Interim Report on the Effects of COPS Funds on the Decline in Crime during the 1990s
Gao ID: GAO-05-699R June 3, 2005The enactment of the Public Safety Partnership and Community Policing Act of 1994, Title 1 of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act (VCCLEA), authorized appropriations of $8.8 billion to advance the practice of community policing as an effective strategy in communities' efforts to improve public safety. It had as a goal adding 100,000 new police officers nationwide. The Attorney General created the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) to administer community policing grants. VCCLEA was enacted shortly after a period of increasing violent crimes such as murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault. In December 1993, the Department of Justice (DOJ) began making community policing grants to state and local law enforcement agencies. By 2001, COPS grants totaling $7.3 billion in obligations had been made to state and local law enforcement agencies, and these agencies had expended about $5 billion of these obligated amounts. The COPS grant expenditures amounted to about 1 percent of total local law enforcement expenditures from 1994 through 2001. During the time that agencies were spending COPS funds, violent crimes declined. One recent study of the effects of COPS grants on crime concluded that the COPS grants contributed to reductions in crime in the 1990s. However, we previously reviewed the study and reported that its methodological limitations were such that the study's results should be viewed as inconclusive. Moreover, neither the study we reviewed nor a second study of the effects of COPS grant funds on crime analyzed specific ways by which COPS funds could affect crime. In response to the inconclusive results of the study we reviewed, Congress asked us to undertake our own independent evaluation of the impact of COPS grants on the decline in crime that occurred during the 1990s. This report provides results to date from our evaluation regarding three interrelated questions about the extent to which, if any, that COPS grants affected the decline in crime in the 1990s: (1) How were the COPS grant funds distributed among local law enforcement agencies, and to what extent did the distribution of funds correspond to the distribution of total crime and violent crime? (2) Were COPS grants associated with changes in policing practices such as proactive problem identification and intervention, collaboration between police and their communities, and a focus on specific places with high concentrations of crime? (3) Did COPS grant funds lead to increases in the number of sworn police officers, and if so, what was the impact of these COPS-funded officers on the decline in crime during the 1990s? Our final report on our evaluation--due for release in fall 2005--will assess additional aspects of these research objectives, such as other distributional issues related to the flow of funds, officers, and crime; cost-effectiveness issues; and the relationship between policing practices and crime.
Of the $6.01 billion in total COPS grant funds obligated to agencies in our sample between 1994 and 2001, the majority was obligated in the form of hiring grants, which accounted for about $4.05 billion, or 67 percent of all obligations. About 82 percent, or about 9,100, of the agencies in our sample received at least one COPS grant, of any type, during this period, and about 75 percent received at least one hiring grant. By 2001, about 70 percent of the obligated amounts had been spent by the agencies that received the grants. In the sample of COPS grantee agencies for which we obtained population and crime data and could make comparisons, we found that the COPS Office distributed about half of the grant money to agencies covering populations of more than 150,000 and half to agencies with populations of less than 150,000. Because crime may not be directly related to population, one potential effect of the statutory requirement to allocate funds based upon population is that funds might not necessarily be allocated in relation to the volume of crime. We found that, in the aggregate, COPS grant funds were distributed in proportion to the total volume of index crimes, but they were not distributed in proportion to the volume of violent crimes in the agencies that fell into these two population categories. Our analysis of changes in policing practices shows that agencies that received COPS grant funds reported on average larger increases in policing practices than those agencies that did not receive a COPS grant. However, it may be the case that the receipt of COPS grants resulted from agencies' efforts to change policing as opposed to being the cause of the change in policing practices. Our regression models for estimating the effects of the variation in the timing and amount of COPS hiring grant expenditures per capita on the levels of sworn officers over the years from 1991 through 2001 showed that COPS hiring grant expenditures were associated with increases in the net number of sworn police officers. Specifically, from our analyses of data for police agencies serving populations of 10,000 or more persons we estimated that each $25,000 in COPS hiring grant expenditures per year added about 0.6 of a sworn officer to the net number of sworn officers. Using COPS hiring grants as a statistical link between the change in the number of sworn officers and the change in crime, we estimated that COPS-funded increases in sworn officers per capita were associated with declines in the rates of total index crimes, violent crimes, and property crimes in our sample of agencies serving populations of 10,000 or more persons. These effects held after we controlled for the effects of other federal law enforcement grant program expenditures by agencies, local socio-economic and demographic changes that could affect crime, and state-level factors--such as increases in incarceration, changes in sentencing practice, and state-level changes in other programs such as welfare--that could also affect crime.
GAO-05-699R, Interim Report on the Effects of COPS Funds on the Decline in Crime during the 1990s
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entitled 'Preliminary Report on the Effects of COPS Funds on the
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United States Government Accountability Office:
Washington, DC 20548:
May XX, 2005:
The Honorable F. James Sensenbrenner:
Chairman:
Committee on the Judiciary:
House of Representatives:
Subject: Preliminary Report on the Effects of COPS Funds on the Decline
in Crime during the 1990s:
Dear Mr. Chairman:
Established under the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of
1994 (Pub. L. 103-322), which authorized appropriations of $8.8 billion
for it, the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program mission
was to advance the practice of community policing as an effective
strategy in communities' efforts to improve public safety and had as a
goal providing for 100,000 new police officers. VCCLEA--the largest
federal crime bill in the history of the country--was enacted during a
period of increasing crime, particularly serious violent crimes, such
as murder, rape, aggravated assault, and robbery.[Footnote 1] For
example, between 1983 and 1992--the year before the national decline in
crime began--the number of serious violent crimes known to the police
increased from about 1.3 million to over 1.9 million (or about 50
percent), and the serious violent crime rate per 100,000 population
increased from 538 to 758 (or by 39 percent).
