The Office of Community-Oriented Police Services (COPS) was created as a result of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. As a component of the U.S. Department of Justice, the mission of the COPS office is to advance the practice of community policing by state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies throughout the country.
Community policing represents a shift from traditional law enforcement practices.
Instead of emphasizing timely responses to calls for service and reactive patrol methods, community policing focuses on proactive problem-solving methods intended to address the factors that cause crime and social disorder within communities. This strategy also calls for law enforcement and citizens to work collaboratively in the course of both identifying and effectively addressing crime and disorder issues.
Moreover, community policing encourages law enforcement agencies to undergo fundamental changes that enable the agency to function effectively and efficiently in an organizational structure that provides as much decision-making authority as practical to patrol-level officers and units, who are closest to the community and likely to have the clearest understanding of problems that impact the community. This increased authority, coupled with increased mutual trust and respect between the community and patrol-level officers, can ultimately lead to relationships that help deter crime, bring needed services and resources, and engage community members in their own safety.
Since 1994, supporting the development of this type of strategic approach to policing has been the primary mission of the COPS office. From 1994 to 2005, COPS invested more than $11.8 billion to add community policing officers to the nation’s streets and schools, enhance crime fighting technology, support crime prevention initiatives, and provide community policing training and technical assistance resources. During this period, COPS awarded more than 36,000 grants to more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies to fund the hiring of more than 118,000 community policing officers and deputies and to procure and deploy much needed crime fighting technology systems.
The COPS office has also provided training and technical assistance to law enforcement agencies through its national network of Regional Community Policing Institutes. These institutes train law enforcement officials, government executives, and community members side by side. To date, the institutes have trained more than five hundred thousand individuals on topics ranging from an introduction to community policing principles to terrorism prevention and response, all within the context of community policing.
COPS’ other training and technical assistance resources include an annual community policing conference that attracts law enforcement officials and criminal justice experts from across the United States; training conferences and leadership symposiums on topics such as school safety, methamphetamine eradication, homeland security, intelligence gathering, and other emerging law enforcement issues; and a series of more than three hundred user-friendly publications that address a variety of crime and disorder topics.
In addition, COPS has distributed approximately four hundred thousand copies of publications from their Problem-Oriented Guides for Police (POP) series. These guides summarize knowledge about how police can reduce harm caused by specific crime and disorder problems. Robbery at ATMs, Disorderly Youth in Public Places, Drug Dealing in Privately Owned Apartment Complexes, and Speeding in Residential Areas are examples of the many topics covered in COPS’ POP Guide series.
An October 2005 U.S. Government Accounting Office (GAO) report found that COPS funds significantly increased nationally reported levels of community policing practices. The GAO also concluded 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 their sample of agencies serving populations often thousand or more. Specifically, they estimate that for the years 1998 to 2000, COPS grant expenditures were associated with reductions in index crimes from their 1993 levels that ranged from about 200,000 to 225,000 index crimes. For 1998, they estimated that the crimes reduced due to COPS grant expenditures amounted to about 8% of the total decline in index crimes and about 13% of the total decline in violent crimes from their 1993 levels. They calculated that during the years 1999 and 2000, the COPS-funded reductions in crime accounted for about 5% of the total reduction in index crimes and about 10% of the total reduction in violent crimes from their 1993 levels. These effects held after they controlled for other factors that could also affect crime, such as federal law enforcement grant program expenditures by agencies, local socioeconomic and demographic changes, and state-level factors such as increases in incarceration, changes in sentencing practices, and changes in other programs such as welfare.
The GAO analysis also found that COPS grant funds were associated with significant increases in average reported levels of policing practices (problem solving, place-oriented practices, crime analysis, and community collaboration). For example, among agencies that received COPS grant funds in this period, the average level of reported use of problem-solving practices increased by about 35%, as compared to about a 20% increase among nongrantee agencies. The increase in place-oriented practices among COPS grantee agencies was about 32%, as compared to about 13% among the non-COPS grantee agencies.
Finally, the GAO analysis concluded that COPS hiring grant expenditures were associated with increases in the net number of sworn police officers. They obtained these results after controlling for a large number of relevant factors, including other federal law enforcement grant expenditures, annual changes in local economic and demographic conditions in the county in which an agency was located, and changes in state-level factors that could affect the level of sworn officers. The GAO estimates that COPS expenditures were responsible for an increase in the number of sworn officers per capita of about 3% above the levels that would have been expected without COPS funds.
COPS has made significant strides in helping law enforcement overcome numerous challenges through community policing and will continue working to provide timely, efficient, and strategically advanced support to police and sheriff’s departments and the communities that they serve. Today’s law enforcement officers, executives, and practices must be capable of responding to various challenges, and community policing is a dynamic strategy that can be adapted to meet a broad range of emerging public safety needs.
