[Senate Hearing 110-303] [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office] S. Hrg. 110-303 RISING CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES: EXAMINING THE FEDERAL ROLE IN HELPING COMMUNITIES PREVENT AND RESPOND TO VIOLENT CRIME ======================================================================= HEARING before the SUBCOMMITTEE ON CRIME AND DRUGS of the COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY UNITED STATES SENATE ONE HUNDRED TENTH CONGRESS FIRST SESSION __________ MAY 23, 2007 __________ Serial No. J-110-39 __________ Printed for the use of the Committee on the Judiciary U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 40-885 PDF WASHINGTON DC: 2008 --------------------------------------------------------------------- For sale by the Superintendent of Documents, U.S. Government Printing Office Internet: bookstore.gpo.gov Phone: toll free (866)512-1800 DC area (202)512-1800 Fax: (202) 512-2250 Mail Stop SSOP, Washington, DC 20402-0001 COMMITTEE ON THE JUDICIARY PATRICK J. LEAHY, Vermont, Chairman EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah HERB KOHL, Wisconsin CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California JON KYL, Arizona RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois JOHN CORNYN, Texas BENJAMIN L. CARDIN, Maryland SAM BROWNBACK, Kansas SHELDON WHITEHOUSE, Rhode Island TOM COBURN, Oklahoma Bruce A. Cohen, Chief Counsel and Staff Director Michael O'Neill, Republican Chief Counsel and Staff Director ------ Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs JOSEPH R. BIDEN, Jr., Delaware, Chairman EDWARD M. KENNEDY, Massachusetts LINDSEY O. GRAHAM, South Carolina HERB KOHL, Wisconsin ARLEN SPECTER, Pennsylvania DIANNE FEINSTEIN, California ORRIN G. HATCH, Utah RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, Wisconsin CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, Iowa CHARLES E. SCHUMER, New York JEFF SESSIONS, Alabama RICHARD J. DURBIN, Illinois TOM COBURN, Texas Todd Hinnen, Chief Counsel Walt Kuhn, Republican Chief Counsel C O N T E N T S ---------- STATEMENTS OF COMMITTEE MEMBERS Page Biden, Hon. Joseph R., Jr., a U.S. Senator from the State of Delaware....................................................... 1 prepared statement........................................... 100 Feingold, Russell D., a U.S. Senator from the State of Wisconsin. 11 prepared statement........................................... 131 Feinstein, Hon. Dianne, a U.S. Senator from the State of California, prepared statement................................. 133 Grassley, Hon. Charles E., a U.S. Senator from the State of Iowa. 3 Leahy, Hon. Patrick J., a U.S. Senator from the State of Vermont, prepared statement............................................. 178 WITNESSES Epley, Mark, Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C......................... 5 Fox, James Alan, The Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts................. 29 Gregory, Rick S., Chief of Police, New Castle County, Delaware... 21 Kamatchus, Ted, President, National Sheriffs' Association, Marshalltown, Iowa............................................. 16 Laine, Russell B., Second Vice President, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Algonquin, Illinois........... 26 Nee, Thomas J., President, National Association of Police Organizations, Boston, Massachusetts........................... 18 Palmer, Hon. Douglas H., Mayor, Trenton, New Jersey, and President, United States Conference of Mayors, Trenton, New Jersey......................................................... 23 QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS Responses of Mark Epley to questions submitted by Senators Biden and Kennedy.................................................... 47 Response of James A. Fox to a question submitted by Senator Biden 77 Response of Rick Gregory to a question submitted by Senator Kennedy........................................................ 79 Responses of Ted Kamatchus to questions submitted by Senators Biden, Kennedy and Durbin...................................... 80 Responses of Russell Laine to questions submitted by Senators Durbin and Kennedy............................................. 86 Responses of Thomas Nee to questions submitted by Senators Kennedy and Durbin............................................. 89 Responses of Douglas Palmer to questions submitted by Senators Biden, Durbin and Kennedy...................................... 93 SUBMISSIONS FOR THE RECORD Advancement Project, Constance L. Rice, Los Angeles, California, letter......................................................... 98 Bakersfield City Council, Bakersfield, California, letter........ 99 Boys & Girls Clubs of America, Lorrain Howerton, Senior Vice President, Office of Government Relations, Washington, D.C., letter......................................................... 102 Bratton, William J., Chief of Police, Los Angeles Police Department, Los Angeles, California, statement................. 103 Brookings Institution, Washington, D.C., policy brief............ 107 California Gang Investigators Association, Wesley D. McBride, Executive Director, Huntington Beach, California, letter....... 114 California Peace Officers' Association, Paul Cappitelli, President, Sacramento, California, letter...................... 115 Chicago Sun-Times, December 28, 2006, article.................... 116 County of Los Angeles Board of Supervisors, Sachi A. Hamai, Executive Officer, Los Angeles, California, letter............. 117 Delaware News Journal, Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., May 18, 2007, article.................................................. 118 Dubuque Telegraph Herald, Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., article.. 119 Epley, Mark, Senior Counsel to the Deputy Attorney General, Department of Justice, Washington, D.C., statement............. 121 Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA), Art Gordon, National President, Lewisberry, Pennsylvania, letter........... 130 Fox, James Alan, The Lipman Family Professor of Criminal Justice, Northeastern University, Boston, Massachusetts, statement...... 136 Fraternal Order of Police, Chuck Canterbury, National President, Washington, D.C., letter....................................... 140 Gregory, Rick S., Chief of Police, New Castle County, Delaware, statement...................................................... 141 Heck, Mathias H., Jr., Prosecuting Attorney, Montgomery County, Ohio, statement................................................ 146 Hispanic American Police Command Officers Association (HAPCOA), Ray Leyva, National President, San Antonio, Texas, letter...... 157 International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP), Joseph C. Carter, President, Alexandria, Virginia, letter................ 158 International Association of Women Police (IAWP), Amy Ramsay, President, Orillia, Ontario, Canada, letter.................... 159 International Union of Police Associations, AFL-CIO, Dennis Slocumb, International Vice President, Alexandria, Virginia, letter......................................................... 160 Kamatchus, Ted, President, National Sheriffs' Association, Marshalltown, Iowa, statement and attachment................... 161 Laine, Russell B., Second Vice President, International Association of Chiefs of Police, Algonquin, Illinois, statement 167 League of California Cities, Maria Alegria, President, and Christopher McKenzie, Executive Director, Sacramento, California, letter............................................. 177 Legal Momentum, Lisalyn R. Jacobs, Vice-President of Government Relations, Washington, D.C., letter............................ 180 Major Cities Chiefs Association, Darrel Stephens, President, Washington, D.C., letter....................................... 185 MENTOR, Karen Nussle, Senior Vice President, Alexandria, Virginia, letter............................................... 186 National Alliance to End Homelessness, LaKesha Pope, Youth Program and Policy Analyst, and Richard A. Hooks Wayman, Senior Youth Policy Analyst, Washington, D.C. letter.................. 187 National Association of Women Law Enforcement Executives (NAWLEE), Laura Forbes, President, Carver, Massachusetts, letter......................................................... 189 National Black Police Association, Inc., Ronald E. Hampton, Executive Director, Washington, D.C., letter................... 190 National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges (NCJFCJ), Hon. Dale R. Koch, Presiding Judge, Multnomah County Circuit Court, Portland, Oregon, President, National Council of Juvenile and Family Court Judges, statement.................... 191 National Council on Disability, Association of University Centers on Disabilities, and the National Center for Victims of Crime, Washington, D.C., joint statement.............................. 195 National Latino Peace Officers Association (NLPOA), Roy Garivey, President, Las Vegas, Nevada, letter........................... 203 National Major Gang Task Force, Edward L. Cohn, Executive Director, Indianapolis, Indiana, letter........................ 204 National Narcotic Officers' Associations' Coalition (NNOAC), Ronald E. Brooks, President, West Covina, California, letter... 205 National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives (NOBLE), Jimmie Dotson, National President, Alexandria, Virginia, letter............................................... 206 National Troopers Coalition (NTC), Dennis Hallion, Chairman, Washington, D.C., letter....................................... 207 Nee, Thomas J., President, National Association of Police Organizations, Boston, Massachusetts, statement and attachment. 208 Palmer, Hon. Douglas H., Mayor, Trenton, New Jersey, and President, United States Conference of Mayors, statement and attachment..................................................... 214 Passalacqua, Stephan R., Sonoma Country District Attorney, Santa Rosa, California, letter....................................... 222 Penrod, Gary S., Sheriff, San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, San Bernardino, California, letter................. 223 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., October 18, 2006, article.............................................. 224 Points of Light Foundation, Howard H. Williams III, Interim CEO and President, Washington, D.C., letter........................ 226 Police Executive Research Forum, Washington, D.C., report........ 227 Police Foundation, Hubert Williams, President, Washington, D.C., letter......................................................... 247 Schwarzenegger, Hon. Arnold, Governor of California, Sacramento, California, letter............................................. 248 Stalking Resource Center, Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., January 26, 2007, article.............................................. 249 The State, Columbia, South Carolina, Senator Joseph R. Biden, Jr., August 7, 2007, article................................... 250 United States Conference of Mayors, January 24, 2007, article.... 252 USA Today, Washington, D.C., article............................. 255 RISING CRIME IN THE UNITED STATES: EXAMINING THE FEDERAL ROLE IN HELPING COMMUNITIES PREVENT AND RESPOND TO VIOLENT CRIME ---------- WEDNESDAY, MAY 23, 2007 U.S. Senate, Subcommittee on Crime and Drugs, Committee on the Judiciary, Washington, D.C. The Subcommittee met, pursuant to notice, at 9:31 a.m., in room SD-226, Dirksen Senate Office Building, Hon. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Chairman of the Subcommittee, presiding. Present: Senators Biden, Kohl, Feingold, and Grassley. OPENING STATEMENT OF HON. JOSEPH R. BIDEN, JR., A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF DELAWARE Chairman Biden. The hearing will come to order. I welcome our witnesses today, and let me begin by saying that Senator Graham, who is the Ranking Member on the Subcommittee--we have a mild little issue on the floor called ``immigration'' we are debating today, and he has some responsibilities relating to that legislation. Senator Specter is going to be here. He is at, I think, the Appropriations Committee. And Senator Grassley is here. And I am going to make a brief opening statement, and I would yield then to Senator Grassley, who has an introduction he would like to make. Let me begin by saying that I am glad you all could be here today to address a subject which this Committee, in the 17 years I was the Chairman or Ranking Member, spent most of my time dealing with, and that is the issue of violent crime in America and what role, if any, the Federal Government should have in helping States combat violent crime. I would like to talk a little bit about that today, but let me begin by thanking the witnesses and welcome our distinguished experts. There are some old friends here who have been working on this issue for a long time, and some new friends that I hope will be working with me and others over the next couple months to make some real changes in our funding mechanisms for local law enforcement. Last week we observed National Police Week, and it reminded us all of the sacrifices that are made every single day by those who are willing to go out there and protect our communities. I would like to ask the staff to find out who is banging up there and tell them they will be arrested. I have a lot of cops down here. [Laughter.] Chairman Biden. And if they do not stop, they are going to be arrested. But we meet today against the backdrop of an insidious resurgence of violent crime in communities across the country. For the first time in more than a decade, crime is on the rise. The 2005 Federal Bureau of Investigation Uniform Crime Report found that murders are up 3.4 percent--the largest percentage increase in 15 years--with 16,692 murders in 2005-- the most since 1998. And I realize it is anecdotal, but you need only turn on the television in any major metropolitan area, and it seems as though the murder rate is up beyond that. Again, we have no statistics beyond 2005 nationally, but I know in Philadelphia, in Baltimore, in New York City, across the country as I travel, that is the banner headline in most of the news reports about murder rates exceeding last year's murder rates at this point. Again, I want to make it clear. There are no uniform statistics yet that I have available to me, but it is a problem. The report also found that other types of violent crime, including forcible rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, rose 2.3 percent. The Police Executive Research Forum's recent study of crime in 56 cities found that over the past 2 years homicides increased more than 10 percent nationwide and 20 percent in major cities. I am troubled, as all of us are, by these trends, but, quite frankly, I am not surprised. The Federal Government has taken its focus off of street crime since 9/11, asking law enforcement to do more with less. And the administration, in my view--and we are going to hear from an administration witness in a moment--has understandably dedicated vast Federal resources to counterterrorism. But it has done it at the expense of law enforcement, in my view, robbing Peter to pay Paul. I find absolutely no justification for the $2.1 billion cut in local law enforcement assistance since 2001, notwithstanding the need to vastly increase the amount of money to deal with counterterrorism. There has been sort of a perfect storm out there. The FBI has necessarily been pulled off a lot of work it used to do in local law enforcement. The cities and States have had to cut back as we have eliminated programs. And, quite frankly, if anyone is likely to find a terrorist, it is not going to be some brave Special Forces soldier wearing night vision goggles. It is going to be one of your men or women, Chief, who are going to be the ones who are going find the terrorist occupying an empty apartment building that only that cop walking the beat or riding by in his patrol car is going to know has been vacant the last 4 years, and all of a sudden there is a light on up there. The President has killed the COPS program and drastically cut the Justice Assistance Grants. And when the program was announced by former Attorney General Ashcroft, he said, ``It worked marvelously.'' It