In 1994, the COPS Office began making grants to local law enforcement
agencies, and by 2001, it had made about 23,000 grants totaling $7.3
billion. Of these obligated amounts, by the end of 2001, local law
enforcement agencies had expended (or drawn down) about $5 billion. The
COPS grant expenditures amounted to about 1 percent of total local law
enforcement expenditures between 1994 and 2001. At the same time that
local agencies were drawing down COPS funds, serious crimes declined.
For example, between 1994 and 2001, the number of violent crimes
declined from about 1.9 million to about 1.4 million (or by 23
percent), and the violent crime rate per 100,000 population declined
from 714 to 504 (or by 29 percent). Given the comparatively large
expenditure of COPS funds for local law enforcement and the correlation
between these expenditures and the decline in crime, the questions of
whether, and if any, how much, the COPS grants contributed to the
decline in crime merits attention.
Yet, this issue has received only modest attention. One recent study
concluded that the COPS grants contributed to reductions in crime in
the 1990s. However, we previously reviewed the study and reported that
its methodological limitations were such that the study's results
should be viewed as inconclusive.[Footnote 2] Moreover, neither the
study we reviewed nor another study of effects of COPS grant funds on
crime attempted to isolate the ways in which COPS funds could affect
crime.[Footnote 3] For example, the studies did not examine if COPS-
funded police officers were associated with reductions in crime.
In response to our review of the prior study, you asked us to undertake
our own independent evaluation of the impact of COPS grants on the
decline in crime that occurred during the 1990s. This correspondence
reports partial findings regarding three inter-related questions about
the extent to which, if any, that COPS grants affected the decline in
crime in the 1990s: (1) How were the COPS grant funds distributed among
local law enforcement agencies, and to what extent did the distribution
of funds correspond to the distribution of violent crime? (2) Did COPS
grant funds lead to changes in the types of policing tactics that are
associated with crime prevention? (3) Did COPS grant funds lead to
increases in the number of sworn police officers, and if so, what was
the impact of these COPS-funded officers on the decline in crime during
the1990s? Our full report--due for release in the fall 2005--will
address our research objectives in greater.
To address our reporting objectives, we created and analyzed a unique
database consisting of observations on over 13,000 local law
enforcement agencies covering the years from 1990 to 2001. For each
agency, we compiled data on COPS and other federal law enforcement
grant obligations and expenditures, crime rates, and sworn officers. We
also compiled data on factors that the literature suggests are related
to changes in crime, including local economic conditions--such as
employment rates and per capita income--and demographic variables--such
as the percent of the population aged 15 to 24, and the racial and
gender composition of the population. We also added to the database
information from two surveys of nationally representative samples of
police departments that reported on the types of policing tactics that
they implemented. Prior to developing our database, we assessed the
reliability of each data source and in preparing this report, we used
only the data that we found to be sufficiently reliable for the
purposes of our report.
We analyzed the data on COPS and other federal grant obligation and
expenditure amounts to describe how many agencies received COPS grants
and the types and amounts of grants and expenditures. We compared the
amounts of COPS grants with characteristics of each agency's community,
such as their population size and crime rates. To address the extent to
which COPS grants led to changes in policing tactics, we analyzed data
from the two surveys to assess changes in policing tactics between
agencies that received COPS grants and those that did not receive
them.[Footnote 4] To assess the effects of COPS funds on officers and
crime, we developed and estimated so-called fixed-effects regression
models of these relationships. Our regressions estimated the effects of
COPS and other federal law enforcement grants on officers and crime,
respectively, while controlling for differences among agencies in their
pre-COPS program trends in crime rates and sworn officers, differences
over time in socio-economic factors that could affect both the number
of police officers and crime rates, such as unemployment and per-capita
income, and changes in population composition. To help to isolate the
direction of causality between officers and crime, we used a
statistical instrument, and to control for unmeasured sources of
variation, we used agency, state, and year fixed effects. Because of
the complexity of the statistical models that we used to estimate the
effects of COPS grants on crime, we reviewed our approach and methods
with a panel of expert researchers. The panel consisted of
criminologists, economists, statisticians, and practitioners, and it
was convened for us by the National Research Council. See enclosure I
for additional details on our data and methods.
We conducted our work between November 2003 and May 2005 in accordance
with generally accepted government auditing standards.
Background:
The COPS Office distributed grants in some 36 different program
categories. The largest grant program category was the COPS hiring
grants, which required agencies to hire new officers and at the same
time to indicate the types of community policing strategies that they
intended to implement with the officers that they were to hire with
these grants. The hiring grants paid a maximum of $25,000 per officer
per year (or at most 75 percent of an officer's salary) and generally
required that local agencies provide a match to cover the remaining
salary and benefits. Agencies were also required to retain COPS-funded
officers for at least one year after the end of the grant. COPS grants
were also intended to encourage changes in policing practices. Agencies
were asked to report the types of tactics that they planned to
implement with their COPS hiring grants. Problem-solving that pertained
to increased enforcement activities, place-oriented tactics that
focused on addressing crime problems in specific buildings,
neighborhoods or other places, and collaborating with community
residents by increasing officer contact with citizens and improving
citizen feedback were among types of tactics adopted.
