House Appropriations Committee votes to eliminate funding for community police officers

Republicans on the House Appropriations Committee want to eliminate the 17-year-old federal Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program that has helped states and localities hire community police officers since 1994, provide no more funding for states to help pay the costs of imprisoning illegal immigrants, and sharply reduce federal juvenile justice funding. It's part of an overall reduction of more than $1 billion in the Justice Department budget of $27 billion-plus that the committee approved yesterday.

Republicans defeated an amendment by Democratic Rep. Chaka Fattah of Pennsylvania to give $35 million to the COPS program. Commerce and Justice Subcommittee Chairman Frank Wolf, R-Va., "said he was supportive of COPS but objected to the offset Fattah came up with – to take money from an asset forfeiture fund also used by law enforcement," Erik Wasson of The Hill reports. Wolf did agree to seek additional funding for the program if more money becomes available. (Read more)

Bipartisan votes protect local police subsidies and legal aid to the poor from House GOP cuts

House Democrats and some moderate Republicans joined forces to restore some funding for the Community Oriented Policing Services and legal aid for the poor, two important programs in many rural areas. "The victories were not without cost, forcing deep cuts from the nation’s space program as well as research and development funds in the Department of Homeland Security," David Rogers of Politco reports. "But the votes are the clearest sign yet of some second thoughts in the GOP about the depth and direction of the reductions demanded by conservatives and tea party supporters on the right."

In voting to preserve at least reduced funding for legal aid to the poor, 68 Republicans crossed party lines in support of the Democrats' initiative, and 70 Republicans supported restoring $208 million for the COPS program. "The dike seemed to break when as many as 132 Republicans backed an amendment by Rep. Bill Pascrell (D-N.J.) to restore $510 million for Homeland Security grants for first-responders," Rogers writes. In May we reported errors in a funding calculation from the stimulus act had led the COPS program to incorrectly award funding to applicants who didn't deserve it as the expense of others that did. (Read more)

Stimulus, budget seek to fund 50,000 new police

As reported here, in last year's budget President Bush gutted the Office of Justice Programs, which oversees state and local anticrime grants such as the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program. President Obama's stimulus plan and budget provide funding to resurrect those programs, with the aim of hiring 50,000 new police officers. Stacey Barchenger of the Statesman Journal in Salem, Ore., reports that "Uncertainty about how it can be spent and strings attached to some portions of the money has police agencies taking different approaches."

The COPS program was created during the Clinton administration. The Obama version is slightly different. It no longer requires "police agencies to pay millions in local dollars to tap federal hiring grants," writes Kevin Johnson of USA Today. "It gives police agencies nearly unfettered access to $1 billion over three years for hiring up to 6,000 officers as many departments face cuts." (Read more)

The White House budget narrative for the Justice Department says, "Supporting the hiring of police nationwide will help states and communities prevent the growth of crime during the economic downturn." Some criminal-justice analysts say more police do not necessarily mean less crime.

Oregon is making preparations for the grant money. State Justice Commission Executive Director Craig Prins said, "The money might be designated to any of a number of specific projects, which could include community corrections, drug courts or drug response and prevention teams." (Read more)

Feds' error sent money to some small law-enforcement agencies, denied it to others

The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the ecponomic stimulus bill, provided funding to enhance state and local law enforcement.  An audit found that the Department of Justice's Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) distributed most of the $1 billion without incident, but errors in the funding calculation sent money to 45 applicants that didn't deserve it and hurt 40 other applicants: 34 didn't receive a grant award due to the error, and received less money than they should have, Andrew Ramonas of MainJustice reports. Most of those in both categories serve small populations.

"COPS intends to remedy these inaccuracies by ensuring those agencies that were negatively affected will be provided funding" from the 2010 hiring program, the agency said in its report.  The program required all states or territories that applied to receive at least 0.5 percent of the total. Five jurisdictions -- Hawaii, Wyoming, South Dakota, Maine and the Northern Mariana Islands -- received awards they otherwise wouldn't have. Six states -- Tennessee, California, North Carolina, Massachusetts, Florida and New Jersey -- were awarded less money than they would have received without the minimum requirement.