worked marvelously, and we are cutting it? I have never quite fully understood that except for the ideological notion that the Federal Government should not be involved in dealing with local law enforcement. They call it ``devolution of Government.'' I call it the ``increase in violent crime.'' The President has also redirected 1,000 FBI agents from crime to counterterrorism, as is necessary, and as a result, violent crime investigations by the FBI are down 60 percent. have been proposing to increase the FBI by over 1,000 agents the last 4 years. What are we doing? But this is what we are going to talk about a little bit today. Fewer police on the street preventing crime and protecting communities means more crime, and it is as simple as that. It is not rocket science. We went through this whole debate during the 1980s and 1990s, when I was told the Biden crime bill would have no impact because we never tried it before. We never increased that many cops before. And we increased cops and violent crime went down. And so our sheriffs and police officers have done an extraordinary job in the face of diminishing Federal support, but they also need help, in my view. We cannot focus on terrorism at the expense of fighting crime, and that is a false choice. We can do both. We need not be put in this dilemma of the false choice of you either fight terrorism or you fight street crime. We are fully within our capability of doing both. As my father would say, ``Show me your budget; I will tell you what you value.'' So I find this argument somewhat--anyway, I find it difficult to swallow. It seems to me we have to get back to basics. More than a decade ago, we faced a similar violent crime crisis, although the crime rates were much higher. We overcame that crisis by supporting local law enforcement with the tools and resources they needed to prevent crime whenever possible and to punish crime wherever necessary. We passed the most sweeping anti- crime bill in the history of this Nation and created the Community Oriented Policing Services Program--the so-called COPS program. We funded 118,000 local officers. We expanded community policing across the Nation. And it worked. Crime rates fell 8 straight years. The violent crime rate dropped 26 percent; the murder rate dropped 34 percent. The Government Accountability Office has documented the success of these anti-crime measures, and a recent Brookings Institution study found that the COPS program was one of the most cost-effective programs for combating crime. In fact, the Brookings Institution found that for every dollar spent on COPS, we save between $6 and $12 for the public overall. Today we have several distinguished experts to help us understand how to best to use Federal resources to reverse these trends and to help make our communities safer again. A number of experts have also submitted written testimony which I will reference during this hearing, and we will submit that testimony so it is available for the record. I now invite my good friend and former Chairman of this Committee, Senator Grassley, to make any opening comments and introduce a distinguished Iowan who is here to testify. STATEMENT OF HON. CHARLES E. GRASSLEY, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF IOWA Senator Grassley. Thank you. I will not give an opening statement. I will have to immediately go to serve in my capacity as lead Republican on the Finance Committee starting at 10 o'clock. Mr. Chairman, you are involved in the caucus system in Iowa, and I will bet you-- Chairman Biden. I have heard of it. I have heard of it. Senator Grassley. And I will bet you have had people say it is like running for sheriff. Chairman Biden. Yes, it is, only it is not as hard. Senator Grassley. You have one of those 99 Iowa sheriffs before you. This stern-looking man over here is really quite friendly. He is President of the Sheriffs' Association nationally. He is a friend of mine, and he has been a sheriff for a long time. So I am pleased to welcome to this Committee again--because I had this opportunity a few weeks ago--Ted Kamatchus, Sheriff for Marshall County, Iowa, and that is right in the middle of our State. So you will be going through it several times, and drive carefully. The staff person that brought me here today says, ``I got two tickets from him 3 years ago.'' [Laughter.] Senator Grassley. So he is doing his job, see. As I said, just a few weeks ago he was here on another subject, so it is great to see him back. This sheriff is here today because he is a national leader, as the Sheriffs' Association National President. But the most important thing for your testimony is that he has got 30 years' experience in law enforcement. He is an outspoken advocate for sheriffs across the country, from border to border, coast to coast. I have known him a number of years and know him to be a straight shooter from the standpoint of talking. He tells it like it is. You may be a straight shooter otherwise, too. Thank God I have not experienced that. He relates his practice firsthand, which he has gathered from fighting crime, and particularly in Iowa, you have heard a lot about the methamphetamine scourge that we have. He is out there day in and day out on the front lines witnessing the devastating effect of this drug on our communities. Hearing from witnesses like the sheriff with experience and know-how is essential for us to do our job. As both a sheriff for rural Iowa and the President of the National Association, he will provide invaluable insight into the necessity of providing resources to local law enforcement, including what is always an issue around here, the Byrne and JAG grant program and the COPS program. So on behalf of the Subcommittee, I am happy to welcome you. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Biden. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman, and, Ted, we are going to welcome you a little later. I have had the benefit of meeting with the sheriff, and I look forward to his testimony. We now have Mark Epley, who is senior counsel to the Deputy Attorney General of the U.S. Department of Justice. He joined the Justice Department and he is responsible for advising and assisting the Deputy Attorney General in the formulation and implementation of the Justice Department budget--which is always an easy thing to do, right? He also oversees the grants that the Justice Department makes to the Community Oriented Policing Program and the Office of Justice Programs and the Office of Violence Against Women. Prior to becoming senior counsel, he served as Chief of Staff to the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Justice Programs. Before he joined the Justice Department, Mr. Epley served as general counsel to the House Armed Services Committee and as counsel to its Military Personnel Subcommittee. He practiced law at Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., before embarking on his career in public service. We are happy to have you here, Mr. Epley, and we look forward to your testimony. The floor is yours. STATEMENT OF MARK EPLEY, SENIOR COUNSEL TO THE DEPUTY ATTORNEY GENERAL, DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE, WASHINGTON, D.C. Mr. Epley. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I am glad for the opportunity to testify before the Subcommittee about violent crime in America and what the Department of Justice is doing to assist our State and local partners with the prevention and control of crime. Due in large measure to the effectiveness and hard work of State and local law enforcement, violent crime in America remains near historic lows, according to the 2005 National Crime Victimization Survey and the FBI's Uniform Crime Report. After rising to a dramatic peak in the early 1990s, violent crime rates in America have declined steadily since. Although in 2005 there were measurable increases in violent crime--with regard to homicide, robbery and, to some extent, aggravated assault, though rape went down--it is important to note that the rate of violent crime in 2005 is the second-lowest reported in last 30 years. Only 2004 was lower. When we examine this data, we do not discern any nationwide trend. Rather, what we see is that certain crimes in certain communities are going up. For example, the rate of homicide nationwide went up 2.4 percent in 2005. The Northeast, however, experienced a 5.3-percent, the South a 0.8-percent increase, and the West a 1.7-percent increase. Likewise, cities of different sizes were affected differently by crime. Very large cities did not see a change in their homicide rate. Cities of 100,000 to 250,000 saw a measurable increase in their homicide rate. And those 250,000 to 500,000 saw a decline. We do not see a particular nationwide trend, and the data does not point to any particular cause. But it is important to note, as the Attorney General said last week, it is difficult to hope when you live in fear of crime. When you look at the 2005 data, when you look at the 2006 preliminary data, notwithstanding its limitations, you see that many communities face violent crime challenges, and the Department is committed to working with those communities to meet that challenge. To better understand what is going on with violent crime in America, the Attorney General asked the Department to go and visit communities throughout the country, and we did that. We visited 18 cities around the country, some of which had experienced increases in violent crime and some decreases, to understand what works and what the challenges are. And one of the consistent themes that we heard was the value of Federal- local partnership. And a specific example of that that was raised was Project Safe Neighborhoods, an initiative through which local law enforcement and local prosecutors can refer for Federal prosecution gun crimes. And through that partnership we have doubled the number of gun crime prosecutions in the last 6 years when compared to the preceding 6 years. Another example of partnership is law enforcement task force activity, like the FBI's Safe Streets Task Force, the ATF's Violent Crime Impact Teams, the U.S. Marshal Service's regional fugitive apprehension task forces. Whether partnering through operations or prosecution, the Department is committed to growing those relationships, but we appreciate that partnership on the part of local law enforcement takes resources. And the President's 2008 budget recognizes that fact. It seeks $200 million to support the Violent Crimes Reduction Partnership Initiative. These are funds that would support multijurisdictional task forces led by local law enforcement, working with Federal law enforcement, to target relief to those communities that are facing challenges. More immediately, the Attorney General announced last week that the Office of Justice Programs would be investing $125 million through the Byrne discretionary program throughout the country. And one of the focus areas of that program is targeting violent crime. We hope that those resources will be quickly delivered to the field to provide those communities facing violent crime challenges relief. Mr. Chairman, the Department is committed to working with our State and local partners to add value where we can. But it is important to understand that not all communities are experiencing crime in the same way. Therefore, it is important to understand that some communities are affected differently than others in order to effectively target relief and in order to partner effectively. And we are committed to doing that. Thank you. Chairman Biden. As the old joke goes, therein lies the problem. You have a fundamentally different view of what is going on than I do. You know, I kind of view fighting crime like cutting grass. You go out there and cut your grass this weekend and it looks great. If you do not cut it for another week, it looks okay. In 2 weeks, it looks pretty bad. In a month, it really gets tattered. Why are you increasing the Byrne grants when you tried to eliminate them? What epiphany did you guys have? Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, are you referring to the President's request for-- Chairman Biden. You just said you asked for $125 million for the Byrne grants. Isn't that what you just said to me? I am sorry. Maybe I misunderstood. Mr. Epley. You are right, Mr. Chairman. The announcement the Attorney General made last week was that $125 million of the Byrne discretionary grant program would be invested across the country to prevent and control crime. Chairman Biden. What changed? I mean, you all have been after eliminating it the last 6 years, so all of a sudden--I mean, what was the epiphany? What happened to make you realize you needed to do this? Mr. Epley. Those funds, Mr. Chairman, were appropriated by Congress as part of the joint resolution, the 2007-- Chairman Biden. Yes, we consistently do not listen to you. If you notice, we completely disregard you every year you do this. So you should not be surprised that we appropriated the funds. I am wondering why you now--why is the Department--this is unfair to do this to you. The Attorney General should be here answering these questions. But do you know why? If you know. I do not mean to be rude, but do you know why this year you concluded that you needed that discretionary Byrne grant money to get out to the States? Was it political pressure? Mr. Epley. No, Mr. Chairman. With regard to the 2007 money, the Department is merely seeking to faithfully administer the funds that Congress appropriated in 2007. And-- Chairman Biden. But do you think we should be? What I am trying to get at is in the past you have argued this money is not necessary. You have argued it is not necessary, we do not need it, and that the States and the cities and localities could take care of it and you should not be in the business of doing it. That is the argument you made, the Justice Department under its past two Attorneys General has made the last 6 years. And I am wondering why all of a sudden you think that now you want to faithfully implement this program. Do you think it is worthwhile? Do you think it is a good thing? Do you think the Byrne grants are good? Do you think they are necessary? Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, I need to speak--as far as looking forward and the law enforcement investments that the President's budget seeks to make-- Chairman Biden. Let me just ask you a very specific question, Mark. And it is OK if you do not know the answer. But it would be nice to know whether or not you think now the Byrne grants are important. Do you think they are necessary in order to fight crime? Or do you still--is the Department doing it because of the political pressure we have? The reason it matters, it matters in terms of what we can look forward to and the kinds of cooperation we are going to get. So if we had not put the money in, would you guys have put the money in? Mr. Epley. The President's 2008 budget request seeks $200 million to support multijurisdictional task forces led by local law enforcement, and so I think that is the best expression of the administration's view on how to effectively partner with State and local law enforcement. Chairman Biden. Now, you make the case that, you know, crime varies from locale to locale. That is why I wrote the COPS bill the way I did, because communities do not have to ask for it. There is no requirement. We do not have to go in where crime is not up. I find that it is an interesting thing. Mayors and county council persons and county executives, they do not ask for the money. The people who have real problems, they ask for the money. I mean, I think the reason why it has gotten such significant, consistent, positive reviews is it did not mandate anything. The COPS bill said, gee, if you need cops, go to your mayor and see if you can get your city council to come up with their piece of it and the Federal Government will kick in their piece. So I cannot think of any program--can you think of any program that better makes the judgment of whether or not additional law enforcement resources in terms of a shield are needed than the COPS program? Or do you think you all should decide that federally? Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, based on what we saw in the field when we visited 18 communities around the country, some of these communities had experienced an increase in violent crime, and others a decrease. Chairman Biden. Right. Mr. Epley. And we observed a very curious thing, and that is, in some communities there was both over time, 2000 to 2005, a decrease in their staffing and a decrease in certain kinds of violent crime. On the other hand, there were communities in which there were increases in their law enforcement staffing, and they experienced increases in violent crime. What we took away from that is that there are many factors that drive violent crime. It might be demographic changes. Some of the communities pointed to loosely organized gangs or street crews, increasingly violent juvenile crime, the presence of illegal guns, demographic changes, re-entering felons. All of these things contribute to the nature of crime in a given community. Chairman Biden. True. Mr. Epley. And based on what we saw and observed in the field, the administration's view is that the best way to target relief to those communities facing violent crime challenges is to support law enforcement task forces. And essentially that is an investment in veteran law enforcement for-- Chairman Biden. Why did you cut those task forces then? Or you just think they are needed now? You are coming back with $200 million, which is a significantly smaller amount than was available for these joint task forces. You eliminated the Violent Crime Strike Forces with the FBI. You wiped those out a while ago, over my objection, and others' objections. So you think that that is the best way to target this. Now, you know, you are beginning to sound like a liberal Democrat. It took me 10 years to fight the Democrats that there are only a couple things we know about crime, violent crime. One, after hundreds of hours of hearings, if there are four corners at an intersection and a crime is going to be committed on one of those corners and there are only three cops, it will be committed where the cop is not. That one we know. We also know that when people get to be about 40 years old, they commit fewer violent crimes because it is harder to run down the street and jump the chain link fence. You know, it makes it a little more difficult. And so you all are saying that what you are going to do is at the Federal level, you have made a judgment, after visiting 18 localities, that, in fact, there is really no correlation between the amount of resources in terms of personnel and whether or not there is violent crime. That is your bottom line, is it not? Is that what you are saying? Mr. Epley. I do not know that I--I would not want to say it is--I would provide a more nuanced-- Chairman Biden. I would like to hear it. Mr. Epley.--representation, namely, that when we look back over time, we have law enforcement expenditure data up through 2004 on the dollar amounts spent on police protection by Federal, State, and local law enforcement. Looking back over time to 1990, we see that in each year the total amount of money spent on police protection, adjusted for inflation, has increased each year. And so one of the conclusions that one can draw is that State and local government have raised money and spent it on police protection consistent with their primary responsibility with keeping the peace and securing public safety. When we look at this picture, we see the nature of crime in America--that is, different crimes going up in different communities. We want to add value where we can and make measurable--and invest in things that yield measurable results. Chairman Biden. Do you think there is any correlation between the fact that we spend considerably more money federally which leveraged States' spending more money and the violent crime rate for roughly 10 years in a row dropping about 8 percent per year? Was there any correlation between the increase in the Federal resources leveraging State resources and the drop in violent crime? What do you think? Because this is a basic, basic, basic disagreement here, and I am trying to get at the core of where the administration is and where I am, at least. So is there a correlation? I mean, to what do you attribute that drop in crime? Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, I do not know, but let me tell you some of the observations that one can draw. One can see that the rate of violent crime started going south, that is, got better in the early 1990s-- Chairman Biden. Barely. Barely. Mr. Epley.--even in advance of-- Chairman Biden. Barely, and we increased funding then, even. That was before the COPS bill. But we increased Federal funding over that period, from 1988 to 1992. Mr. Epley. But even before the Omnibus Crime Control Act money came out in 1994 and 1995 and so on, we began to see the violent crime rate going down. There is no doubt about the fact that over time-- Chairman Biden. Well, let me make the point. There was an increase in funding commensurate with it going down before we did the $30 billion crime bill in 1994. From 1988 to 1994, we increased Federal participation and Federal money into local law enforcement. And so it was not like we were cutting funding and crime was going down. We were increasing Federal funding. We did not increase it nearly as much as we did in 1994, but beginning in 1995, with the increase, the significant increase in Federal funding, there was a significant decrease in violent crime. Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, what certainly you see when you look at law enforcement expenditures, the rate of crime, and the number of law enforcement sworn officers on board, you do see-1995, 1996, and so on--an increase in the number of sworn law enforcement members as a proportion of population. So that is something that, when you look at the statistics over time, you do see a change in that regard. During the entire period, back starting in 1993 through 2005, you see the rate of violent crime declining. Notwithstanding changes in the law-- Chairman Biden. Declining less and less and less every year. Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, I think that statisticians that we talk to say that at the rate of crime that is now measured, it is difficult to measure meaningful changes in violent crime. That is why I think in some communities you actually see the homicide rate going up but the robbery rate going down, or vice versa. Typically, that-- Chairman Biden. That has always been the case. You go back 40 years, there has not been a direct correlation that every crime goes up in every category. There are times when crimes go up in murder and they drop down in robbery or rape. There are times when they go up in rape and they drop down in murder. It is not, at least to the best--I have been doing this for a long time, and I am using your statistics, and the statistics made available from the UCR reports, I just find it interesting. In 2000, we had 708,022 sworn officers, and the recent report shows that there are 670,000 sworn officers in 2005. But what I do not get is the argument you are making--I get it. The argument you are making is that there are other things unrelated to additional police officers, Byrne grants, law enforcement block grants, all the things which you have slashed. There are different things than those things that are going to be able to impact on keeping the crime rate from continuing to go up. Is that what you are saying? Mr. Epley. That is right, Mr. Chairman. I think that the fundamental point that I would like to share as part of this dialog about how best to respond to violent crime is that Federal partnership with State and local law enforcement can add value and that-- Chairman Biden. Yes, but you have slashed that. You have slashed it dramatically. Mr. Epley. But, Mr. Chairman, we would argue that the nature of partnership is not always--the nature and effectiveness of the partnership is not always measured in terms of grant dollars, that, Mr. Chairman, Federal law enforcement task forces like the FBI Safe Streets Task Forces, the ATF Violent Crime Impact Teams, the Marshals' Fugitive Apprehension Program, and so on, the aggressive prosecutions that we have been able to pursue through Project Safe Neighborhoods, an investment of $1.6 billion in Project Safe Neighborhoods in terms of training local law enforcement and prosecutors, designating special AUSAs to prosecute these crimes--through that partnership we have doubled the number of gun criminals in prison. And each and every one of those gun criminals, essentially 35,000 more were prosecuted over the last 6 years. They were taken out of the community they were terrorizing and incapacitated from-- Chairman Biden. I am very familiar with it. In 2003 and 2004, you did not want to do that. It was us beating the living devil out of you to have the U.S. Attorneys take over more of these gun prosecutions because of the Federal laws we wrote, because the penalties are so severe. I am the guy that drafted that legislation, you know, the legislation laying out the penalties and eliminating parole and probation. I actually sat in this old place and authored that years ago, and-- Mr. Epley. It has been an effective tool, Mr. Chairman. Chairman Biden. Well, anyway, look, I think one of the--I see my colleague from Wisconsin is here, and I am going to yield to him in just a moment? I just can assure you of one thing. If we continue to decrease or keep at the reduced level of roughly $2 billion a year that is not going from the Federal Government to local law enforcement, roughly $1 billion a year for hiring additional officers, you are going to see the violent crime rate continue to go up. It is a pattern. You know, Emerson once said, ``Society is like a wave. The wave moves on, but the particles remain the same.'' God has not made a new brand of man or woman in a millennia. And the idea that we are going to be able to keep violent crime down with fewer officers and fewer resources as populations increase, I find that to be totally counterintuitive. But we can get back to that. I have a few more specific questions. Let me yield to my colleague now. STATEMENT OF HON. RUSSELL D. FEINGOLD, A U.S. SENATOR FROM THE STATE OF WISCONSIN Senator Feingold. Thank you so much, Mr. Chairman. I want to thank you for chairing this hearing. I also want to recognize, because we do not do it often enough, the leadership that the Chairman has had on this issue of fighting crime and getting this right for his entire career. There is no one who has been more dedicated to the issue. I benefit from being able to talk about COPS programs and his leadership on the Violence Against Women Act every time I am home. So, Mr. Chairman, I can finally talk about my 15 years in the Senate--nothing like what you can say--and you maintain the commitment over time, and I admire you for that very, very much. Chairman Biden. Thank you. Senator Feingold. I would also like to thank all the witnesses whose expertise is greatly needed at a time when the Nation is struggling with an increase in violence and crime in our communities. I would ask that my full statement be included in the record. While we all hear about the rising crime rates in cities across America, one of the cities hardest hit has been Milwaukee, Wisconsin. According to a report released by the Police Executive Research Forum, Milwaukee's homicide rates have increased by 17 percent, robbery rates by 39 percent, and aggravated assault by 85 percent, all in the past 2 years. These statistics alone are staggering, but the human toll is truly heartbreaking. On Monday, May 14, 2007, 4-year-old Jasmine Owens was shot and killed by a drive-by shooter. She had been skipping rope in her front yard. On Thursday, February 22, 2007, Shaina Mersman was shot and killed at noon in the middle of a busy shopping area. She was 8 months pregnant, and she died in the middle of the street. These are but two of the senseless deaths in a list of names that is far too long. It is my sincere hope that through hearings like this and legislation such as Senator Biden's COPS Improvements Act, Senator Feinstein's Edward Byrne Memorial Justice Assistant Grant Program bill, and my own PRECAUTION bill, which I am introducing later this week, that we can begin to address these very real problems. The PRECAUTION Act recognizes that it is far better to invest in precautionary measures now than it is to pay later the costs of crime--a cost borne not only in dollars but in lives. We have mourned the loss of far too many innocent lives already. This legislation creates a national commission to review the range of prevention and intervention programming available, to identify the most successful strategies out of that group, and to report on those findings to the criminal justice community. It creates a targeted grant program through the National Institute of Justice that will fund promising and innovative techniques that need Federal dollars to be developed into more reliable strategies. In general, the PRECAUTION Act provides resources that will further the integration of prevention and intervention strategies into traditional law enforcement practices. I hope that other members of the Judiciary Committee will join Senator Specter and me in working to get this modest but important piece of legislation passed. I also appreciate the support of Ted Kamatchus, the President of the National Sheriffs' Association, for my bill, because I believe that utilizing prevention and intervention strategies is both smart and necessary. I would ask the witness to respond. I have mentioned that Milwaukee has been particularly hard hit by rising crime rates. What is the Justice Department doing to provide additional help and resources to Milwaukee? Mr. Epley. Mr. Feingold, the Department of Justice, we share your concern about the violent crime challenge that Milwaukee has been facing. As the Attorney General said last week, it is difficult to dream dreams when you grow up in a community that is weighed down with the fear of crime. As you know, the Department of Justice invested specifically in Milwaukee $2.5 million for its comprehensive gang initiative--that $2.5 million, $1 million to prevention work, $1 million to crime suppression, and half a million dollars to re-entry prisoner re-entry. One of the most effective ways to prevent crime is to keep those career criminals from continuing in a life of crime. In addition to those funds, specifically targeted to Milwaukee and actually nine other cities around the country, the 2007 grant money has begun to be both made available to communities through solicitations, but then also the formula money has begun to be pushed out to the field. So, for example, the Justice Assistance Grant programs that the Department administers actually have an increase this year, such that Wisconsin will enjoy a $2.3 million increase in Justice Assistance Grant money. Milwaukee itself stands to gain about $400,000 more than last year in Justice Assistance Grants. In addition to that, Mr. Feingold, the Project Safe Neighborhoods money for the Eastern District of Wisconsin--a lot of those dollars will go to work in Milwaukee--will go up 70 percent this year, and likewise, the PSN grants effort, which is sort of the PSN Task Force effort as against gang activity, will likewise increase by about 60 percent for the Eastern District of Wisconsin. So we hope through these investments--PSN, PSN Gangs, the increase in the Justice Assistance Grant program--that Milwaukee and Wisconsin will have the resources necessary to suppress violent crime. Senator Feingold. I appreciate that answer as far as it goes. Some of it had to do with what has already been done before. Some of it appears to be forward-looking. But the fact is that there have been dramatic cuts advocated for some of the most important Federal grant programs: the COPS program, the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program. These are important programs for Milwaukee. In fact, I am told that Milwaukee received zero dollars in COPS hiring funds last year. How does that track with the commitment to the problem in Milwaukee? Mr. Epley. The COPS hiring program, when it accomplished its core mission, which was to hire 100,000 sworn law enforcement officers, the administration began to invest resources in other priority areas, including Project Safe Neighborhoods, as a way to target relief to communities facing violent crime challenges. I believe 2005 was the last year in which Congress provided funds for the universal hiring program. It was a small dollar amount. Maybe the last year for which a substantial amount of money was 2004. But in large measure, that universal hiring program has been phased out, both through the administration budgets that we have put forward, but also through the spending priorities articulated in the congressional appropriations acts. Senator Feingold. I think it is regrettable that that has been done, but let's work together to try to get the help to the city that it needs. Thank you very much. Mr. Epley. Thank you. Chairman Biden. Thank you. Mr. Epley, do we have enough FBI agents? What do you think? Mr. Epley. I think that the President's 2008 budget requests resources sufficient to meet the Bureau's mission. There are always difficult choices to make in a budget when it is taken as a whole. The FBI has been asked to take on a significant burden, standing up a bureau within a bureau to do effective counterterrorism and counterintelligence work. And standing up that bureau takes resources. They do a lot with a limited budget. Chairman Biden. If I gave you money for another 1,000 FBI agents, could you use them? Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, the funds that we--the resources that the Department seeks, the administration seeks for the Bureau, are best represented by the President's 2008 budget. And-- Chairman Biden. Well, you know, in 2006, the FBI brought 34 percent fewer criminal cases to Federal prosecutors than in 2000. The FBI sent prosecutors only 3,500 white-collar crimes in 2005 compared to 10,000 in 2000. And the FBI pursued 65 percent fewer hate crimes in 2005 than 2002. Director Mueller, testifying before this Committee at the end of 2006, said that he has to rededicate 1,000 FBI agents to dealing with the bureau within a bureau, as you reference it. And my understanding from very reliable sources, at least in my years of working with the FBI, is that the FBI asked for more agents this year and the request was denied. I have introduced a bill that would allocate $160 million a year to add 1,000 additional FBI agents dedicated to fighting crime because, you know, it is kind of fascinating. I do not know how--it is just fascinating, you know, only Orwellian Washington-speak that we can talk about cutting 1,000 FBI agents out of dealing with local law enforcement and say that you are sending $200 million to deal with local law enforcement problems, and that somehow we are able to do--it reminds me of Ed Meese in fighting the crime bill, we can ``do more with less.'' Now, I assume that means that something else is going on, that there is no need for these 1,000 agents that were involved, that have been redirected to terrorism. Is it that the terrorism money is affecting violent crime in the street. Is the counterterrorism work of the FBI, you know, impacting positively on street crime in Milwaukee or Philadelphia or Wilmington, Delaware? Is that part of the argument? Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, I do not know what effect--we can get back to you--the counterterrorism, counterintelligence investments that have been made post-- 9/11 have had on violent crime. Chairman Biden. I can tell you it has not had any, but you can check it out. Well, look, there used to be those old movies, all those old B movies, ``Smokey and the Bandit.'' What we have here is we have ourselves, our communications problem. You guys view the world of violent crime and the problem that localities and the Federal Government faces starkly differently than I do. And the inability to provide the resources that we were providing and increase the resources because of the increased strain on the FBI I find very difficult. Now, I know it is not your job. You are not at OMB. You do not get to make those hard decisions. But there is a clear distinction here. You know, for example, just providing a tax cut--this is above both our pay grades. But just providing a tax cut for those who make an average of $1.45 million a year, that is an $85 billion a year expenditure. All I am asking for is about $2.1 billion out of that for local law enforcement like we did before. But there seems to be a sense that--and the argument you are making--I understand it--is that we really do not need it. More cops are not really going to make any impact on violent crime in America. The violent crime problem is much lower than it has been at any time in recent history, although it has gone--there has been an uptick. And, therefore, we are copacetic. Things are going along pretty well right now. You probably do not have the time, but you might find it interesting to hang around and hear the testimony of the people who are about to testify. For the record, are you at liberty to provide us with the 18 localities you went to and observed to reach your conclusions that there is nothing needed more than what you have asked for? Are you prepared to do that? Mr. Epley. Yes, sir. We can make those communities available. Chairman Biden. I would appreciate that. Mr. Epley. Mr. Chairman, if you would indulge me just one moment. Chairman Biden. Sure. Mr. Epley. I just want you to know that we do not view it as copacetic. The fact that certain crimes in certain communities are going up and many communities are facing a violent crime challenge, we think that is a serious matter and that we are looking for ways to most effectively partner with those communities to make a difference. Chairman Biden. Well, you know, there is an old expression attributable to G.K. Chesterton. He said, ``It is not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.'' I would paraphrase the nice rhetorical comment of the Attorney General saying it is difficult to hope when you live in fear of crime. I would argue it is difficult to cope with fewer COPS and it causes crime. But I thank you for your testimony, and like I said, we have a fundamental, basic, distinct disagreement. I fundamentally disagree with the administration. And I am going to do everything I can to make it difficult for you not to accept more money. Thank you very, very much. I appreciate it. Mr. Epley. Thank you. Chairman Biden. By the way, as you are leaving, one of the other things is that you talked about the DEA and the FBI. Talk to your DEA guys about the hiring freeze that is on and tell them--just, you know, do your own little survey. Go out in the field and ask them whether or not they think they can cope with this hiring freeze. The impact of the freeze and the loss of the positions that exist is expected to amount to 180 fewer primary drug organizations than we are able to disrupt or dismantle today and most likely approximately $300 million less in revenue they will be able to deny drug traffickers. That is the study that has been done by the DEA. But, at any rate, you ought to go talk to those guys. You know, get in the car and ride with them, like I do. I think you may find it is a little bit different. Anyway, thank you very much, and I appreciate your being here. [The prepared statement of Mr. Epley appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Biden. Our next panel, Ted has already been referenced about eight times here, so I do not think I have to introduce you again, Ted. Tom Nee, the President of the National Association of Police Organizations. Chief Rick Gregory, Chief of Police of New Castle County, Delaware. Mayor Douglas Palmer, Mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, and the President of the United States Conference of Mayors. And Chief Russ Laine, the Vice President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police. And James Alan Fox, a criminologist from Northeastern University. I welcome you all. I will put each of your bios in the record in the interest of time, but it is a very distinguished panel. I want you to know I am not being merely parochial, having the chief of the second largest police organization in my State here. The New Castle County police and his predecessors helped draft the Biden crime bill, literally not figuratively. They were one of the lead agencies and, I would argue, they have one of the best records in implementing community policing in the country. That is why I wanted him here. I see the mayor is not here yet, so we will proceed, and when he gets here, if he is coming, we will have him join us at the table. Why don't we start in the order in which you were--we will go left to right, with you, Sheriff, and work our way across to you, Professor, and then we will get into some questions if we can. Welcome. STATEMENT OF TED KAMATCHUS, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL SHERIFFS' ASSOCIATION, MARSHALLTOWN, IOWA Sheriff Kamatchus. Thank you, Mr. Chairman and members of the Committee. My name is Ted Kamatchus. I am the Sheriff of Marshall County, Iowa, and the President of the National Sheriffs' Association. I am pleased to have this opportunity to appear before you today to express my concerns and what I know to be the concerns of sheriffs all across the country with the recent increase in violent crimes coupled with severe reductions in Federal assistance to State and local agencies. The essential message that I bring to you today is that the Federal Government needs to play a larger role in crime fighting. Together we need a coordinated national attack on crime, recognizing that there is no single ``silver bullet'' solution. Political rhetoric must not prevail over action. This is not a Republican or Democrat issue. This is an ``us'' issue. It is for the citizens across this country. As you may be aware, sheriffs play a unique role in our criminal justice system. In addition to providing traditional policing within their respective counties, sheriffs also facilitate local jails and are responsible for protecting and providing security for the judicial system. Over 99 percent of the sheriffs are elected and oftentimes serve as the chief law enforcement officer of their counties. Consequently, they have a keen understanding of the needs of our criminal justice system as well as of the local communities which we serve. In the early 1990s, Congress joined in a partnership with local law enforcement to provide assistance in Federal funds for hiring additional officers to put offenders behind bars and fight the war on drugs. Unfortunately, in recent years, the Federal Government has strayed from its commitment to fight crime. The majority of violent crimes we have recently been experiencing have been related to drugs and an increase in gang violence. Sheriffs have not been able to hire the number of deputies they need to address these issues, and in many jurisdictions, current levels of staffing only allow peace officers to respond from one 911 call to another. Stacking calls is not safe. For nearly 30 years, Byrne-JAG grants have funded State and local drug task forces, community crime prevention programs, substance abuse treatment programs, prosecution initiatives, and many other local crime control and prevention programs. It has not just been drug task forces. We perceive these programs as the underpinning of Federal aid for local law enforcement to address violent crimes. Continued reduction in Byrne funding will undoubtedly obliterate the successes that we have all helped to achieve together. In most States, Byrne-funded drug task forces are the cornerstone of drug enforcement efforts. These task forces represent the ideal in law enforcement, pooling limited resources, sharing intelligence, strategically targeting a specific problem, and eliminating duplication of efforts. Moreover, these task forces allow Federal, State, and local law enforcement and prosecutors to work together and share intelligence to stem large-scale organized crime. However, most States have had to scale back on the number of such task forces. Also, I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the COPS programs, particularly in the funding for the programs I have mentioned distributed directly to local law enforcement agencies--those that can best assess and allocate funds where they have the most impact. COPS programs assure the quality of policing services through better training and the highest technology equipment possible. We have heard time and time again that ``homeland security begins with hometown security.'' Yet vital programs such as Byrne and COPS that provide the necessary resources to ensure that hometown security have both been cut drastically, and the hiring initiatives for COPS have been zeroed out in most recent years. It is of no surprise to those in the law enforcement community that since law enforcement programs have been depleted, the crime rate has been rising. We urge this Congress to restore funds for the important public safety programs of Byrne and COPS. We want that $1.1 billion for Byrne and the $1.15 billion for COPS. We would also like to express our thanks to you, Senator Biden, and also to Senator Feinstein for taking a leadership role in their efforts to restore funding for these two essential law enforcement programs. In addition to highlighting the importance of the Byrne and COPS programs, I would also like to urge the Senate to take action on some measures that we believe will assist local law enforcement in helping to address violent crime. The National Sheriffs' Association has endorsed the Gang Abatement and Prevention Act aimed at increasing and enhancing law enforcement resources committed to investigation and prosecution of violent gangs; the Second Chance Act which would begin to address the Nation's escalating recidivism rates; and the Methamphetamine Production Prevention Act, cosponsored by my friend from Iowa, Senator Grassley, which would facilitate the use of electronic methamphetamine precursor logbook systems in order to help States crack down on domestic meth production; and, as was earlier mentioned, the PRECAUTION Act. We heard earlier from Senator Feingold, and early in his statement, he indicated that it will provide guidance in a direct and accessible format to State and local law enforcement to ensure that the criminal justice community is investing its limited resources in the most cost-effective way possible. Mr. Chairman, I would like to note that over 20 sheriffs from border States were in Washington about a month ago, and we are really concerned about this border initiative. The immigration problem that we are seeing and the border security are major, major issues for us. It is more than just an issue of immigration. It is an issue of proliferation of drug cartels, drugs, and actually the movement of contraband, which are drugs, weapons, and people. We need something done about that, and we ask that you hear those sheriffs, because they are there every day on the borders fighting to help the Federal Government. I want to thank you for the opportunity to come before you and express my concerns. I hope I have conveyed to you the dire situation that sheriffs are faced with across this country and how critical Byrne and COPS programs are to us. The strain caused by limited funds for law enforcement programs in the face of increasing violence and drug abuse in our communities should be a major inducement for Government and law enforcement alike to share the responsibility for keeping our communities safe. I ask for your full consideration on my comments today, and I know that through your commitment and the efforts together we can make our communities safer. I want to thank you very much. [The prepared statement of Sheriff Kamatchus appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Biden. Thank you very much, Sheriff. STATEMENT OF THOMAS J. NEE, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF POLICE ORGANIZATIONS, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS Mr. Nee. Good morning, Mr. Chairman. My name is Thomas Nee. I am a police officer in the city of Boston. I serve as the President of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association. Chairman Biden. I thought you were from Selma, Alabama, with that accent. [Laughter.] Mr. Nee. Not with this accent, sir. Chairman Biden. Welcome. Mr. Nee. I also have the honor of serving as the President of the National Association of Police Organizations, representing 238,000 sworn law enforcement officers throughout the United States. This