In addition to COPS hiring grants, there were several other major
categories of COPS grants programs. Making Officer Redeployment
Effective (or MORE) grants were used to purchase equipment and hire
civilians, with the goal of expanding the amount of time current law
enforcement officers can spend on community policing.[Footnote 5] Some
COPS grant programs provided funds for innovations in policing. For
example, the Distressed Neighborhoods Pilot Project grants provided
funds to communities with high levels of crime and/or economic distress
to hire officers and implement a variety of strategies to improve
public safety, and the Methamphetamine Initiative provided funds to
state and local agencies to support a variety of enforcement,
intervention, and prevention efforts to combat the methamphetamine
problem. Finally, there was a variety of miscellaneous COPS grant
programs. For example, the Regional Community Policing Initiative
provided funds for training officers and representatives of communities
and local governments, and COPS in Schools provided funds to law
enforcement agencies to hire and train school resource officers to help
prevent school violence and improve school and student safety.
Each year COPS was required to distribute half of the grant funds to
agencies with populations exceeding 150,000 and half of the grant funds
to agencies with populations of 150,000 or less.[Footnote 6]
Assessing whether COPS grants contributed to the decline in crime in
the 1990s is complicated by many factors. Nationwide, the decline in
crime began in 1993 before the COPS program made its first grants.
Further, as crime declined during the 1990s, the amount of COPS grant
funds increased. The general decline in crime makes it difficult to
isolate the effect of COPS funds on crime.
COPS grants were distributed in ways that make rigorous evaluations of
their causal impacts difficult to determine. For example, the majority
of police agencies received at least one COPS grant, as we estimated
that 75 percent of police agencies received some type of COPS grant in
our study period and among larger agencies (i.e., those serving
populations of 100,000 or more persons) over 90 percent received at
least one COPS grant. This distribution of COPS grant recipient
agencies limits the number of agencies that could be used as comparison
agencies against which to assess the effects of COPS grant funds on the
decline in crime. Further, within the COPS' program allowable limits on
amounts of funds that agencies could request, agencies generally chose
the amount of grant funds they wanted and they generally received the
amount of COPS funds that they requested. This introduces potential
selection bias into the analysis, in that agencies may have both self-
selected themselves on whether to participate in the COPS program and
on the extent to which they would participate. To assess the effects of
the COPS grant, under conditions of selection bias, it is necessary to
isolate the effects of the grants from an agency's underlying capacity
to address crime problems in its community and its choice to
participate in the COPS program.
To address these issues, we relied on methodological developments in
research on crime that aim to disentangle the effects of programs such
as COPS from other factors that could affect crime rates at the same
time. For example, statistical models based on the use of a panel of
data--or repeated observations on the same units, such as police
agencies, over several time periods--allow for partial identification
of the effects of COPS funds on crime by taking into account the
variation between agencies over time in the amounts of expenditures and
their relationships to crime rates. These methods also allow for the
introduction of controls for pre-existing differences between units
(agencies) and controls for differences over time that can help to
identify causal relationships. In addition, crime research has adopted
the use of statistical instruments as a method for identifying the
causal direction of factors that could be determined simultaneously,
such as the relationship between police officers and crime rates.
Finally, by explicitly identifying mechanisms through which a program
can have its effects--such as increases in officers attributable to
COPS funds and their effects on crime--the program's model can be
tested to rule out spurious correlations between inputs (such as COPS
funds) and outcomes (such as crime).
Results:
Of the $7.32 billion in total COPS grant funds obligated between 1994
and 2001, the majority was obligated in the form of hiring grants,
which accounted for about $4.69 billion, or 64 percent of all
obligations. About 82 percent of agencies received at least one COPS
grant, of any type, during this period, and about 75 percent received
at least one hiring grant. By 2001, about 70 percent of the obligated
amounts had been drawn down (or spent) by the agencies that received
the grants.[Footnote 7] In the sample of COPS grantee agencies for
which we obtained population and crime data and could make
comparisons,[Footnote 8] we found that the COPS Office distributed
grants according to statutory requirements--in that about half of the
monies went to agencies covering populations of more than 150,000 and
half went to agencies with populations of less than 150,000. In the
aggregate, COPS grant funds were also distributed in proportion to the
total volume of index crimes, but they were not distributed in
proportion to the volume of violent crimes in the agencies that fell
into these two population categories. For example, agencies serving
populations of less than 150,000 persons received about 53 percent of
COPS funding but they accounted for about 39 percent of violent crimes
reported to the police. Agencies serving the smallest populations (such
as places with populations of fewer than 25,000 persons) received an
even larger share of COPS grant funds than the share of violent crimes
that they contributed to the national total.
