Election Issues Today

President Obama’s stimulus plan will restore funding for local police forces that was initiated under President Clinton and pretty much pushed aside by President Bush.

The program is known as Community Oriented Police Services, COPS for short, naturally, and aims to add 100,000 police officers over the next eight years. Unlike the tax cut aspects of the stimulus plan, this money directly creates jobs at the local level.

The plan includes about $1 billion for local government to hire more police officers. The economic crisis feeds fear of increased crime and so this portion of the stimulus plan presents an opportunity to improve upon the Clinton program by eliminating the 25 percent local “matching” fund requirement that had made it difficult for many municipalities to take advantage of the previous COPS provisions.

I can attest from personal experience that municipal governments are hard-pressed to maintain police and fire services when local tax revenues are falling. Police and Fire Departments eat up a majority of a City’s annual budget.

Whether or not these economic hard times will lead to increasing crime rates is unknown, but that is an argument being brought forward to support keeping law enforcement well-funded for the next few years.

There is also additional money in the stimulus package, about $2.6 billion, that will be available to help local law enforcement with assistance to crime victims, rural drug problems, and police overtime.