most experts say the approach’s core is a commitment by police departments to work more closely with neighborhood groups to prevent crime, rather than simply responding to emergencies through the “911” system.

Implementing that vision requires “a fairly rigorous devolution of authority” from central commanders to local precincts--and as such is frequently resisted even in communities that have rhetorically committed to the community policing concept, says George L. Kelling, a professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University. In varying ways, cities such as New York and Houston have stumbled in the transition to the new system, and Houston has actually backed away.

If the Administration is to maximize the impact of the new officers, Kelling argues, it will have to rigorously target its resources toward those communities that display the most commitment to reform.

“It all depends how discerning they are,” Kelling says. “It seems to me the federal government has to identify not only cities in need, but cities that are moving in creative ways toward responding to that need.”

More Police, Less Crime?

Federal figures indicate no direct relationship between a city’s level of policing and its crime rate. With nearly four officers per 1,000 residents, Philadelphia has a relatively low crime rate; Atlanta, with almost as many police per capita, has a crime rate almost three times greater. And San Jose, with 50% fewer police officers per capita than New York or Philadelphia, has a lower crime rate than either of those.

City Police officers per 1,000 residents crime rate per 1,000 San Diego 1.02 80.10 Los Angeles 2.16 93.60 Seattle 2.26 120.00 San Jose 2.34 49.10 San Francisco 2.46 101.90 Denver 2.71 81.50 Miami 2.73 174.88 Dallas 2.75 124.29 Cleveland 3.20 82.80 Boston 3.39 98.46 Detroit 3.68 112.29 Atlanta 3.71 173.47 New York 3.83 84.90 Philadelphia 3.89 60.70

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reports 1992.