The program also required an equal amount of funding to be awarded to agencies serving fewer than 150,000 people and those serving over 150,000. COPS met this goal by awarding almost $500 million to 961 grantees serving populations below 150,000 and $500 million to 85 agencies serving populations over 150,000. Beginning on page 46 of the 86-page report, DOJ lists the 91 applicants negatively and positively affected by the funding equation error. (Read more)

Senate panel votes to save program that provides grants to hire community police officers

A committee in the Democrat-led Senate voted $394 million to save a program that hires community police officers and other safety personnel, responding to last week's decision by the Republican-led House to zero out the program for the fiscal year that begins Oct. 1, Ted Gest reports for The Crime Report. President Obama has pushed for the program's continuation as part of his response to last year's school shooting in Newtown, Conn.

Community Oriented Policing Services, which is part of the U.S. Department of Justice, "advances the practice of community policing in America’s state, local and tribal law enforcement agencies," the agency says on its website. "COPS does its work principally by sharing information and making grants to police departments around the United States." The Senate committee's plan, likely to be adopted by the whole Senate, would pay about 1,400 police officers nationwide,

The Senate plan would use $150 million for school safety personnel, conduct school safety assessments, and fill gaps in school safety plans, Gest reports. "The House panel would provide $75 million; the final figure is likely to be a compromise between the two numbers." (Read more)

COPS has been successful in many communities. In 2009 the Merrillville Police Department in northwest Indiana received $600,000 through the grant to hire three police officers for three years, Chas Reilly reports for the The Times of Northwest Indiana. The police department, which has to take on the salaries after the grant ends, has applied for a grant to hire two more officers for three years.

Another community, Powell, Wyo., with a population of around 6,000, has applied for a grant to hire another officer to keep the department fully staffed, C.J. Baker reports for the Powell Tribune. Police Chief Roy Eckerdt told Baker, “Without that position, we can staff, yes — as long as nobody takes a vacation, nobody gets sick and nobody goes to a [training] school." (Read more)

Republicans propose cuts to at least 70 programs, many of which have rural implications

House Republicans on Wednesday unveiled a broad raft of budget cuts, many that would have rural impact, that they plan to attach to legislation that would keep the government funded after March 4.

"While making these cuts is hard, we have a unique opportunity to right our fiscal ship and begin to reduce our massive deficits and debt," said Rep. Hal Rogers, left, the chairman of the House Appropriations Committee, whose southeastern Kentucky 5th District is the nation's most rural and one of its poorest. "We have taken a wire brush to the discretionary budget and scoured every program to find real savings that are responsible and justifiable to the American people."

Republicans released 70 of their proposed cuts, but noted those were only a "partial list." The proposal would cut $237 million from President Obama's fiscal 2011 request for Rural Development programs in the Department of Agriculture, $201 million from USDA's Farm Services Agency, $246 million from agriculture research, $46 million from USDA's Natural Resources Conservation Service, $348 million from the Land and Water Conservation Fund, $72 million from the Fish and Wildlife Service and $51 million from the National Park Service. Spending on energy programs were among the cuts with energy efficiency and renewable energy programs cut by $889 million, nuclear energy cut by $169 million and fossil energy research cut by $31 million. The proposal would cut $1.6 billion from the Environmental Protection Agency. (Read more)

Rogers said today that he intends to propose more cuts, to reach the $100 billion figure "originally introduced by House Republican leaders last year in their Pledge to America. GOP leaders had later acknowledged that cutting $100 billion was unrealistic," reports Felicia Sonmez of The Washington Post.

TheCrimeReport.org, a service of Criminal Justice Journalists and the Center on Media, Crime and Justice at the City University of New York, reports, "Major cuts in federal criminal justice programs could be in store during the current federal fiscal year, which ends Sept. 30," including "$600 million for the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program, $256 million in state and local law enforcement assistance, $74 million for the FBI, $69 million for the White House drug czar's office, and $52 million for law enforcement wireless communications. This is just the start of a congressional process that includes committee and floor debate in both Houses and negotiations with the White House, but it signals potentially major reductions in federal programs. Some newly elected House Republicans want to make even deeper cuts." For the committee's press release, go here.

