Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, February 19, 1995 TAG: 9502180033
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: G2 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Congressional Republicans want to replace them with block law-enforcement grants to local governments. Last week, the House passed a bill to that effect.
We have another idea.
Why spend $11.4 billion in federal money over the next five years on more police ($7.5 billion) and prevention programs ($3.9 billion), as Clinton and last year's bill would do, or $10 billion over five years on block grants to local governments, as this year's House bill would do?
Why not spend zero?
To quote from ourselves, in a July 1994 editorial lending tepid support to last year's bill:
"Members of Congress know perfectly well that prevention and punishment of crime - at least of street crime, the kind that makes law-abiding voters fearful - [rest] almost exclusively with localities and states. That doesn't stop lawmakers from making a federal case out of the problem - it does strike such a responsive chord with the electorate, after all."
Or to quote from Virginia Gov. George Allen, in a Washington speech that summer opposing the same bill:
" ... [T]he bill ignores a basic fact of life: The federal government has jurisdiction over just 5 percent of all crimes committed in our nation. The states have always had primary responsibility for keeping citizens safe, and any serious assault on crime must begin with them."
Allen also slammed the bill because of "its misplaced focus on crime 'prevention' - a euphemism for higher social-welfare spending." We supported the bill, with reservations, because more police properly deployed (especially in neighborhood partnerships), as well as some of those nasty old "social-welfare" programs, have a better track record for cutting crime than, say, building and populating ever more prisons.
But agreement neither with Allen's view nor with ours on those latter points is necessary for agreement on the first point: Crime control is basically a state and local responsibility. Precisely because federal responsibility for crime-fighting is marginal at most, federal crime bills tend to be unwieldy affairs, generated as much for political posturing as for any other reason.
Speaking of which, it is strange to see congressional Republicans, who last year attacked Clinton's legislation because it was too flexible in its definition of anti-crime measures, now insist that the funding should be made yet more flexible. Circumstances and needs do differ from place to place, but that's an argument for letting states and localities come up with their own anti-crime initiatives.
Not only are no-strings-attached law-enforcement grants old hat (they failed their test in the '70s). They also amount to cycling taxpayers' money through Washington (with a cut taken off the top) that could be as well left for state and local governments to raise in the first place.
by CNB