Democrats Unite Against GOP Crime Bill : Congress: President’s party closes ranks behind his threat to veto measure rerouting funds for new police. Today’s scheduled vote is expected to be close.

The GOP’s “contract with America,” which has made substantial progress in its journey through the House, hit a serious pothole Monday as Democrats closed ranks behind President Clinton’s threat to use his veto in defense of a program to hire thousands of new police officers.

At issue as the House entered the second week of a contentious debate over crime is the fate of $13 billion in grants that last year’s omnibus crime bill made available to fund crime prevention programs and to fulfill Clinton’s campaign promise to put 100,000 new police officers on the nation’s streets.

Nearly finished with their massive rewrite of the 1994 bill, House Republicans sought to dismantle police and prevention programs that constituted the centerpiece of the Clinton bill and replace them with a smaller, $10.5-billion block grant that state and municipal governments could spend on anti-crime measures of their choice.

“We have a fire in the streets of America today and the first thing we have to do is put out the fire before we start worrying about fire control or crime prevention,” said Rep. Frederick Heineman, a GOP freshman and former police chief in Raleigh, N.C.

The GOP lawmakers argued that their bill would give local authorities greater flexibility in deciding which anti-crime measures will best serve their communities, while the grants in the Clinton bill would force them to start community policing programs and other initiatives that may not be appropriate for every locality with a high crime rate.

However, with Atty. Gen. Janet Reno and representatives of most major police groups at their sides, Democrats derided the GOP substitute as a giant “pork barrel” proposal that will do little to deter crime.

In the name of flexibility, “they would give huge amounts of money with no strings attached to local governments to spend as they wish,” said Rep. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who noted that a similar proposal was tested in the 1970s but later abandoned as the “worst and most wasteful” failure of the then-nascent war on crime.

“More than 17,000 police have already been hired and more than 7,000 localities have already benefited” from last year’s legislation, added Schumer, who said that GOP plans to “rip up” the bill and write a new law are “just plain goofy.”

Republicans spent last week revising the crime bill with a series of measures that met with surprisingly little Democratic opposition. But Democrats dug in their heels over the Community Policing Services program in the Clinton bill, sensing that the GOP is more vulnerable on an issue where they must defend their opposition to the provision for more officers.

Clinton said over the weekend that he would veto the GOP bill to keep his promise of hiring more police and, buoyed by support from almost every major law enforcement group in the nation, the Democrats finally went on the attack Monday on the eve of what is expected to be a close vote.

Although they conceded that they may not be able to pry loose enough Republican support to block passage of the GOP alternative, Democratic leaders expressed confidence that they will be able to deny it enough votes to sustain what could be the first veto of Clinton’s presidency.

Under the GOP proposal, the $8-billion police officers program, as well as $5 billion in crime prevention and other programs, would be folded into a $10.5-billion fund that, in the House version of the bill, would be directly available to qualifying municipalities to spend as they wish.

The Democrats said that lack of accountability in the GOP proposal raises the specter of abuse similar to that during the Richard Nixon Administration, when crime-fighting funds were squandered on dubious studies and in some cases to buy limousines and airplanes for state officials.

But Republicans angrily rejected the comparison with past failures.