Federal government focuses on school safety bills instead of gun restrictions

While state legislatures have mostly focused on gun-control legislation in response to recent school shootings, the federal government is leaning more toward school-safety initiatives. President Trump walked back his recent support for raising the minimum age for gun purchases after pushback from the National Rifle Association, and called on Congress today to pass legislation aimed at violence prevention and intervention in schools.

The Students, Teachers and Officers Preventing (STOP) School Violence Act has been introduced in the Senate and the House. Both versions have bipartisan support, would authorize Department of Justice school safety programs, and would authorize grant money for school safety initiatives, but there are some differences in the House and Senate versions, Andrew Ujifusa reports for Education Week.

The House bill, introduced by Republican John Rutherford of Florida, would provide $50 million annually from fiscal years 2019 through 2028. The Senate bill, introduced by Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, would provide $75 million for the Secure Our Schools grant program through the end of fiscal year 2018, which ends on Sept. 30, then $100 million annually for fiscal years 2019 through 2028.

The bills differ on how the grant money could be spent. The Senate bill specifies that the grants can be used for technology such as panic buttons or surveillance systems, while the House bill doesn't mention technology as a possible use for funding. Hatch's bill also puts a greater emphasis on seeking evidence-based solutions to award grant money. Both bills would require school districts to put up 25 percent in matching funds to be eligible for grants, but the Senate bill allows the fund-matching requirement to be waived. And finally, "Rutherford's bill would move the Secure Our Schools grant program out of the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) office at the Justice Department, and into the Bureau of Justice Assistance, which provides technical assistance to state and local officials. Hatch's bill keeps the program in the COPS office," Ujifusa reports.

In addition to urging Congress to pass the STOP legislation, Trump is also calling on Secretary of Education Betsy DeVos to form and chair a school safety task force to look at successful safety measures already in place in schools and districts around the country. "The administration will also review federal privacy laws to determine if there are ways to improve coordination between education, healthcare, and law enforcement sectors. And it will support a so-called 'Fix NICS' bill that would seek to ensure more thorough records in the existing background check system for gun purchases," Evie Blad reports for Education Week.

Obama would boost local police and mental health; guide shows where solons have been on gun issues

President Obama's plan for reducing gun violence, announced today, calls for new funding to employ local police officers and for improving mental health care services, which could help rural areas that lack police protection and where mental health care is often out of reach because of lack of facilities and providers.

The plan calls for expanding the COPS Hiring Grants, which help police departments hire officers to be school resource officers. The Department of Justice will be ordered to give preference to grant applications that support such school officers. The COPS program has helped rural police departments hire officers they likely wouldn't be able to hire without it because of small budgets.

The mental-health section of the plan calls for creating programs to train educators to identify mental illness in children and teens and how to refer them for treatment, and for $25 million for state-based initiatives to support people aged 16 to 25 who have mental health or substance abuse issues. An additional 5,000 mental health care professionals would be trained to serve youth under the plan, and insurance coverage for mental health issues would be required, including those covered by Medicaid.

Key parts of the plan would require background checks for all gun sales, increase penalties for gun trafficking, end the freeze on gun-violence research and pay for more school counselors. Its most controversial parts would ban military-style assault weapons and ammunition magazines with more than 10 bullets. "There are strong indicators that any comprehensive legislation restricting weapons and ammunition won't even see a vote on the House floor," Jonathan Martin and Jake Sherman of Politico report. Republican representatives from the Midwest and Northeast told Martin and Sherman they have "almost zero appetite to vote on any sort of sweeping gun bill." (Read more)

To give easy glimpses of where your senators and representative(s) have stood on these issues, and with the main lobbying interests, the independent, investigative journalism outlet ProPublica has created an interactive graphic showing how each lawmaker is rated by the National Rifle Association and the Brady Campaign for gun-control laws, with a chart of current members' votes on the 1994 assault-weapons ban and an accounting of the NRA campaign contributions to each legislator, available here.

In a world of social-media noise and dark drugs, how do we warn kids how dangerous experimenting with them is?

Illustration by Michael DeForge, The New York Times

How do you talk to your kids about fentanyl, xylazine, or meth? How do you warn them how dangerous a simple party could become? At the risk of sounding like the old Alan Parsons Project, perhaps it's time to say, "Where do we go from here?" In answer to that question, addiction journalist Maia Szalavitz gives her thoughts on talking to kids about dark drugs in an opinion piece for The New York Times.

