https://www.thenewamerican.com/usnews/politics/item/26721-cops-program-has-spent-billions-since-1994-portraying-criminals-as-victims-and-police-as-criminals

: WASHINGTON, D.C. – The Trump administration is continuing to
: implement the COPS program in the Department of Justice, a
: provision of the Clinton-era 1994 Violent Crime Control and
: Law Enforcement Act (P.L. 103-322), a program that
: President Clinton promised would provide the federal grants
: needed to hire and equip 100,000 new police officers.

: The Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) in
: the Department of Justice was established by Attorney
: General Janet Reno, with plans to implement a six-year,

: $8.8 billion grant program that would enable state and
: local law enforcement agencies to hire or redeploy 100,000
: additional police officers for community policing efforts.
: Since its inception, the COPS program has spent over $14
: billion, with the 2017 fiscal year budget calling for an
: increase of $62.5 million to advance President Trump’s
: community policing initiative.

: Empirical evidence to date suggests that the program has
: resulted in spending billions of dollars in federal taxes
: on left-leaning “pork barrel” programs that give “community
: organizing activists” a new opportunity to portray
: criminals as the victims and police officers as criminals,
: rather than equipping departments with additional officers
: as it originally promised to do.

: “Social Workers With Guns”

: Almost from the program’s inception, social scientists have
: questioned whether the COPS program was responsible for
: putting more police officers on the streets, or if the
: additions in police forces resulted from an increase in
: population. Nor is there consensus on whether or not
: decreases in crime can be associated with increases in
: police forces funded by the COPS program.

: What is clear is that the program has not done enough to
: fulfill the vision on the Left expressed by Robert
: Trojanowicz, the director of Michigan State University’s
: National Center for Community Policing, and a professor of
: criminal justice for 25 years. He defined the concept of
: community policing as “a new philosophy of policing based
: on the concept that police officers and private citizens
: working together in creative ways can help solve
: contemporary problems related to crime, fear of crime,
: social and physical disorder, and neighborhood decay.” In
: other words, “social workers with guns.”

: His philosophy required that “police departments develop a new
: relationship with the law-abiding people in the community,
: allowing them a greater voice in setting local priorities,
: and involving them in efforts to improve the overall
: quality of life in their neighborhoods.” To complete the
: transformation of law enforcement into social-work
: activity, Trojanowicz’s perspective required “shifting the
: focus of police work from handling calls to solving
: problems.”

: Still, left-oriented activists find the COPS program
: disappointing.

: “Indeed four of the cities where the most controversial police
: killings have occurred since November — Cleveland, Tulsa,
: Charlestown, S.C., and Baltimore — have benefitted from
: millions in COPS grants over the years,” noted Kenneth
: Lipp, a contributor on criminal justice policy, policing,
: and civil liberties for Al Jazeera America and
: NextCity.org, in an article published on May 6, 2015.

: Lipp also wrote an article that agreed with the Obama DOJ’s
: “scathing criticism” of the Cleveland Police Department for
: engaging “in a pattern or practice of the use of excessive
: force” that the DOJ tied to “a failure to embrace and
: incorporate the concepts of community policing at all
: levels.” In it he wrote, “Between 2011 and 2013, the police
: department in Cleveland alone received more than $7 million
: to put more officers on the street. Unfortunately, one of
: them happened to be Timothy Loehmann — who shot and killed
: 12-year old Tamir Rice last November for sitting on a park
: bench holding a BB gun (it’s worth mentioning here that
: Ohio is an open-carry state).”

: Community Policing — a Leftist “Paradigm-Shift”

: Herman Goldstein, a professor of criminal justice at the
: University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Law, introduced
: the concept of community policing as a paradigm shift that
: required traditional law enforcement models to adapt a new
: concept of forming problem-solving relationships with local
: communities.

: In Goldstein’s view, “community policing” demanded “the
: involvement of the community in getting the police job
: done.” This included “the permanent assignment of police
: officers to a neighborhood in order to cultivate better
: relationships; the setting of police priorities based on
: the specific needs and desires of the community; and the
: meeting of these needs by the allocation of police
: resources and personnel otherwise assigned to responding to
: calls for police assistance.” Goldstein insisted “community
: policing” involved “a different way of thinking about
: policing” that stressed placing police visibly in
: communities to reduce fear and deter crime, with police
: “easily accessible, frequently visible, and caring in their
: relationships with citizens.”

: More subtly, “community policing” involved a shift that began
: in the 1960s, when social scientists began viewing crime as
: a result of adverse social and economic conditions. This
: was famously seen in the analysis of the National Advisory
: Commission on Civil Disorders, more commonly known as the
: Kerner Commission after its chair, Governor Otto Kerner,
: Jr. of Illinois, was appointed by President Lyndon Johnson
: to investigate the causes of the 1967 race riots.