Our analysis of changes in policing tactics shows that COPS grant funds
were associated with increases in police agencies' adoption of tactics
that evaluations have shown to be effective in reducing crime. Our
comparisons of the pre-COPS grant program (i.e., 1993) levels of four
types of policing tactics with their levels during the COPS program
(i.e., in 1997) in the Policing Strategies survey sample of police
agencies showed firstly that among all police agencies there were
increases in the adoption of problem-solving, place-oriented, community-
collaboration, and crime-analysis policing tactics. Specifically, among
all agencies in the sample, between 1993 and 1997, the level of use of
these tactics increased by about 32 percent--as measured by our
summative index of policing tactics. However, our results also showed
secondly that agencies that received COPS grant funds between 1993 and
1997 increased their adoption of problem-solving and place-oriented
tactics more than did the agencies that did not receive COPS grant
funds during these years. For example, agencies that received COPS
grant funds between 1993 and 1997 increased their level of problem-
solving tactics by 45 percent--as measured by our summative index of
tactics--while those that did not receive grants increased them by 32
percent. In addition, our analysis of changes in tactics during the
COPS program in the National Evaluation of COPS survey data from 1996
to 2000, also showed that COPS grantee agencies had larger increases in
their use of problem-solving, place-oriented, and community-
collaboration tactics than did the agencies that had not received a
COPS grant by 2000. Agencies that received a COPS grant before 1996 had
the largest increases in place-oriented and community- collaboration
tactics, while agencies that received a COPS grant between 1996 and
2000 had larger increases in these tactics than did the agencies that
had not received a COPS grant by 2000.
Our fixed-effects regression models of the effects of the variation in
the timing and amount of COPS hiring grant expenditures on the levels
of sworn officers over the years from 1990 to 2001 showed that COPS
hiring grant expenditures were associated with increases in the net
number of sworn police officers per capita. We obtained these results
after controlling for agency-level differences in the timing and amount
of other COPS grant expenditures and other federal law enforcement
grant expenditures; after controlling for annual changes in local
economic and demographic conditions in the county in which an agency
was located; and after controlling for changes in state-level factors
that could affect the level of sworn officers. Specifically, from our
analyses of data for police agencies serving populations of 10,000 or
more persons--which covered about 75 percent of the total population in
the U.S.--we estimated that each $25,000 in COPS hiring grant
expenditures per year was associated with a net increase in the stock
of sworn officers of about six-tenths of a sworn officer. When we
assessed the effects of COPS grant expenditures in specific years on
the level of sworn officers in these years, we found that compared to
the baseline, pre-COPS program year of 1993, COPS expenditures in 1998
through 2000--three years in which COPS expenditures were at or near
their peak amounts of about $815 million per year--were responsible for
an estimated increase in the number of sworn officers per capita of
about 3 percent above the levels that would have been expected without
the funds. Upon projecting the results from our analysis of our sample
of agencies to the entire U.S. population, we estimated that in the
years from 1998 to 2000, COPS grant funds paid for about 18,000
officers in each of these years.
Using COPS hiring grants as a statistical instrument to isolate the
causal direction of the relationship between sworn officers and crime
over the years from 1990 to 2001 in our sample of agencies serving
populations of 10,000 or more persons, we found that COPS-funded
increases in sworn officers per capita were associated with declines in
the index crime rate and declines in the rates of murder, aggravated
assault, robbery, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. From our
regression results we calculated that a 1 percentage point increase in
the level of COPS-funded sworn officers per capita was associated with
about a 0.4 percent reduction in the index crime rate and about a 1
percent reduction in the violent crime rate. Among types of violent
crimes, the estimated effects of changes in officers on crime varied;
for example, a 1 percent increase in the level of officers was
associated with a 2 percent reduction in robbery rates but a 0.5
percent reduction in the rate of aggravated assaults. These effects
held after we controlled for the effects of other federal grant program
funds received by agencies, local socio-economic and demographic
changes that could affect crime, and state-level factors--such as
increases in incarceration, changes in sentencing practice, and state-
level changes in other programs such as welfare--that could also affect
crime. In our analysis, the total effect of COPS grant expenditures on
crime rates depended upon the level of COPS grant expenditures in a
given year, and level of expenditures varied from year to year. For the
years from 1998 through 2000--when COPS grant expenditures were at
their peak levels--and among the agencies in our sample, we estimated
that COPS grant expenditures were associated with about a 1 percent
annual reduction in the index crime rate from its 1993 level, and about
a 3 percent annual reduction in the violent crime rate from its 1993
level. When we projected these results from the analysis of our sample
to the entire U.S. population, we estimated the annual reduction in
crimes attributable to COPS funds nationwide. For 1998--when COPS
expenditures amounted to about $820 million or about 1.5 percent of all
local law enforcement expenditures--we estimated that COPS grant
expenditures were associated with a reduction of an about 212,000 index
crimes and 68,000 violent crimes from their levels in 1993. These
crimes due to COPS grant expenditures amounted to about 8 percent of
the decline in index crimes between 1993 and 1998 and about 12 percent
of the decline in violent crimes over this period. During the years
1999 and 2000--when COPS expenditures also amounted to about $815
million or 1.5 percent of all local law enforcement expenditures--and
crime continued to decline, we calculated that the COPS-funded
reductions in crimes accounted for about 5 percent of the total
reduction in index crimes and about 9 percent of the total reduction in
violent crimes from their 1993 levels.