It can start with knowledge of what can happen when kids take risks. "In September, two 15-year-old Los Angeles girls overdosed on fentanyl, one of them fatally, after they purchased what they thought were prescription opioid‌‌ pills. . . . Teen opioid fatalities have doubled in recent years, even as opioid use among adolescents has plummeted. . . .Street fentanyl and its derivatives can be dozens to thousands of times more potent than the oxycodone in Percocet. Street synthetics are typically found in drugs sold as heroin or prescription pills, but they are sometimes present in party drugs like cocaine. This has exponentially increased the risk of even one or two ‌‌youthful experiments."

Young people are assailed with social media and messaging all day long. How do parents and caretakers cut through the noise? "Two key themes emerge in effective approaches. One is that reaching adolescents requires earning trust by being truthful, rather than simply trying to instill fear. The second‌‌ is that school-based programs must recognize that not all drug use can be prevented. ‌‌Instead of focusing only on abstinence, they aim to prevent the highest-risk behaviors and ‌address the personal and environmental factors most likely to lead to addiction.

Today there is a greater recognition of the need for accuracy‌ over hype. New videos and radio spots from the Advertising Council, which has been making public service announcements for the government and nonprofits since the 1940s, confront the dangerous new reality directly. They feature former drug dealers — not cops — speaking plainly about fentanyl. They also provide information on how to reverse overdoses with the opioid antidote, naloxone."

What has been working? "Rhana Hashemi, who has helped pilot an evidence-based program called Safety First, says teens are more likely to listen when they recognize they are given accurate information about genuine dangers. . . . Hashemi said that she always stresses that abstinence is the safest option and that in reality, most teenagers abstain from illegal drugs. She also provides information on harm reduction. This can include using tests that can detect fentanyl before taking any pill or powder not prescribed by a doctor, never using alone and having naloxone nearby. . . . Hashemi said a common response is for students to recognize how serious the danger is and decide that in light of the effort needed to reduce risk, using isn’t worth it right now. For those who aren’t deterred, however, the hope is they are armed with ways to protect themselves."

Some people are born with temperaments that are more likely to lead to addiction. "In 2016, I wrote about one program called PreVenture, which targets ‌problematic coping strategies by teaching children better ways to manage their particular temperaments. By acting early, ‌‌the program aims to prevent predispositions from becoming disorders‌ and obviate the desire to use drugs to self-medicate. Programs like PreVenture that teach self-regulation and coping skills have been shown to have lasting effects, unlike those that focus only on refusing drugs."

Where do we go from here? We keep kids alive. "Effective addiction prevention requires social change to prevent or at least intervene early in childhood trauma, creating communities conducive to mental health with safe, nurturing schools, stimulating extracurricular activities and access to comprehensive health care. ‌‌But first, we need to keep ‌‌young people alive, which means having uncomfortable, honest conversations about ‌the dangers of drugs and the ways to minimize the risk for those who use them. . . . .No one has yet found a way to eliminate youthful risk-taking and impulsiveness — probably for the best because these can also drive learning and creativity. We can, however, reduce the odds that the unwise things kids do will kill them."

Fact Check: Trump wrong about 'Medicare for all,' school violence funding; ad criticizing Tenn. Republican spins facts

Here's another installment of a series we are running weekly until Election Day, in which we list some of the most relevant items from FactCheck.org and other nonpartisan fact checkers. We encourage you to subscribe to their alerts, which you can do here, and republish their findings, which FactCheck lets anyone do for free with credit to them.

In President Trump's Oct. 10 op-ed for USA Today about 'Medicare for all' proposals, "almost every sentence contained a misleading statement or a falsehood," Glenn Kessler writes for The Washington Post's Fact Checker column. Kessler presumes the president must know that most of his claims have already been debunked by Fact Checker, since Trump links to two of them in his op-ed, but chose to ignore the facts. Trump is correct that the plan promoted by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., would cost the federal government $32.6 trillion over 10 years, but doesn't mention that overall national health expenditures might not increase because costs for individuals and state governments would go down. Kessler does a point-by-point debunking of Trump's claims in the op-ed; it's too long for us to detail here, but well worth the read. Read more here.