: The Kerner Commission concluded that the riots were caused by
: a history of racial discrimination and segregation in which
: “frustrated hopes” were “the residue of unfulfilled
: expectations aroused by the great judicial and legislative
: victories of the Civil Rights Movement and the dramatic
: struggle for equal rights in the South. A climate that
: tends toward approval and encouragement of violence as a
: form of protest has been created by white terrorism
: directed against nonviolent protest.”

: The commission further determined that to some
: African-Americans, “police have come to symbolize white
: power, white racism and white repression.” Largely left out
: of the report were the stories of African-Americans burning
: and looting neighborhoods in black communities, which in
: many cases required the National Guard and U.S. Army
: Reserves to stop the violence.

: Ultimately, this perspective that viewed criminals as victims
: of structural social and economic disadvantages began to
: pervade the “community policing” paradigm.

: Ron Boostrom, a professor in the Criminal Justice
: Administration Program at San Diego State University, wrote
: in an academic paper published in 2000: “This new paradigm
: emphasizes prevention of crime through community
: mobilization and police-citizen partnerships to reinforce
: informal community social controls and to immunize the
: community to crime and delinquency. It attempts to reverse
: community disorganization and decay, thereby immunizing the
: community to continued delinquency, crime, disorder, and
: violence.”

: Boostrom compared “community policing” to the healthcare
: movement in that the new paradigm “proposes a new holistic,
: community-oriented approach to crime prevention and
: control.”

: While the idea of community involvement in police work may
: sound appealing, the end result is all too often the
: greater involvement of left-leaning citizens seeking to
: impose their view that the problem is with police acting as
: criminals in order to enforce the law.

: Under Attorneys General Eric Holder and Loretta Lynch, the DOJ
: used alleged civil rights violations to obtain
: court-sanctioned “consent decrees.” These were in turn used
: to intimidate state and local law enforcement to back off
: the strict enforcement of immigration laws. Similarly, the
: Obama administration politicized the shooting of Michael
: Brown by police on August 9, 2014, to admonish police
: forces around the nation to back off policing crime-ridden
: minority inner cities, even if doing so placed law-abiding
: citizens at greater danger of suffering harm.

: Community Policing and George Soros’ “War on Cops”

: A leaked document from George Soros’ Open Society Foundation
: made clear Soros was on the community policing bandwagon
: with intent to build a “national movement” to reform local
: police forces with federal guidelines that would end up
: creating a national police force dedicated to achieving
: socialist “community policing goals.”

: “The police killings of African-American men in Ferguson,
: Staten Island, most recently in North Charleston,
: Baltimore, and many other American cities highlight that
: reform of policing policy and practice must be integral to
: our criminal justice agenda,” noted the Open Society
: Foundation’s 59-page report prepared for the U.S. Programs
: Board meeting in New York City on May 7-9, 2015.

: “Notably, while such reform activities are inextricably linked
: with our concerns about racial justice and equality, in
: particular about advancing opportunity for boys and men of
: color, they are also critically related to our goal of
: reducing incarceration, given the role that police
: practices play in bringing people into the justice system,”
: the report stated.

: What the documents prove is that the goal behind the
: foundation’s funding of groups like Black Lives Matter was
: to federalize America’s police forces under the banner of
: establishing “community policing” that would deal with
: minority and illegal immigrant criminals, not as law
: enforcement problems, but as the inevitable consequences of
: a capitalist society that unleashes police to control and
: harass minority and illegal victims of social injustice.

: In the 2016 election cycle, Soros channeled more than $3
: million into seven local district-attorney campaigns over
: six states. His goal was to make the U.S. justice system
: consistent with his socialist views dedicated to
: implementing the principles of community policing on a
: national scale.

: “His money has supported African-American and Hispanic
: candidates for these powerful local roles, all of whom ran
: on platforms sharing major goals of Soros’, like reducing
: racial disparities in sentencing and directing some drug
: offenders to diversion programs instead of to trial,” wrote
: Scott Bland in a Politico article published on August 30,
: 2016.

: “It is by far the most tangible action in a progressive push
: to find, prepare and finance criminal justice
: reform-oriented candidates for jobs that have been held by
: longtime incumbents and serve as pipelines to the federal
: courts — and it has inspired fury among opponents angry
: about the outside influence in local elections,” the
: Politico article continued.

: In the final analysis, the tip-off that the DOJ’s COPS program
: was leftist-oriented from the beginning was the inclusion
: of the word “community” to distinguish “community policing”
: from the traditional criminal justice concepts of
: professional police work.

: Just as Barack Obama touted his credentials as a “community
: organizer” when running for president, astute observers of
: the persistent political agenda are well advised to be
: aware that the concept of “community policing” was
: introduced to move traditional criminal justice ideas of
: policing away from law enforcement and toward the Left’s
: concept of “social justice,” requiring privileged treatment
: for criminal activity in communities considered oppressed
: by traditional majority values and lifestyles.