morning, in my testimony, as police officers, as corny as it sounds, we have a duty to serve and protect. As the men and women on the front lines to enforce the law, we have a right, really, and a need for the Federal Government to stand beside us and support us in those efforts in our communities. That is why I am here today on behalf of America's law enforcement community speaking to you today. America's State and local law enforcement are being disregarded by the current administration. They are being passed over for critical funding to assist them in performing their roles in combating and responding to crime and urban terrorism. There are three issues that I will address this morning that are of increasing concern to us at NAPO and our membership: the decrease in funding for vital Department of Justice State and local law enforcement assistance programs witnessed over the past several years; the additional duties taken on by local law enforcement agencies in the post-9/11 era; and finally, the recent increase in crime rates experienced by communities nationwide. These issues are interrelated and cannot be separated, particularly when addressing the issue of rising crime in the United States. The COPS program, together with the Local Law Enforcement Block Grant program and the Byrne Memorial Fund, gave State and local law enforcement the necessary funding to truly assist their efforts in keeping our Nation's communities safe. These justice assistance programs have contributed countless resources to help us combat and fight crime. I would also like to point out, Mr. Chairman, that those funds simply were not for hiring. They were also for retention, which is an important component of it, and with your support these Federal grant programs can be restored. With the support of these Federal grant programs, community policing has been a dominant force behind the dramatic reduction in crime this Nation has witnessed over the past 13 years. In 2000, violent crime rates were at their lowest level in 30 years, particularly in our major cities. More police officers patrolling the streets not only provide greater police presence in our communities but also increase police knowledge of crime as well, thus allowing local law enforcement to do its job in its communities. A key factor in the implementation and success of community policing has been the Federal support through funding and resources to State and local law enforcement agencies. It is not a coincidence that community policing was at its best and national crime rates were at their lowest when Federal support for programs such as COPS, the Byrne grant, and LLEBG was at its highest. And it is also no coincidence that the steep reduction in Federal support for these programs corresponds with the increases in violent crime rates nationwide. Listening to the earlier testimony, I have an absolute positive, fundamental disconnect with what was represented by the administration because we have captured a small sample of what is going on in the country and some of our samplings in some of the major cities. A December 2001 study by researchers at the University of Nebraska at Omaha found that the COPS program is directly linked to the historic drop in U.S. crime rates in the 1990s. The ``More Cops = Less Crime'' statistical analysis produced by you, Mr. Chairman, together with Congressman Weiner, gives further evidence to the link between the COPS grants and the decreases in crime from 1995 to 2000. According to the ``More Cops = Less Crime'' evaluation, the effects of the COPS grants from fiscal year 1994 to fiscal year 1999 on violent crime during that 1995-2000 period were substantial. Approximately $2 billion was provided nationally in hiring grants and over $3.6 million was provided in innovative grants to cities with populations over 10,000. Nationwide, police departments in these cities reported that occurrences of violent crimes decreased by well over 150,000 between 1995 and 2000. Phoenix, Arizona, for instance, received $23.5 million in COPS hiring grants and $2.34 million in COPS innovative grants. Phoenix law enforcement estimates that these funds helped reduce reports of violent crime by over 1,500 incidents and reduced overall crime by 7,679 incidents. Los Angeles, California, received nearly $194 million in COPS grants and $2.3 million in COPS innovative grants between fiscal year 1994 through 1999. And during this time, violent crimes were reduced by 10,500 incidents and overall crime in the city by 53,435 incidents. Phoenix, Arizona, law enforcement agencies have had to redeploy their officers and resources to infrastructure protection such as water treatment facilities, Arizona Public Service power stations, airports, among other infrastructure. More importantly, they seem to have a pair of handcuffs on them with the immigration problem down there. Phoenix has seen record increases in violent crime. Again, to show the disconnect between the administration and what we are experiencing on the street, in 2005-06 the city saw a nearly 5- percent increase in violent crime rates, including a 4.5- percent rise in homicides and an over 6--percent rise in aggravated assault. In 2004 through 2006, Phoenix law enforcement saw an astounding 12-percent increase in homicides and an almost 20-percent increase in aggravated assault over a 2-year period. Los Angeles, California, has seen a substantial amount of resources shifted to homeland security details also. Hundreds of law enforcement officers have been assigned to terrorism prevention issues to protect infrastructure, terrorism task forces, and counterterrorism duties. Although L.A. has seen a decrease in the overall level of violent crimes, including murder, it has seen significant increases in gang-related homicides and violent murders. In New York City, the city has lost over 4,000 policemen absent from the streets of New York since 1999, and that is up to and including the 9/11 era. After 9/11, the city added an additional 1,000 police officers to counterterrorism activities. So that is 5,000 policemen missing from the streets of New York City, and that is not even comprehensible in our world. In Boston, my home city, the Boston miracle, as it was called, in the 1990s, it was a national model for policing around the country. Recently, we have seen an increase and a spike in violence. Between 2004 and 2006, reported homicides alone increased nearly 23 percent in the city of Boston--the highest homicide rate the city has seen in 11 years. In 2004 to 2006, we have seen a 10-percent rise in robberies and a staggering 37-percent rise in aggravated assaults involving firearms. Mr. Chairman, I can add more testimony from Houston, Texas, their statistical analysis; Detroit, Michigan. I do not know where the administration is sampling, sir, but we are experiencing it in the street, and we represent most of the major cities in the country, the rank-and-file line officers. We have our problems today. The biggest problem of all is I think what the chiefs will share with you as well as the rank-and-file testimony here today. It will be in our major cities around the country post- 9/11. We have experienced anywhere from 15 to 18 percent of our staffing is missing from the streets, and I agree with you, Mr. Chairman, as we have in the past. If you do not cover all four corners of the blocks, the genie is out of the bottle. And we can have all the task forces we want and all the prosecution methods behind it, but that is after we lose. That comes in at the eleventh hour, and that is not a good thing. We are suffering right now out here in the streets. We are doing our very best to keep the borders of this country safe, and we need the efforts of the United States Federal Government to complete the task at hand. Thank you very much, Mr. Chairman. [The prepared statement of Mr. Nee appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Biden. I think they spent most of the time down in Crawford getting the crime statistics. I do not know. I should not be so flippant because this is such a serious subject. Before we go to you, Colonel, I just want to point out one thing, just for the record. If you take a look at the crime statistics--I just want this to be in the record. Let me find them here. Take a look at the crime statistics. Let us assume that what is stated is true. The number of crimes committed in the year 2006, whether they are up or down, they are still way beyond what a civilized society should be accepting. So this premise that as long as--and I will submit that for the record. This premise that as long as it is not really going back up above what it was pre-- crime bill that somehow things are OK is, I find, a preposterous notion. The first primary function of Government is to keep folks safe so they can walk the streets. I thought I had them right at hand. I apologize for the intervention, but I will submit them for the record so that we know just how high the low is. It is still very high. Chief, welcome. And, by the way, I might add I am being very parochial here. We have a whole bunch of what I facetiously refer to as ``my guys'' here. We have the Chief of Dover, Delaware, Smyrna, Delaware, South Bethany, Delaware State Police, the Delaware Police Chiefs Council, the Lieutenant of New Castle County, and Corporal Trinidad, who speaks for all of them when they need to be spoken for. I welcome you all here today, and I hope I get a chance to spend a little time with you. But, again, I am not just being parochial when I do that, I say to my friend from Wisconsin. These are the folks that helped write that first bill. They really did. This one did not come out of--no one handed it down. And, by the way, NAPO was the single biggest help at the time when we started this thing off. Thank you for your continued support. No more advertising. Chief, fire away. STATEMENT OF RICK S. GREGORY, CHIEF OF POLICE, NEW CASTLE COUNTY, DELAWARE Chief Gregory. Good morning, sir, and thank you for the opportunity to be here with you this morning and the distinguished members of your panel and Committee and also my fellow law enforcement professionals. I am the Chief of Police for New Castle County. I have been there since the last day of September in 2006. It is the second largest agency in the State of Delaware and, as you mentioned, a pioneer agency in community policing in the State of Delaware. Our agency consists of 364 officers, We cover about 426 square miles with about 450,000 citizens. During 2006, our officers responded to or handled approximately 162,000 calls for service. For the year 2007, we will surpass that mark considering that we have already handled some 82,000 calls for service. Recently, we have become predominantly a call-driven or 911-driven agency. The bulk of our time is responding from one 911 call to the next. This is not effective community policing, as you know. In our agency and in our county, we are seeing a level of violence such as the armed robbery of a pizza delivery person as a commonplace criminal act. From 2005 to 2006, we saw a 38-percent increase in these types of robberies. This type of crime has made violence impersonal and second nature to many offenders. People are shot for reasons for simply being on the wrong side of the street or for saying the wrong things, and we must curb this growing trend. While doing so, we have to also realize that we are going to be doing it with less Federal resources unless we can have some help. A recent article in USA Today entitled ``Youth Gangs Contribute to Rising Crime Rates,'' May 15, 2007, stated, ``increasing violence among teenagers and other youths appears to have contributed to a nationwide crime spike.'' This trend is only the beginning of what we sure believe is going to be an increase for the future. We in Delaware, and specifically New Castle County, are not immune from the national trend. Last summer one of our communities was bombarded with gang violence that eventually led to a full-scale brawl between rival gangs. One was on one side of the street and one was on the other side of the street, not realizing they were rival gang members until they began communicating with hand signals that led to a brawl. One person was shot, one person was stabbed, one was killed. Twelve subjects were arrested for this battle, and of those twelve-- and this is the alarming part--six of them were juveniles. When considering this homicide and the comments from the USA Today article, we try to remember that we are discussing juveniles with weapons. Firearms in the hands of adults are deadly, but consider firearms in the hands of an immature gangster wannabe at the ripe age of 13. It is astounding. The successful investigation of this case and ultimate prosecution was, in large part, due to the expertise offered by our federally funded gang officer. The Federal funding for this officer from the Edward Byrne Memorial Fund allows us to dedicate an officer to the growing problem of gangs and gang violence. Additionally, Federal money spent on the community crime intervention program allows us to dedicate a Spanish- speaking officer to a specific area that is troubled with the problems of Hispanic gang influences. Together these officers provide invaluable intelligence on our gangs. Communities without Federal funding have difficult dealing with these types of problems. Many of these juveniles, as we know, start their life as delinquency runaways. From 2002 until 2006, our agency saw a 22-percent increase in the number of juvenile runaways. This, in effect, is a 22-percent increase in the number of kids primed for recruiting by gangs and the gang culture. One initiative that is working very effectively in Delaware is the Safe Streets program, a collaborative effort involving the four largest police agencies and the Department of Corrections. Combined Federal money in support of this program is close to $1 million. Money spent on ventures such as this are truly effective weapons in the everyday battle to reduce or contain violent crime. Expanded measures in this regard remove repeat offenders from our communities and free up time for our officers to return to the job of community policing. With that, I come with a request that the expansion of programs such as Safe Streets, gang officers, and community crime intervention officers. Allowing a small number of officers to have a magnified and directed impact on communities that are most needing of our help will make an impact. In addition, their efforts serve to rid the communities of repeat offenders, which frees up the officer on the street to spend more time in their communities working to break this increasing cycle of violence. While these positions are of great value, their longevity is limited due to the funding source. Byrne money, which funds these positions, is an excellent resource, but it is not a suitable device for hiring officers. COPS money, as you well know, with its 3-year hiring grant is a better funding source for stability reasons. Federal money spent on these proven successful endeavors is money well spent on the security of our communities. I would like to take the opportunity to thank you for allowing me to come today. I want to thank you also for the leadership that you have proven time and time again. I am not new to community policing. I am new to the area. But I can tell you that nationally we appreciate your leadership and support in what we do. [The prepared statement of Chief Gregory appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Biden. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, you have a job most of us up here would not take on a bet, the most difficult job in America. I really do think being the mayor of a major city is the epicenter of requiring political skill. I am flattered you are here. We had a chance to talk when we spoke to the National Mayors Conference, and your input and the input of your colleagues is vitally important here, and I am delighted you would take the time to be here. I know you have got a lot of other things to do, but thank you very, very much for being here. I am anxious to hear what you have to say. STATEMENT OF HON. DOUGLAS H. PALMER, MAYOR, TRENTON, NEW JERSEY, AND PRESIDENT, UNITED STATES CONFERENCE OF MAYORS Mayor Palmer. Thank you, Senator, and it is a pleasure for me to be here. My name is Douglas Palmer. I am the mayor of Trenton, New Jersey, and I have the honor of being the President of The United States Conference of Mayors, whose membership represents 80 percent of the population of the United States of America. We also want to thank you, Mr. Chairman, for coming to our January meeting and discussing our ten-point plan, one point of which we are talking about, the COPS program, strong cities, strong families, for a strong America. And quite frankly, you cannot have strong cities if you do not have safe cities. As you were talking to Mark Epley--and he seems like a nice enough fellow. I had the opportunity to serve on a few panels with him. And I was just realizing as you were grilling him--I mean talking to him, President Bush does not pay him enough money for what he has to do. And, actually, what he has to do is really go against logical thinking in what we see the trends are. We want to also thank you for your leadership, and I know President Clinton talks about the Clinton crime bill, and he certainly was a large part in that. But we also know that it is the Biden crime bill that helps put us on the right track. You know, a little over 400 days ago, while I was in Los Angeles with Attorney General Gonzales at an event talking about crime, my police director got a call. It was a Friday afternoon, a lovely spring afternoon. I think it was the 1st of April. And he got a call, because we had experienced some gang violence and retaliation earlier in the week that a 7-year-old girl by the name of Tajhanique Lee, while riding her bike, what every young child should be doing on a nice warm spring day, was caught up in the crossfire of two rival gangs, and this beautiful young girl was shot in the face. Fortunately, God spared her life, and she is still a beautiful young lady. But I had the task, like many of my colleagues, mayors and police chiefs--and I am really honored to be with these individuals-- to talk to her mother about 2 hours after it happened in the hospital. Far too often, mayors have to make these calls. Mayors have to go to the funerals of law enforcement people, of law-- abiding citizens and children far too often. We certainly are on the front lines. I would ask Mark--and I know he left, but I would like him to come to Trenton. If he thinks things are copacetic, the status quo is acceptable, I plead with him to come to the city of Trenton where we have seen a reduction in crime, almost 27 percent, but an increase in homicides directly attributable to drugs, illegal guns, and gangs. Our homicide rates go up, as I think these individuals can tell you, fueled by guns, illegal guns in the hands of criminals, and drugs, which is a part of that, and gangs. While we have reduced crime, the fear level is as high as ever. It is not American to be afraid to sit out on your porch in the afternoon. It is not American to have your children not use a park that we have paid for because it is not safe. This is just not American. We also see that this is attributable in part because of the rise in juvenile crime. We see a culture today that is almost a subculture, and we see young people very willing to join gangs, to be lured into gangs, use illegal weapons and to shoot each other. It is just astonishing to me that the administration would think that because certain areas in this country are not experiencing an increase in violent crime that everything is OK. It is almost like if you have heart problems, do not take any medicine, wait until you have the heart attack. Well, we need medicine. We need the kind of support that you have had and shown over the years. We urge Senate passage of the COPS reauthorization bill sponsored by yourself, urge passage of your Second Chance Act to help with prisoner re- entry, which is critically important. And the U.S. Conference of Mayors has endorsed Senator Feinstein's Gang Abatement and Prevention Act of 2007 and urge passage. And, of course, the COPS and the Byrne block grants should be fully funded this year. You cannot have homeland security and not have hometown security. And the point you made was very well taken. We do need 1,000 more FBI agents because our police will tell you that when they used to have the partnership with the Federal Government to have FBI work with them on these very serious cases, now they are fighting counterterrorism. And that is fine. But we need additional FBI agents to come and work with our local law enforcement to help federally put these bad guys away. We truly need this Federal partnership. When we see school violence is on the rise, we know our police have to use more resources there. And what is also troubling for us without a Federal partnership is that the police--and they will tell you, and mayors will tell you--we will have to spend whatever we have to make our citizens safe, and that means a lot of times using resources that we would have for parks, for economic development, for senior citizen programs, for things that are the lifeblood of a city, that help sustain a city, that help make cities livable, we have to take those moneys away for law enforcement because our Federal partners are not at the table with us. So we urge that through your leadership this be done. It is unfortunate that the administration--I hope somebody from the administration is here to listen to these individuals whose officers put their lives on the line each and every day, whose mayors fight the good fight each and every day. But like in everything else, we need a Federal partner. This is a Federal responses needed in a partnership to deal with this problem. It has worked in the past, and we know with the resources that it will work for all of us in the future. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mayor Palmer appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Biden. Mr. Mayor, I am going to place in the record, by the way, for each one of you your bios and what I had prepared for you. But I must say you have done a remarkable job. I know Trenton relatively well. I know New Jersey pretty well. And with all due respect, Mr. Mayor, not every mayor in America is making the choices you have made. You are making some tough choices between, figuratively speaking, street lights and cops. And you are making them for cops. But a lot of other mayors are not either able to or think they should make those choices, and it is truly remarkable that you are running against the trend here because your crime rate is down. Your crime rate is down. But one of the things that caused me to draft that legislation back in the early 1990s was the thing that frightened people the most is the randomness of crime. The randomness. All the studies that we have done and read and all the hundreds of hours of hearings, most people thought they could protect themselves against being victimized by putting themselves in a position where they avoided the bad neighborhood, the bank teller, the ATM machine at midnight, walking in a certain--they thought they could do that. But what happens in your city and every other city, and the nature of the change in the crime, demonstrates once again it is totally random. There is nothing you can do in many cases to give yourself the sense that you are out of harm's way. It is not just avoiding ``the bad neighborhood.'' So, anyway, I just wanted to state for the record that I think your leadership of the National Conference of Mayors has been remarkable. But, more importantly, your day-to-day hands- on leadership in Trenton, New Jersey, has been remarkable. And I just want to note that for the record. And I am sure my Republican colleagues, if they were here, would say the exact same thing. It has been remarkable. Mayor Palmer. Well, Senator, I just would like to say our homicide rate is up, though. Our regular-- Chairman Biden. I know that. But your overall crime-- but my point is that is what is happening all over. What is happening all over is you see these trends. The homicide rate is up, gun crimes are up. You also find gangs are up. MS-13 is becoming visible. It is a little bit like when-- Ted will remember--15 years ago--that is not true--17 years ago, I was in Iowa--having nothing to do with what Senator Grassley referenced of running for President--as a United States Senator in Iowa and warning that ice was coming, methamphetamine was on its way, and how it was coming and wrote a very extensive report. And you look around the corner, juvenile crime is up. I would argue one of the reasons juvenile crime is up is because community policing is down, because school resource officers are not available any longer, because the gang initiatives have been cut, because when you make choices, you have got to make very hard choices in the allocation of these moneys. So I do understand certain aspects of crime are up, but overall it has been remarkable what you have done in the face of these significant cuts. Chief, welcome. It is great to have you here. STATEMENT OF RUSSELL B. LAINE, SECOND VICE PRESIDENT, INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF CHIEFS OF POLICE, ALGONQUIN, ILLINOIS Chief Laine. Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, and good morning, Senator Kohl. My name is Russell Laine, and I serve as the Chief of Police in Algonquin, Illinois. For those of you unfamiliar with the area, Algonquin is a community of approximately 33,000 located about 40 miles northwest of Chicago. I am here today as the Vice President of the International Association of Chiefs of Police representing over 20,000 law enforcement executives throughout the world. I am pleased to be here to discuss the challenges currently confronting the U.S. law enforcement community and our need for an increased level of support from the Federal Government. In the United States, there are more than 18,000 law enforcement agencies and well over 700,000 officers who patrol our State highways and the streets of our communities each and every day. During the past 15 years, these officers, and the law enforcement agencies they serve, have made tremendous strides in reducing the level of crime and violence in our communities. This has been accomplished in part because these officers have an intimate knowledge of their communities and because they have developed close relationships with the citizens they serve. Yet despite the best efforts of our Nation's law enforcement officers, the disturbing truth is that each year in the United States, well over a million of our fellow citizens are victims of violent crime. Unfortunately, in the last 2 years we have seen a steady increase in the rate of violent crime in the United States. According to the Uniform Crime Report, violent crime rose at a rate of 2.5 percent during 2005. To put that in perspective, that is an additional 31,479 victims. Unfortunately, this increase in the crime rate appears to be accelerating. For the first 6 months of 2006, the crime rate rose at a rate of 3.7 percent, when compared to the same timeframe in 2005. If this rate holds for the final 6 months-- and I am sorry to say that I believe it will--it will mean that an additional 47,000 Americans will find themselves as victims. While there are many different theories as to why violent crime is increasing in these communities, after years of often double-digit declines, there is one fact that we all can agree on: no one is immune from crime. What were once considered ``urban'' problems--drug addiction, drug distribution, violent crime, gangs, and poverty--have migrated to suburban and even rural communities. Gangs, guns and drugs are everywhere. In many ways, my hometown of Algonquin typifies the problems that are plaguing many American communities. Traditionally, the Algonquin Police Department has not had to deal with the same level of crime and violence that has confronted larger communities and cities. For example, nearly 22 years ago when I first arrived in Algonquin, the pressing issues facing the department were dealing with curfew violations, traffic issues, parking issues, and stray cows and horses that wandered onto main thoroughfare. Today, that thoroughfare is an eight-lane highway, and the Algonquin Police Department is dealing with more dangerous criminals who are committing increasingly violent crimes. For example, Algonquin just experienced a rather infamous first in the history of our community: our first drive-by shooting. In years past gang activity within Algonquin could be accurately described as local youth wannabes who thought they were acting cool and seeking an identity for themselves, and sometimes we had the random contacts with hard-core gang members from other towns who were merely passing through Algonquin going from one community to another. Today there is an active gang presence within our community, and the attendant violence is increasing both in frequency and intensity. I think it is safe to say that the days of worrying about stray cows are over. And it is not just gang-related and other violent crimes that are on the increase. We are witnessing a rise in property crimes and, like many communities around the country, a new wave of financial and identity crimes. Another example of this chilling trend in the Midwest is a new drug called ``cheez,'' a mix of black heroin and Tylenol. It is mostly sold to minors and is becoming available in the high schools. As you can imagine, responding to and investigating all of these crimes is labor intensive and a time-consuming process. Unfortunately, our ability to do this is becoming increasingly strained. To be blunt, our resources are stretched to the limit. As a result, we have not been able to add the additional officers that would allow us to combat these criminals aggressively. We have not been able to take advantage of necessary training that would leave our officers better prepared to confront the new breed of criminals operating in our community. And we have not been able to acquire the sophisticated technology to help us in our crime fighting and which is available to the bad guys. It is telling that this increase in violent crime, drug sales, and gang activity in America corresponds directly to the substantial decline in funding for State, tribal, and local law enforcement from the Federal Government assistance programs. I will not use my time here this morning to enter into a prolonged discussion of the current budget situation, but I would ask that I be able to submit a copy of the IACP's Budget Analysis for the record. Chairman Biden. Without objection, it will be placed in the record. Chief Laine. Thank you. I do believe it is important to note that when compared to the fiscal year 2002 funding level of $3.8 billion, the administration's fiscal year 2008 proposal represents a reduction of more than $3.2 billion, or 85 percent, and, unfortunately, no program has been hit harder over the last several years than the COPS program. These cuts are particularly troubling because the IACP believes that the COPS program played an integral role in our ability to reduce crime rates in the past. By providing law enforcement agencies with the necessary resources, training, and assistance, the COPS program has become an invaluable ally to State, tribal, and local law enforcement agencies. It is this fact that makes the current situation completely unacceptable, not only to the Nation's entire law enforcement community, but also to the citizens we are sworn to protect from both crime and terrorism. It is an undisputed reality: State, tribal, and local law enforcement agencies are on the front line of effective terrorism prevention. If you recall earlier, it was brought up that--the question was whether terrorism affects violent crime on the street. I would suggest that what really happens, it is the work that the men and women in law enforcement do on the street in their communities and the State highways that really affects how effective we are on terrorism. We willingly accept the new responsibilities in combating terrorism, but our ability to continue with traditional policing is our best weapon against terrorism. For this we need your assistance. State, tribal, and local law enforcement are doing all that we can to protect our communities from increasing crime rates and the specter of terrorism, but we cannot do it alone. We need the full support and assistance of the Federal Government. That is why programs like the COPS program and the Byrne-JAG program have been so successful and so popular in the state and local law enforcement community. And that is why it is so essential for these programs to be fully funded in fiscal year 2008 and the years that follow. Unfortunately, as the IACP Budget Analysis makes clear, the reductions these critical programs have suffered in recent years and the cuts contained in the proposed fiscal year 2008 budget have the potential certainty to cripple the capabilities of law enforcement agencies nationwide and force many departments to take officers off the streets, eliminate the promise of vital communications between agencies during a major public safety emergency or natural disaster--all leading to more crime and more violence in our hometowns and, ultimately, less security for our homeland. I want to thank you for the opportunity to present our comments today, and I also appreciate your leadership in our efforts. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Chief Laine appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Biden. Thanks, Chief. Professor, great to have you as the clean-up hitter here, seriously. STATEMENT OF JAMES ALAN FOX, THE LIPMAN FAMILY PROFESSOR OF CRIMINAL JUSTICE, NORTHEASTERN UNIVERSITY, BOSTON, MASSACHUSETTS Mr. Fox. Thank you very much. I am pleased to be here today alongside these law enforcement representatives from communities around the country. Now, I do not work the streets like these brave men. I live and work in the city of Boston, though. I do actually patrol the halls of the campus, a 31-year veteran of the lecture halls. I live and work in Boston, and Boston, of course, is a city that has grappled with a disturbing increase in gun violence, especially related to youth and gang activity, as Officer Nee has described. You know, they say that misery loves company. Well, for whatever consolation it is--and I am not sure it is any consolation--Boston has lots of miserable company, based on the crime statistics that we have for 2005 and the preliminaries for 2006 and some other reports, such as the PERF report. Just about a year ago, I was here to testify for the Democratic Policy Committee of the House about specifically the issue of the cuts in the COPS program and Byrne program, and what is interesting is if you look at the decline in police resources, it has not been across the board. Since 2000, the number of police officers per capita in cities, large cities, the 58 cities, the largest American cities, has been a 10- percent decline. The rest of the Nation, there has been no change at all. So it is the cities that have seen this big downturn. And, of course, it is the cities where we are seeing the big increases in gangs, guns, and violence and homicides. Now, you also, Mr. Chairman, pointed out that it is not only the decline in resources that we are robbing Peter to pay for Paul, to use your phrase. I think it is more--not just robbing. We are robbing, raping, and murdering Peter to pay for Paul, the shift in resources from hometown security to homeland security. And I think to understand why this has happened, you have to consider who is at risk for these different types of criminal, terrorism versus street violence. The people most at risk for terrorism, of course, are the wealthy, the powerful, those who commute on the airlines, those who work in our financial hubs. The people who are most at risk for ordinary street violence are poor. They live in certain sections of D.C. and Baltimore and Newark. And when you really look at the numbers, you know, it is tragic, the thousands of deaths that occurred on 9/11. But many more people are gunned down every year in America in ordinary street violence than what happened in 9/11. And I do not want to weigh one death against another, but again, the people who are at risk for the kinds of tragedy we see every year are poor and powerless, and that is where we are seeing the problem. What is particularly disconcerting--I do not want to get too political about this, but I know that President Bush was discussed earlier and the fact that he was making cuts. It was so disingenuous. He was running for re-election, standing shoulder to shoulder with New York's finest at the same time cutting the Federal budgets for law enforcement that was supporting New York City. The other thing about it is I know people want tax cuts. You mentioned tax cuts. A few hundred extra dollars in your pocket is not very much consolation if you are staring down the wrong end of a gun. The thing about all these cuts is we may wake up someday and decide, gee, you know, maybe we should not have cut all that money, all the COPS money, it was so successful, we made a mistake. Well, you cannot just flip the switch and return the staffing in quick form. It takes time to recruit. It takes time to train. It takes time to provide those new recruits with experience. So it is unfortunate that we did this, and we are going to have to get back to the--turn the clock back. Now, I am here not so much to talk about policing, because certainly we have heard that. Smart crime fighting involves a balanced between enforcement, from community policing to identifying illegal gun markets; treatment, from drug rehab on demand to prisoner re-entry services; as well as crime prevention, from family support programs to summer jobs for high-risk youth. Regrettably, the prevention approach has at times been disparaged as a waste of money, it is worthless, it is soft on crime. Yet this cynical perspective reflects gross misunderstanding of the process and goals of prevention and a selective examination of the evaluation outcomes. Simply put, prevention programs can work; good prevention programs that are well implemented and well funded do work. Too often, prevention initiatives are implemented on a shoestring, a very short shoestring, with a brief window of opportunity to show results. It is a recipe for failure. Now, I am going to talk about five principles of crime prevention and violence prevention that are really critical to this investment. First of all, no program is successful all the time and for all individuals. No matter what the initiative, there will be failures. Rather than focusing on the failures, as the media likes to do--those ``bad news bearers,'' I call them--the goal should be a reasonable reduction in offending rates. In light of the enormous social and administrative costs and human tolls and suffering associated with each criminal act, even modest gains are worthwhile. Secondy, prevention should have an emphasis on the prefix-- on the prefix ``pre'' as in prevention. The greatest opportunity for positive impact comes with a focus on children--those who are young and impressionable and will be impressed with what a teacher, a preacher, or some other authority figure has to say. Youngsters, as we know, are often drawn to gang activity. It is actually for positive reasons. They are drawn to gangs because of the camaraderie, the respect, the status, the excitement, the protection. Our challenge is to find other ways, alternative means that youngsters could derive the same kinds of need fulfillment in programs that foster positive development. Third, patience is much more than a virtue. It is an essential requirement. Prevention is not a short-term strategy. Unfortunately, many prevention programs are given short windows in which to show progress, and they are often terminated before the final results are in. Fourth, prevention should take a multifaceted approach. There are many points of intervention for successful crime prevention. I do support the gang abatement program, but we should also look for promising programs for young children. Several proven and promising strategies are directed at at-- risk youth, at families with young children. Rather than assail young mothers who are unable to deal with their children, we need to assist them in trying to raise healthy children. In addition, we have school-based initiatives that enhance well- being of large numbers of children. Behavioral skills training at the elementary school level, anti-bullying curricula at the middle school level. We know about the connection between bullying and later offending. Peer mediation and after-school programs targeted at the prime time for juvenile crime. All these things have payoff far greater than the investment. Fifth, and finally, prevention is significantly cost-- effective. Virtually all assessments of crime prevention confirm the old adage that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of prison time. It is, however, a political reality that sound investments in prevention take years to reap the benefits. It takes bold leaders like you to earmark funds today for tomorrow's success, maybe 4, 8, 10 years down the road, when perhaps your successor will reap the benefits and derive pleasure. So, to conclude here, the recent upturn in youth violence was anticipated years ago. As you know, I have been here several times to talk about demographics and other factors, and even while the rates of crime were dropping in the 1990s, criminologists like myself warned about the potential for another wave of youth and gang violence. This not-so-perfect storm combining the growth in the number of at-risk kids and cuts in social and educational programs, we were so complacent, we cut the anti-gang programs because we did not think gangs were a problem anymore. And like your grass analogy, it comes right back. The encouraging news, though, is that the crime problem is not out of control, at least by contrast to the early 1990s when the Nation's murder rate was twice what it is today. It is not surprising that a small bounce-back will happen, but let this small upturn serve as a thunderous wake-up call that crime prevention, police funding, and dealing with illegal guns need to be priorities once again. At this juncture, we can look toward immediate solutions like the gang abatement program and easy access to illegal firearms--approaches that depend heavily on police personnel, intelligence, and deployment. But at the same time, we must maintain a long-range view toward the future. The choice is ours: Either pay for the programs now or pray for the victims later. Thank you. [The prepared statement of Mr. Fox appears as a submission for the record.] Chairman Biden. Thank you very much. I am going to yield to my colleague, Senator Kohl. Senator Kohl. Thank you so much, Senator Biden, and, gentlemen, it is good to have you here today. Am I hearing from all of you that the most important thing we need to do is to increase funding for the programs that we all know or feel work well? Is that the major thing that we are hearing here this morning, that it is the lack of funding that is causing the upsurge in crime in our communities, lack of Federal funding? Mr. Fox. It is juvenile justice funding, the OJJDP, lack of COPS funding. It is basically the idea that we thought we had solved the crime problem. You know, crime rates went down for 8 straight years, and we said, Hey, we do not need to spend money on crime fighting anymore, let's pay attention to other really important things like who is going to win ``American Idol'' or something. But we really got complacent. We took our focus off the crime issue. You do not solve the crime problem. You do not solve the gang issue. You only control them. And so long as you are dealing with it, you are seeing success, and we had success and we said, oh, let's move the money elsewhere. You know, the one thing about youth is that we have a new group of teenagers every 5 years. You know, we did a great job in the 1990s in Boston and elsewhere in investing in those kids and making sure that they were not as violent as their predecessors, that they saw alternatives to joining gangs. But now we have a new group of kids, and they are too young--they do not know what it was like in 1990 when joining a gang could mean an early grave. They were like 2 years old. And so we cut back on the anti-gang initiatives in Boston and elsewhere, and lo and behold, that is where they are going again. So you have to keep on working at it, and because we are seeing success, we should redouble our efforts, not cut them. Senator Kohl. Is the prevalence of guns on the street a major, major issue here? Does anybody want to say anything beyond what is commonly said about guns? Is the prevalence of guns--do we need stronger gun laws? Do we need just stronger enforcement? Mayor Palmer. You know, I think we need stronger enforcement. There is no doubt about that. We need to enforce the laws that are already on the books. But we also need to aggressively go after straw purchases. In New Jersey, in my city, Trenton, New Jersey has very strict gun laws, but 5 minutes from Trenton across the Delaware Bridge and into Pennsylvania, their laws are much more, in my estimation, lenient, where an individual can buy hundreds of guns and then sell them illegally, you know, to gang bangers in the cities. So I think that we have to close the gun show loophole. We have to go after straw purchases. And we have to make sure that people that commit crimes with guns, that they go to jail and not be out. One of the things that was just remarkable to me, unbelievable to me, was just about 2 months ago we had a press conference because the police finally arrested a person who was allegedly involved in two homicides, gang-- related homicides. This individual was out on bail--and this is the court system, too. But this individual was out on bail, committed two murders, and he was out on bail after having shot a cop three times. How could this guy be out on bail? So there is a whole disparity there as well, but certainly illegal guns are a focus. Mayor Bloomberg and Mayor Menino and other mayors are working with mayors against illegal guns, fighting the good fight. But we need to look at, you know, the Tiahrt amendment and those kinds of things as well, and go after these straw purchasers and make committing crimes with a gun as serious if it is happening in a poor neighborhood as it would be in an affluent one. Senator Kohl. Before I ask you, Mr. Fox, are you saying, Mayor, that the issue of guns, who has them, how they get them, whether it is legal or illegal, and then what we do with people once they are convicted of gun crimes in terms of incarceration, is among other things central to this whole discussion we are having here today? Mayor Palmer. Yes, absolutely. I had the experience of going with Mayor Bloomberg, Mayor Street from Philadelphia, and some Philadelphia councilmen to Harrisburg last September to talk about an idea of one gun a month. I met with Democrat and Republican State Senators. They almost laughed us out of the room and said, no, that is not going to happen, you are wasting our time if you are talking about one gun a month. And if you are married, that is like two guns a month, 24 in a year. And they said, no, I just bought three guns this weekend. And so they did not even want to put an amendment so that if you lost your gun or it was stolen to report it. They said no, we are not even reporting lost or stolen guns. You know what happens. People buy guns legally, sell them illegally, and if you go to trace it back, they say, well, now that this gun was involved in a crime, we found it was yours, oh, I lost that gun, or it was stolen. Well, if you report it when it happens, then that is a way of tracing it, too. Senator Kohl. Mr. Fox? Mr. Fox. I can put some of the onus here on the Congress and some of your colleagues. You know, in the last couple of years, it has been kind of disturbing to see some of the change in terms of the posture of the Congress toward guns. And I do not blame the NRA. You know, they have a right to have their opinion. But what I am concerned about is how so many Members of Congress seem to be willing to pass things like the immunity law, the gun immunity law that--you know, when they talked about tort reform 4 years ago in a campaign, who knew that is what they meant, that they would just protect the gun industry. I understand the logic of the debate on the other side, but so many of the advances that have been made in terms of guns in this country have been with the threat of lawsuits. Second, the whole area of gun tracing and efforts in Congress to trim and curtail the extent to which police departments can use gun tracing