Hall Co-sponsors COPS Improvement Act to Add More Than 4,800 Additional Police to NY Streets

 

Washington, D.C. – Congressman John Hall (D-NY19) today joined a bipartisan majority in the House to pass H.R. 1700, the COPS Reauthorization Act.  This measure, which Hall is a co-sponsor of, is designed to help local law enforcement agencies to hire an additional 50,000 police officers on the beat over the next six years. For the 19th Congressional District, which Hall represents, the bill would add 147 new police to local departments.

 

“Community based policing has been shown to reduce crime,” said Hall.  “Neighborhoods are safer when the cops on the street know the communities.  Today’s bill will reinvigorate the highly successful COPS hiring grants program that President Bush and the Republican-led Congress eliminated last year.”

 

“The COPS hiring grants program, created under the Clinton Administration in 1994, was an enormously successful, popular program,” Hall pointed out.  “From 1995 to 2005, this program helped local law enforcement agencies to hire 117,000 additional police officers – which helped to significantly reduce crime across the country.  Over those 10 years, New York received $915,484,070 in COPS hiring grants funding, which enabled New York to hire an additional 11,246 police officers.  The impact was felt statewide, including in the Hudson Valley.”

 

Unfortunately, over the last few years, under President Bush, the Republican-led Congress sharply reduced the funding for COPS hiring grants – cutting funding from more than $1 billion a year in the late 1990s to $198 million in 2003 and $10 million in 2005.  Then, in 2006, the Republican-led Congress completely eliminated the program.

 

“This bill relaunches the COPS hiring grants program – this time calling for funding to allow for the hiring of up to 50,000 new police officers over the next six years,” said Hall.  “With passage of the COPS Reauthorization Act, an additional 4,807 cops will likely be hired in New York over the course of the next six years. In my district alone, the bill will mean 147 new officers on local beats.”

 

Under the COPS hiring grants program, the U.S. experienced a significant drop in crime rates – and independent studies confirm that these grants played a significant role. For example, a nonpartisan GAO study concluded, “COPS-funded increases in sworn officers per capita were associated with declines in rates of total index crimes, violent crimes, and property crime.”  According to the study, between 1998 and 2000, the hiring grants were responsible for reducing crimes by about 200,000 to 225,000 crimes – one third of which were violent.

 

President Bush and Republicans in Congress eliminated the hiring program last year and, at the same time, violent crime has spiked across the nation.  Earlier this year, the Police Executive Research Forum, a prominent law enforcement association, released a report which found that violent crimes rose by double digit percentages over the last two years.  Among the cities surveyed, since 2005, 71 percent had an increase in homicides, 80 percent saw robberies rise and 67 percent reported an increase in aggravated assaults with guns.

 

If passed the COPS Improvement Act of 2007 will bring the following to New York’s 19th Congressional District:

This legislation has been endorsed by the International Association of Chiefs of Police, the National Sheriffs Association, the Fraternal Order of Police, the National Association of Police Organizations, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, and the National League of Cities.

 

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