A TV ad criticizing Rep. Marsha Blackburn, R-Tenn., spins the facts about her votes on health-care issues, Lori Roberts reports for FactCheck.org. Majority Forward, an organization affiliated with the Democratic super PAC Senate Majority, launched the ad in early October to help Blackburn's Democratic challenger, former Tennessee governor Phil Bredesen. The ad claims Blackburn voted in 2012 to "give members of Congress health care for life," but lawmakers had already received a health insurance retirement benefit. "There was a possibility at the time that lawmakers could have lost the benefit, but that never happened," Roberts reports. The ad also says she voted in 2017 to take away maternity coverage, but that's not necessarily true. Her vote to repeal and replace the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act would have meant that some states would no longer require insurers to offer maternity coverage, but insurers could still keep that coverage. Similar claims are likely being made against other Republican House members.

At an event for law enforcement officials, Trump said his administration's STOP School Violence Act had provided "historic levels of funding to improve school safety" and "hire more officers." But this is untrue, because the new law doesn't fund school safety at "historic levels," Eugene Kiely reports for FactCheck.org. The act, which was signed in March, was funded with $75 million shifted from an existing school safety program. "But a single program created in the late 1990s and since disbanded, called COPS in Schools, provided as much as $180 million in fiscal year 2000, according to a 2017 government report. That’s $260 million in 2018 dollars," Kiely reports.

Budget would cut local anti-crime grants again

President Bush's proposed budget for the fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, 2008, "calls for more FBI funding but less for state and local anticrime grants," reports Ted Gest in the daily news digest of Criminal Justice Journalists.

The Drug Enforcement Administration would get "a slight increase," but the Justice Department budget "would gut the Office of Justice Programs, which oversees state and local anticrime grants, the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS), the Office on Violence Against Women, and the Office for Victims of Crime," CJJ reports.

"The White House would give the agency only $813 million, compared to the $2.3 billion appropriated by Congress this year. Advocates are seeking more funds for the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program in a supplemental appropriations bill for the current fiscal year after Congress cut funding in December. The budget again proposed $200 million for a violent crime reduction partnership initiative, but Congress has not provided full funding for that in recent years."

Bush "seeks more than $7.1 billion for the FBI, compared with this year's $6.5 billion appropriation," CJJ reports. "The proposal includes $361 million in new money for intelligence and counterterrorism programs."

Cuts in cops, rise in crime lead communities in rural southern Oregon to form citizen patrols

Budget cuts and the end of a federal timber-payments program have depleted law enforcement in some rural southern Oregon towns. In response, citizens in towns in Josephine County are taking matters into their own hands, using citizen patrols to keep their towns safe, Liam Moriarty reports for NPR. "In rural southern Oregon, high unemployment, the growing use of meth and other drugs and the sudden lack of law enforcement has fueled an explosion of burglaries, vehicle thefts and other property crimes."

Josephine County (Wikipedia map), population 82,000, had an unemployment rate of 10.8 percent in August 2013, Moriarty notes. "For decades, revenue from timber sales on the federal land that makes up 70 percent of Josephine County kept property taxes low and county government functioning. As logging dramatically declined, those payments dried up. After two failed property tax levies, the sheriff's department's budget was cut by more than half. Two-thirds of the staff was laid off. A single deputy was left to patrol the entire county."

That led to the formation of at least four citizen-based safety groups in the county, including Citizens Against Crime in O'Brien, pop. 546, and the North Valley Community Watch Responder Team in Merlin, pop. 2,100, Moriarty writes. The groups do anything from patrolling the area looking for suspicious activity to training exercises, such as one to teach how to search a building where an intruder could be hiding.

Alan Cress, who volunteers in Citizens Against Crime, told Moriarty, "We're not trying to take the place of law enforcement. In fact, we have a great deal of respect for what law enforcement does. We recognize the limited resources they have, and we're just trying to keep a presence out there." (Read more)

Weekly questions opponents' reactions to lesser prairie chicken being named threatened species

The move by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to designate the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species and the subsequent release this week of a proposed plan to protect the chickens has sparked controversy among conservationists, as well as farmers and ranchers. How the proposed plan plays out, and whether or not rules can even be enforced, are some of the main concerns.