Agency Comments:
TO COME:
If you or your staff have any questions concerning this report, please
contact Laurie Ekstand at (202) or by e-m ail at Ekstrandl@gao.gov or
William J. Sabol at (202) 512-3464 or Sabolwj@gao.gov. Key contributors
to this report were:
Sincerely yours,
Signed by:
Laurie Ekstrand, Director:
Homeland Security and Justice Issues:
Signed by:
Nancy Kingsbury:
Managing Director, Applied Research and Methods:
Enclosures - I:
[End of section]
Enclosure I: Elements of the Database and Methods Used to Assess
Effects of COPS Funds on Sworn Officers and Crime Rates:
We constructed a database that consisted of up to 12 years of data
(covering the period from 1990 to 2001) for each of 13,133 law
enforcement agencies. These agencies represented about 75 percent of
all local law enforcement agencies that reported data to the UCR; they
covered about 95 percent of the population in the United States and
about 95 percent of all crimes reported in the UCR. We constructed our
database in the form of a panel, in which we obtained repeated measures
on key variables in each agency over time.
The database contained information on federal grant amounts, crime,
officers, and socio-economic and demographic factors associated with
crime. The types of information contained in our database were:
* Grant obligation amounts to and annual amounts expended by each
recipient of a COPS grant;
* Annual amounts of other federal local law enforcement grants expended
by both agencies that received COPS funds and those that did not;
* Annual data on the number of index crimes and each category of index
crimes, along with annual data on the number of such crimes per 100,000
population;
* Annual observations on the number of sworn police officers and the
number of officers per 10,000 population;
* Annual data on economic and demographic factors that are related to
crime, such as employment, per-capita income, relative size of persons
in "crime-prone" age group of 15 to 24, the gender and racial
composition of populations, and total population.
We linked data from the various sources to each law enforcement agency
contained in our sample of agencies. The sources of data used to
compile the annual observations from 1990 to 2001 on local police
departments included:
* FBI Uniform Crime Reports (UCR)--Annual data files on the number of
crimes and sworn officers reported by each agency to the UCR. The crime
data are available separately for each Index Crime, which include the
crimes of murder and non-negligent manslaughter, rape, robbery,
aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft. In
addition, the data on sworn officers represent the number of officers
in each agency on October 31 of each year. We used the originating
agency code (or ORI) variable and census place codes to link crime and
officer data to other data sources.
* COPS Office--Annual data on each grant awarded and amounts obligated
for each grant. The COPS data include the ORI code and other
information that we used to link with other data sources.
* Office of Justice Programs Financial Data--Annual data on the amount
drawn down from each grant awarded by OJP. Because OJP and COPS share
data, these OJP data also included COPS grant draw downs. The data on
draw downs of funds best represent expenditures of federal grant monies
in the years in which the dollars were spent. By contrast, amounts
obligated in a given year may not be spent in that year. We used
information about Census place (FIPS) codes and about OJP vendors to
link data.
* Bureau of Economic Analysis--County level data on per capita income
and employment. We linked these data to agency-level data using census
place codes. Local economic conditions within each county are applied
to each agency within a county.
* Census of Population Intercensal Estimates--Annual data for each
county from 1990 to 1999 on population totals, and population
breakdowns by gender, race, and age. We linked these data using census
place code identifiers, and we extrapolated from underlying trends in
each population category to obtain estimates for 2000 and 2001.
In addition to the sources above that provided annual data on local
policing agencies, we obtained and included in our database information
from two separate surveys of nationally representative samples of local
law enforcement agencies about the types of policing tactics that they
implemented. Both surveys consisted of two waves of observations on the
same police departments. The first survey, the National Survey of
Community Policing Strategies (or "Policing Strategies Survey"), was
conducted by the Police Foundation in 1993 (pre COPS), and Opinion
Research Corporation (ORC) Macro International, Inc., and the Police
Executive Research Forum (or PERF) in 1997 (during the COPS program).
We used the Policing Strategies Survey data that contain information on
1,242 police agencies that responded to both waves of the survey, and
of these, we were able to link the data from 1,236 agencies to our
larger database on crime, officers, monies, and economic conditions. We
used the Policing Strategies Survey data to compare changes in the
types and levels of policing tactics that occurred during the COPS
program with pre-COPS levels of tactics.
The second survey, the National Evaluation of the COPS Program (or
"National Evaluation of COPS"), was conducted by the Urban Institute,
and it consisted of two waves of observations on a sample of 1,225
agencies in 1996 and again in 2000. We used the data from this survey
to compare changes in policing occurring during the period of the COPS
program. We were able to link the data from these two sources to our
larger database using various identifiers.
Prior to developing our database, we assessed the reliability of each
data source and in preparing this report, we used only the data that we
found to be sufficiently reliable for the purposes of our report.
Methods Used in Our Analyses:
We used various methods to analyze each of our reporting objectives.
Methods to Analyze the Flow of COPS Funds:
To assess the flow of COPS funds, we use the OJP Financial data to
compute the amount of COPS funds obligated by COPS grants and the
amount expended--or drawn down--by local police agencies during the
period from 1994 to 2001. To describe the overall COPS funding trends
by grant type, we analyzed the universe of agencies in the OJP data
that received any federal law enforcement grant during the period 1990-
2001, regardless of whether or not the agency received a COPS grant
during the period. For analyses of COPS funds by agency population
sizes and for comparisons of funding levels with levels of violent and
total index crime, we limited our analysis to the subsample of agencies
whose crime and population data we were able to link to the OJP data.
