David A. Keene

Police Corps starved for funds
Tuesday, May 28, 2003

Congress is notorious for lavishing money on programs, weapons systems and projects that everyone privately knows don't work or aren't worth a fraction of what we put into them. At the same time, smaller programs that actually work are often ignored because they are small or because they don't have high-powered sponsorship.

The Police Corps may be just such a program. Adam Walinsky, an iconoclastic speechwriter for the late Sen. Robert Kennedy (D-N.Y.), dreamed up the program in the late 70s and, after years of effort, finally managed to get it enacted into law in the mid-90s. Now he fears that although virtually everyone seems to acknowledge its value, the program could die of neglect.

From the beginning, the program won support from unlikely quarters.

Congressional champions have included Newt Gingrich (R-Ga.), Bob Dornan (R-Calif.), Barney Frank (D-Mass.), Trent Lott (R-Miss.) and John Kerry (D-Mass.)

Conceptually it's simple enough. The Police Corps is patterned on Reserve Officers Training Corps and based on the idea that new blood can be attracted to police work if society provides college assistance to potential recruits. Recruits agree to devote a few years to police work in exchange for assistance with college expenses. Walinsky was convinced that young people who look at law enforcement as a career option as a result of the scholarship offer might find a policing career very attractive on its own merits.

It's not a big program. Walinsky never proposed putting 100,000 new cops on the street like Clinton, in part because he knew that it's impossible to snap one's fingers and come up with that number of quality recruits or train them for virtually instantaneous deployment.

In 1996, a few states began setting up Police Corps programs and others followed. Since then programs have sprouted in more than two dozen states, graduates of the program have excelled on the street, and more than one police department has decided to make all its officers go through the Corps' training program.

And to everyone's amazement except Walinsky's, graduates aren't abandoning police work after serving their required time. They're staying because they like the work and because they are very good at it.

In Washington, however, a program's success or failure is not a particularly good predictor of whether it will be continued, terminates or is abandoned. Small programs that are working sometimes fall through the cracks while bigger ones that virtually everyone admits aren't much good often continue seemingly forever -- for example, Head Start, which according to evaluation after evaluation seems to help no children at all.

Last year, Justice Department bureaucrats began nixing the addition of states into the Police Corps program, ostensibly to save money.

We're not talking about a fortune here... at least not in the federal budgetary world. President Bush requested $30 million in his budget for the entire program, barely enough to keep it going. Congress cut that in half, crippling the program.

Meanwhile, the general COPS program of nearly a billion dollars continues, including $200 million for the cops Clinton supposedly put on the street.

So the Police Corps starves. Unless the president and Congress come up with at least $45 million in next year's budget, the program could collapse.

The lesson here may be that a program that costs a lot of money generates stronger congressional and bureaucratic support than a smaller program just because it's bigger. If the Police Corps can fall through the cracks, one has to wonder just how many other worthy programs face a similar fate.