Laurie Ezzell Brown, editor and publisher of The Canadian Record in the Texas Panhandle, responded to the designation and the proposed plan in an editorial Thursday:

"We were unprepared for the hand-wringing, man-the-battle-stations reaction to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s announcement earlier this month that the chicken would be listed as 'threatened,' rather than the far more onerous designation of 'endangered'. In making its decision, the USFWS took into consideration a range-wide conservation plan developed over the last two years with input from representatives of industries that would be affected by the listing—among them oil and gas producers, farmers and ranchers, and wind farm developers.

"The ruling was accompanied by the federal agency’s promise to develop a timetable and criteria for eventual de-listing. Implicit in that decision was the understanding that the conservation plan should be given a chance to work, and that the stakeholders would be given a chance to show their commitment to making it work. What we expected would be a declaration of victory by those stake- holders who dodged the endangered-listing bullet was instead a call to battle.

"It was suddenly very clear that the only acceptable outcome to them would have been no listing at all—this, despite the fact that the prairie-chicken population is in rapid and precipitous decline. One of the most frequently-heard comments has been one questioning the civil and criminal penalties that can be assessed to those who willfully or knowingly harm either the chicken itself or its habitat. Those penalties are the muscle, without which any regulatory effort is ineffective."

But enforcing the rules are nearly impossible, unless someone goes so far to the extreme that their actions can't go unnoticed, Brown writes. Sean Kyle, a wildlife diversity specialist with the Texas Parks and Wildlife Department, likened endangered species enforcement to the handing of speeding tickets. Lyle, who has been working for 22 years to keep the bird from getting listed, said that someone going a little over the speed limit won't get stopped, but "If you’re doing 118 mph in a 60 mph speed zone, the cops are going to stop you," Brown reports.

Participation in the program is voluntary, and "is intended to protect stakeholders from those 'take' provisions," Brown writes. "The threatened designation includes a 4(d) rule, which exempts all practices implemented by landowners, wind developers and oil and gas producers that fall under the auspicies of the rangewide plan. With the listing, the industry must continue to pay into the habitat exchange fund set up by the plan, and landowners who wish to conserve prairie-chicken habitat—using the same kind of beneficial land management practices that most of them already observe— can enroll in the plan and will profit from the exchange." (Read more)

'Radically Rural' returns Sept. 21-22; community journalism track includes session on covering the political divide

There's still time time to register for "Radically Rural," the annual community development summit for rural stakeholders to be held in Keene, N.H., and virtually Sept. 21-22.

This year's event will include seven tracks: Arts & Culture, Clean Energy, Community Journalism, Entrepreneurship, All in for Health, Land & Community, and Main St. Terrence Williams, president and COO of The Keene Sentinel, will lead the community journalism track, with three sessions:

• Covering the Divide: An exploration of how news organizations can better serve communities that are split over politics, the pandemic, policing, voting and more. Elizabeth Stephens, executive editor of the Columbia Missourian, will moderate the session. Panelists are Tony Baranowski, manager of special projects at the Cedar Rapids Gazette; Sara Konrad Baranowski, deputy managing editor at the Gazette; and Peter Huoppi, multimedia director at The Day in New London, Conn., and co-producer of the documentary "Those People."
• Better Judgment: How innovative newsrooms are changing their coverage of cops and courts to provide fairer, more equitable news reporting. Cierra Hinton, publisher of Scalawag, will moderate the session. Panelists are: Paul Cuno-Booth, freelance journalist and reporter on several alternative justice projects in New Hampshire; Molly Born, West Virginia multimedia producer and educator, now documenting West Virginia’s history and future; and DeLyah Jones, freelance journalist, community engagement consultant and journalism philanthropy program officer.
• Crazy Good: 50 ideas to make you a better journalist. The session will feature speaker Jeremy Caplan, director of teaching and learning at the City University of New York's Newmark Graduate School of Journalism.

The summit is sponsored by the Sentinel and the Hannah Grimes Center for Entrepreneurship. Learn more or register here.