This resulted in a sample of 11,187 agencies--or 85 percent--of the
13,133 agencies in our crime sample. These agencies accounted for 86
percent of the reported index crimes in the U.S. (between 1990 and
2001). We capture the vast majority of COPS funds, but we exclude some
COPS funds from our analyses either because we could not match them to
agencies that reported data to the UCR or because the funds went to
agencies that we excluded from our analyses.[Footnote 9]
In analyzing the flow of COPS funds to local law enforcement agencies,
our objectives were to assess whether the COPS grants were distributed
according to statutory requirements and to assess the effect of these
requirements on the distribution of COPS funds in relation to the
volume of serious crimes occurring in the agencies that received COPS
grants.
Methods to Analyze Changes in Policing Practices and Tactics:
To address whether COPS grants were associated with increases in the
adoption of crime-preventing policing tactics, we analyzed the Policing
Strategies and National Evaluation of COPS survey data. We compared
differences in the levels of tactics between agencies that received
COPS grants and those that did not receive grants during the two
periods covered by the surveys. With the Policing Strategies Survey, we
compared pre-and post-COPS program differences in the adoption of
tactics (or from 1993 to 1997), and with the National Evaluation of
COPS Survey, we compared changes in the adoption of tactics that
occurred within the COPS program (or from 1996 to 2000).
Each of the surveys reported data on the policing tactics used by
agencies. Survey responses were obtained from knowledgeable officials
within each agency, such as the police chief or the chief's designee.
The number of items related to policing tactics differed between the
two surveys. For the data in each survey, we classified items into
tactics categories based on our assessment of the policing literature.
We then assessed statistically the degree to which the items that we
included in each of our four categories were correlated with each other
and uncorrelated with items in the other categories.
The Policing Strategies Survey data contained 30 items related to
policing tactics. We combined eight tactics pertaining to increasing
officer contact with citizens and improving citizen feedback into a
community collaboration index. We used items on the crime analysis
units within police departments to create our index of crime analysis.
We combined seven tactics pertaining to increasing enforcement activity
or place management in buildings, neighborhoods, or other specific
places into an index of place-focused tactics. And we compiled the data
on twelve items that reflected organizational efforts to reduce or
interrupt recurring mechanisms that may encourage crime into a problem-
solving tactics index. The classification of items from the Policing
Strategies Survey into our four indexes of types of policing tactics is
shown in table 2.
Table 1: Policing Tactics and Strategy Items Utilized to Create
Summative Indexes in the Policing Strategies Survey.
Community collaboration:
* Agency uses foot patrol as a specific assignment;
* Agency uses foot patrol as a periodic expectation for officers
assigned to cars;
* Agency uses citizen surveys to determine community needs and
priorities;
* Agency uses citizen surveys to evaluate police service;
* Patrol officers conduct surveys in area of assignment;
* Patrol officer meet regularly with community groups;
* Supervisors maintain regular contact with community leaders;
* Agency uses citizens as volunteers within the police agency.
Crime analysis:
* Agency has a decentralized crime analysis unit/ function;
* Agency has a centralized crime analysis unit/function;
* Supervisors manage crime analysis for geographic area of
responsibility.
Place-oriented practices:
* Agency designates some officers as "community" or "neighborhood"
officers;
* Agency uses building code enforcement as a means of helping remove
crime;
* Geographically based crime analysis made available to officers;
* Command or decision-making responsibility tied to neighborhoods or
beats;
* Patrol officers enforce civil and code violations in area;
* Fixed assignment of patrol officers to specific beats or areas;
* Agency uses other regulatory codes to combat drugs and crime.
Problem-solving practices:
* Specific training provided officers for problem identification and
resolution;
* Training for citizens in problem identification or resolution;
* Landlord/manager training programs for order maintenance;
* Interagency involvement in problem identification and resolution;
* Agency has revised procedures to deal with neighborhood problems;
* Multidisciplinary teams to deal with special problems such as child;
* Specialized problem solving unit;
* Patrol officers work with citizens to identify and resolve area
problems;
* Organization has been redesigned to support problem solving efforts;
* Line supervisors make final decision about which problems are to be
addressed;
* Line supervisors make final decision about how to handle most
community problems;
* Line supervisors make final decision about application of agency
resources to solve problem in geographic area of responsibility.
Source: Policing Strategies Survey, 1993 and 1997.
Note: Each individual items is coded dichotomously (yes/no) to indicate
whether an agency implemented the specific tactic.
[End of table]
The National Evaluation of COPS Survey contained data on 19 items
relating to policing tactics. We classified these items into the same
tactics categories as we did with the Policing Strategies Survey data.
Many of the items in the National Evaluation of COPS Survey were worded
in the same way as in the Policing Strategies Survey.
Table 2: Policing Tactics and Strategy Items Utilized to Create
Summative Indexes in the National Evaluation of COPS Survey.
Community collaboration:
* Regular community meetings to discuss crime;
* Surveys of citizens to determine general community needs and
satisfaction with your agency;
* Citizen action/advisory councils in precincts or beats;
* Officers analyze community resident's comments to identify recurring
patterns of crime and disorder on their beats;
* Considering neighborhood values in creating solutions or planning
projects;
* Varying styles of preventive patrol (e.g. bikes, walk and talk);
* Joint projects with local businesses to reduce disorder or petty
crime.
Crime analysis:
* Analyzing crime patterns using computerized geographic information
systems;
* Officers analyze and use crime data to identify recurring patterns of
crime and disorder on their beats.
Place-oriented practices:
* Clean up/fix up projects with community residents;
* Joint projects with community residents to reduce disorder such as
loitering, public drinking;
* Beat or patrol boundaries that coincide with neighborhood/community
boundaries;
* Alcohol, housing, or other code enforcement to combat crime and
disorder.
Problem-solving practices:
* Designating certain patterns as "problems" or "projects" requiring
non-traditional responses;
* Analyzing problems with business or property owners, school
principals, or property managers or occupants;
* Analyzing problems with probation/parole officers or others who
monitor offenders;
* Using agency data to measure effects of responses to problems;
* Documenting problems, projects, analyses, responses, failures, and
successes in writing;
* Team approach instead of chain of command for prevention, problem
solving, and law enforcement.
Source: National Evaluation of COPS Survey, 1996 and 2000.
Note: Each individual items is coded dichotomously (yes/no) to indicate
whether an agency implemented the specific tactic.
[End of table]
From each of the surveys, we developed summative indexes of the overall
number tactics and the number of tactics within each of the 4
categories of policing tactics. We then computed and compared changes
in the mean levels of tactics between the COPS grantee and non-grantee
agencies. To control for differences between agencies and trends over
time in the adoption of policing tactics that could account for
differences in tactics, in our analysis of the Policing Strategies
Survey data and the National Evaluation of COPS Survey data, we
estimated regressions that controlled for social and economic
characteristics of the places in which police agencies were located and
pre-existing trends in officers and crimes.
Methods to Estimate the Effects of COPS Funds on Officers and Crime:
We adopted similar approaches to estimating the effects of COPS funds
on officers and crime, as described below.
Methods to Estimate the Effects of COPS Funds on Officers:
To estimate the effect of COPS funds on officers, we used fixed-effects
regression methods that permitted us to assess changes in the levels of
sworn officers per 10,000 persons as a function of COPS funds, other
federal funds, local economic conditions, and changes in the age,
gender, and racial composition of local populations. The fixed effects
regression models allow us to control for two sources of unmeasured
variation (i.e., omitted variables): The pre-existing differences among
the agencies in our sample that are constant within agencies over time
and the differences within agencies over time in relation to the
overall trends in variables. By adopting these models we are able to
control for the effects of unmeasured variables that vary over time
between agencies and that might be correlated with our dependent
variables. We introduced fixed effects at the level of the local law
enforcement agency. In addition, to control for state-level influences
on officers that we were unable to observe directly--such as changes in
state sentencing practices--we also introduced into our models state-
by-year level fixed effects.
Finally, to control for underlying trends in the pre-COPS grant period
in sworn officers and crime, we estimated regressions that analyzed
these trends, and then we classified each agency's trend within
population size groups. This allowed us to compare agencies within size
categories that had similar trends in officers and crime prior to the
COPS program. Specifically, we separated the agencies in 4 groups based
on the growth rate in both officers and in crime during 1990-1993,
which is prior to the implementation of the COPS program. We
constructed each combination of these groups, which produced 16 cells.
These cells were then interacted with each year, and 4 population
categories, for a total of 704 effects. In essence then, each agency is
being compared with another agency that had a similar "trajectory" of
crime and officers in the pre-COPS period.[Footnote 10]
We analyzed the data for 5,199 police agencies with populations of
10,000 or more persons. We estimated several regressions of the effect
of COPS funds on sworn officers, and we included as time-varying
independent variables the per capita amounts of COPS hiring grants,
COPS innovative grants, COPS MORE grants, COPS miscellaneous grants,
Edward Byrne Memorial State and Local Law Enforcement Assistance
Discretionary Grants, Local Law Enforcement Block Grants (LLEBG), the
employment to population ratio, per capita income, the percent of the
population that was male, the percent of the population that was
nonwhite, and the percent of the population that was between the ages
of 15 and 24. All of our economic and population measures were observed
at the level of the county that contained the local law enforcement
agency. Our regressions included the agency level fixed effects, year
effects, effects for the pre-COPS trends in the growth of officers and
crime, population weights (to allow us to estimate national-level
effects), and state-by-year fixed effects.
Methods to Estimate the Effects of COPS Funds on Crime through
Officers:
We estimated the impact of COPS funding on crime through these funds'
effects on changes in officers. We made use of the fact that, unlike
the other COPS grant types, hiring grants were earmarked specifically
for the hiring of officers. Consequently, variation in the number of
officers coming from hiring grant should be unrelated with other
changes in police expenditures. In this sense, we used COPS hiring as
an instrument to isolate the direction of causality between officers
and crime rates.
We then estimated population-weighted regressions of the impact of the
flow of COPS dollars on crime rates, net of pre-existing trends in
crime rates and growth of officers, and net of economic conditions,
population change, and other amounts of funding for local law
enforcement. We used the population weights to allow us to develop
estimates for the nation as a whole. We estimated our regressions on
the same sample of 5,199 agencies with populations of 10,000 or more
that we used in our officers equations. We estimated crime equations
separately by type of crime and population size group. Under the
assumption that hiring grants can be used as an instrument, we used the
results from the two regressions--officer rate on COPS funds and crime
rate on COPS funds--to calculate the elasticity of crime with respect
to officers (i.e., percent change in crime rates attributable to the
percent change in officers).
More specifically, we estimated the effect of COPS funds on crime using
a reduced form equation that included measures of specific types of
COPS grant funds (e.g., hiring, MORE, innovative, and miscellaneous
grants) expended, measures of other federal grant funds expended, and
the controls for socio-economic and demographic changes in the
population. We included the 704 variables that controlled for pre-COPS
trends in officers and crime, and we introduced agency level, year
level, and state-by-year fixed effects. The state-by-year fixed effects
allow us to control for unmeasured state-level sources of variation
with crime, such as increases in state incarceration rates, changes in
state sentencing practices, and changes in other state programs--such
as welfare reform--that could affect crime rates. We estimated
regressions separately for the index crime rate and by type of index
crime.
After obtaining the coefficients from our officers and crime
regressions, and to obtain estimates of the effects of COPS funds on
crime through officers, we then calculated the elasticity of crime with
respect to officers in any given year. The elasticity of crime with
respect to officers provides an estimate of the effect of a 1 percent
change in the level of sworn officers per capita on the per capita
crime rate. Using these elasticities, we then apportioned the amount of
the reduction in crime that we could attribute to COPS funds. To
project the effects of COPS funds on crime to the nation as a whole, we
then weighted the estimates of COPS effects on crime in our sample up
to the nation as whole.
[End of section]
FOOTNOTES
[1] VCCLEA contained other provisions to address violent crime, such
encouraging states to increase the use of incarceration for violent
offenders through the Violent Offender Initiative and Truth-in-
Sentencing grants, enhancing penalties for gang crimes, and expanding
the number of Federal death penalty offenses.
[2] The study that we reviewed was: Zhao, J. and Thurman, Q. A National
Evaluation of the Effect of COPS Grants on Crime from 1994 to 1999
(December 2001). Our review of this study was reported in: GAO:
Technical Assessment of Zhao and Thurman's 2001 Evaluation of the
Effects of COPS Grants on Crime, GAO-03-867R (Washington, D.C.: June
13, 2003).
[3] In addition to the Zhao and Thurman work cited above, David
Muhlhausen has assessed the effects of COPS funds on crime rates. Using
county-level data on crimes and funds, Muhlhausen found that other than
the Innovative grant program, COPS grants were not associated with
reductions in crime. See: Muhlhausen, D. Do Community Oriented Policing
Services Grants Affect Violent Crime Rates (Washington, D.C.: Heritage
Foundation, May 25, 2001).
[4] The first survey was National Survey of Community Policing
Strategies, and it was conducted by the Police Foundation in 1993 to
provide information in what was occurring and what needed to occur in
the development and implementation of community policing. In 1997,
Opinion Research Corporation (ORC) Macro International, Inc., and the
Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) conducted the National Survey of
Community Policing Strategies Update, a longitudinal follow-up to the
previous survey, using the same sample as the 1993 survey. The 1997
survey was designed to provide information on the most current
practices and trends in community policing. In the remainder of this
letter, we refer to the two waves of this longitudinal survey as the
Policing Strategies survey. The second survey was the National
Evaluation of the COPS Program survey, which was conducted by the Urban
Institute between 1996 and 2000. It was a nationally-representative
sample of law enforcement agencies that were contacted in 1996 and
again in 2000. In the remainder of this letter, we refer to this second
survey as the National Evaluation of COPS survey.
[5] MORE grants in 1995 could also be used to pay for police officer
overtime costs.
[6] Of funds available in any fiscal year, up to 3 percent may be used
for technical assistance or for evaluations or studies carried out or
commissioned by the Attorney General. The requirement to allocate the
funds by size of agency population applies to the remaining funds in
any fiscal year (USC 42, chapter 46, subchapter XX, sec. 3793, (a) (11)
(B).
[7] Due to lags between the time when grants are obligated and all of
the funds are expended, not all COPS obligated amounts during the years
from 1994 to 2001 were drawn down or expended in that same period by
the agencies that received the grants.
[8] This sample consisted of 11,187 agencies, or 85 percent of the
agencies that reported crime data to the UCR. This group of agencies
accounted for 86 percent of the reported index crimes in the United
states between 1990 and 2001.
[9] The COPS Office received applications from law enforcement agencies
that did not have originating agency (ORI) numbers. These numbers are
used by the UCR to identify agencies that report crimes. The COPS
Office assigned the agencies that did not have ORIs a "ZZ" ORI code.
This code was based upon a number that the applicant agency reported to
which the COPS Office appended a "ZZ" code. We were unable to match
these "ZZ" agencies to agencies in the UCR. However, our analysis of
these agencies suggests that they were mostly smaller agencies of
recent origin as well as consortia, tribal and private research
organizations.
[10] This approach was first implemented by Evans, W. and Owens, E in
Flypaper COPS (College Park, Md.: Univeristy of Maryland, April, 2005).