efforts, we know--you know, I have done a lot of work at the Brady Center, and we know that these rogue dealers, that 1 percent of the gun dealers are responsible for over half the guns used in crimes every year. We need to be able to identify these people. Boy, if there was a liquor store where all the 14-year-- olds are going to buy beer, we would do something about that liquor store. And I do agree wholeheartedly with the idea about prosecuting gun crimes, but let's also keep in mind that so much of the increase we have seen is in kids carrying guns. They do not really care, many of them, about what the criminal justice system might do. They are carrying guns because they feel they need it to survive. You know, the criminal justice system, the Federal Government can just take a number and wait in this line with all the other people out to get them. So they feel they need the gun to live, and whatever prosecution there is--they may not even be aware of what the Federal Government is doing--is not a priority. So we need to find out the process by which the guns are getting into this illegal market, and investigate it and deal with it, and deal with the rogue dealers. Senator Kohl. Anybody disagree with that or want to offer additional comments on this issue, gun availability? Crimes committed with guns and people not being sufficiently long incarcerated? Sheriff Kamatchus. If I might just make a comment on it, I own well over 100 firearms, and I have been a competitive shooter for a long time. And I am a firm believer in the fact that the old adage that guns do not commit crimes, people do. But I also am a firm believer in what was said earlier in the fact that you have to have strong, just--you know, we have to commit these individuals to a facility so they cannot get back out so quickly. We have to make sure that the individuals who perpetrate the crimes are handled harshly so that if there is any potential for a deterrent factor in that, it is real, it is not talked about. Recently, in a neighboring county to mine, we had some young teens at a party, and one young gentleman simply walked up--and this case is still active, so I do not want to get into it too much, but walked up and pulled a gun and shot another kid right in the head, in rural Iowa. Dropped him right there. And I know the family that had the loss personally. The bottom line on it is that we need to do something with those type of people so that those young individuals who are coming up that was mentioned earlier who do not have an understanding of what it is like to be involved with gangs or such, that those individuals have a better understanding of what can happen to them if they perpetrate those crimes. So, you know, I just want to make sure that we do not end up in a situation here where we evolve it into the banning of weapons or something that is so restricting that we do not have firearms anymore. That is just what I want to make sure is said. Senator Kohl. Oh, yes. No question about it. Your comment is--Mr. Nee? Mr. Nee. You know, it is the unlawful guns that we have the problem with up there in New England, firsthand knowledge. I can give you by way of example, the other night, Thursday night--I am certain Professor Fox could add. Within a ten- square-block radius, within an hour and a half of time, we seized nine illegal guns on the street. Three were used in acts of violence; the rest were seized through aggressive police tactics that night because of the many shootings that we had that night. But I firmly believe being, again, a sportsman, somebody who enjoys that way of life, being around firearms for the past 29 years of my life, I am not afraid of them. I believe that there has to be an understanding, and they do have a lawful purpose. But it is uniformity in gun laws in the United States that has to be brought in line. You can go to a neighboring State, and I see some of these places popping up now where they are teaching kids to shoot AKs. They have got to be 21 years old, and they are up there taking tactical training and courses where they are not licensed, there is no understanding, and then they get into these underground railroads with these firearms that are coming up out of some of the communities in other parts of the country. And we are lacking right now the ability to track and trace these underground networks of guns that are coming out of other parts of the country. You know, I watched the gun purchase program that we used up in Boston several years ago. No one was turning in the guns we were looking for. They were turning in black powder muskets and things, you know, things that were prehistoric, for sake of a better term. But, you know, these guns are still being used, and just to a slight degree I would disagree with the Professor in this sense, that these guns are not used just to keep kids alive. A lot of these guns are being used in aggressive acts of violence. What is extremely disturbing to me is up in Boston proper--and I am hearing it from a lot of the major cities--a lot of these kids today have no fear of taking up arms against an armed police department, an armed officer. And if the country--if people do not get that, if they are willing to take up arms against a uniformed officer, trained, they have no problem taking it up against the rest of society. That message has got to be sent with firm, swift convictions, incarcerations. The message has got to be clear. We can blame the guns all we want. It is the kids behind the guns that are using these things. Again, like you said, nine guns within 90 minutes of a ten-square-block radius part of the city. It was very disturbing to the policemen involved, and we are finding it more and more common that these young gang members are taking firearms up against our police officers, our colleagues around the country. And it is very disturbing to me. Mayor Palmer. And I would say you need a comprehensive approach. The U.S. Conference of Mayors understands that. You need job training, re-entry is very important, drug treatment, housing when people get out, and all those things. But you have to make--police will tell you. What is really disturbing is before, if you were getting robbed, you would say, OK, stick 'em up; here, here is everything, I am not arguing with you, here is everything I have. And they shoot you anyway. Why? That is a sociological thing, because they are mad-- Mr. Fox. Eliminate the witness. Mayor Palmer. Well, no, they will shoot you in the butt. They will not kill you, maybe, but they are mad. They are just mad because you have it and I do not and I had to get it. So we need to do more in the prevention, education, and those things, but we also have to send a strong message, and I am--look, I never thought in my days I would be so conservative on this issue, as tough as I am on crime, but I know what it is doing to innocent people. But you have got to make sure these juveniles that shoot somebody, you got to lock them up for a long time so they get it out of their system, and when they are in jail, then you give them programs and try to help turn them around, because these kids have no fear using guns. They see it on videos. They see it on TV, MTV, and they think it is cool. To get bones, being in the gang, they make you shoot somebody. That has got to stop. You have to make these kids afraid if they get caught shooting a gun or having a gun that they are going to jail. Then we have to rehabilitate them when we fail before that. But it is just like why do teenage--no, I might get a little over my bounds here, but it is like why did teenage pregnancy at one point go down? It was because teenagers were starting to use condoms. Why were they using condoms? Because they were scared to death at the time of getting AIDS, because they thought, if I get AIDS, I am going to die. So they got scared and they started wearing condoms. Now, I know that is an overgeneralization, but you have got to make kids scared, teenagers, juveniles, scared to be in a gang, scared to use a gun because of the consequences. How we do that is up for debate, but we have got to scare them straight, in my opinion. Mr. Fox. You know, it is interesting--you mentioned the media. What is interesting is that so many kids will hold guns, because they see it on TV, it looked really cool, like sideways or upside down. Actually, you know, do not tell them this, but it is actually not good in terms of their accuracy. The gun can actually jam. But it looks good because that is what they see on TV. But I wanted to say something. You know, I used to write for a rather conservative newspaper, the Herald. I used to write a column, and anytime you say anything about guns, you get deluged with, you know, pro-NRA people. I did not know they had so much time on their hands. They are always cleaning their weapons. But they certainly have time to write me. I think it is very possible to be in favor of things like gun tracing and against the immunity law, yet respect the right of decent, law-abiding people that own guns. No one--I will not say no one, but so many people who are gun control freaks, I guess, we have no problem with people owning guns, so long as they use them right. And we are only looking to try to break down and interdict the illegal gun markets, and trying to do that is not--you know, the slippery slope and all that kind of garbage, there is no slippery slope. We are only interested in finding guns that are illegal, how do people purchase them. No one here is interested in trying to deprive law-abiding citizens of their guns. And it is not a panacea. The one gun a month, let's keep in mind that Virginia has one gun a month, and that is why Mr. Cho down at Virginia Tech had to wait a month to buy his second weapon. And I know in Massachusetts they talk about one gun a month. It is a small piece of the puzzle. We need, I agree, something comprehensive, something national, because every State is as weak as the weakest link in the chain. But we can indeed focus on dealing with illegal guns and respect the rights of gun owners. I wish we were all on the same page here. We should be. But for some reason, everyone wants to get painted into corners, like you are either against them or you are for them. Chairman Biden. Thank you very much, Senator. I would like to pursue--and I know your time is valuable, but if you would give me a few more minutes, I would like to pursue a couple things here, more in sort of a generic sense here, before we get into specifics. I am making this statement to invite response, and, look, as my colleagues from Delaware can tell you, I always say I am a United States Senator, I am used to not being taken seriously, so I really do want your critical comments, if you disagree with the assertions, the broad assertions I am going to make. For 17 years, I chaired this Committee and/or was the Ranking Member, and it took a long time to get a consensus between then the Chairman or Ranking Member, Strom Thurmond, and Joe Biden, which was an interesting combination at that time. And all through the 1970s and all through the 1980s, we had this constant, ongoing fight about, on the one side, what we have to do is look at the source of crime and deal with that because there is not much you can do in dealing with crime once it occurs; and the other side was hang 'em high, make the penalties tougher, put people in jail longer. And it took a long time to get what I thought was a consensus that from police to social workers agreed on. And that was there are three pieces of this puzzle. One piece, which is very important and could have real payback and was cheaper if you invested in it, was prevention. The other point was the apprehension of the bad guys. And the third point was incarceration of the bad guys. And so the original crime bill, which caused me so much trouble and took literally 6 years to get done, it is the first time we combined all three of those things. And that bill said three things--and it equally distributed the money. It was a $30 billion bill--and, by the way, this is not a pride of authorship thing. This is trying to get a sense of what seems to me to be happening, and I would like you to comment on it. And so we reached this sort of grand compromise, something we never really tried before: one, the Federal Government had a significant responsibility to deal with local crime, the reason being, Mr. Mayor, you can do everything right, but if we do not control cocaine coming out of Afghanistan, if we do not control cocaine coming out of Colombia, heroin coming out of Colombia and parts of Venezuela, coming through the port in Trenton, you cannot do much. There is nothing you can do about our porous borders and all the drugs that are coming through those borders, no matter how good you are. And so it seems to me there is a Federal responsibility. We went through this fight. The Federal Government has a responsibility, even though the ultimate local responsibility is the crime committed on the street, that is literally local. But all the factors that go into why that crime was committed, a lot of it had to do with the failure of Federal policy. So we fought through this whole thing about whether or not the Federal Government has a role in dealing with local crime. And the second thing we fought through was how you get my conservative friends, who wanted tougher enforcement, and my liberal friends, who wanted more prevention, whether it is drug rehab or whether it is after-school programs or a whole range of other things, how you get them on the same page. And it really was a tortuous undertaking. It took 6 years to get it done. And the third part--the part that nobody really liked--was providing more money to States to build prisons, because as the great Senator from the State of Maryland, Senator Mathias, pointed out when I authored the bill that became the Sentencing Commission, he said it is going to cause more people to go to jail, and he was right. It is. And we can argue whether the Sentencing Commission--but it had an effect. It had an effect at least while you are in jail. The only thing we do know is if you are in jail behind bars, you are not committing crime in the streets. You may be committing crimes in jail, but you are not committing them on the street. And so the one thing I was not able to get done in that bill was to deal with what Senator Specter and I are trying to do now, and that is, invest money in reintegrating people back into society when they get out of the prison--housing, jobs, drug programs, because all of you know drugs are rampant in prisons right now. If you are not addicted, you might get addicted in prison. And so we had this thing, and the formula seemed to work. We seemed to have arrived at a consensus, Democrats and Republicans, that there was some Federal responsibility. You needed to do all three pieces in order to impact on crime. And it was not just cops, more cops. It related to prevention, and it related to incarceration. Now, at the Federal level, we did the things you are looking for, Mr. Mayor. Use a gun in the commission of a crime, you go to jail. Bingo, you go to jail. You do not pass go. You go to jail. Most of your States do not do that. I say ``your States.'' Most States do not do that. We also suggested that there is no probation or parole in the sense that you look out there, and we did not know what caused recidivism, we did not know what the measure was, so I admit, I am responsible for it, and I sometimes wonder whether I was right, Professor, saying same time for the same crime, you know, and you go to jail. Or if it is not jail, if that is not the sentence, whatever that crime is. Now, here is my dilemma, what I really do not understand. I am wondering whether--I would ask from the police enforcement officer's standpoint and from an elected official's standpoint and then from a criminologist's standpoint. What happened? What happened that would lead anyone to believe that that formula was not a legitimate formula? When that formula, the combination of all those things was employed, when money was put behind it, States took advantage of it, crime actually went down at the very time those in the crime-committing years were going up. So what happened? What kind of discussions took place in the squad room, you know, over the last 10 years to say we have got this under control? What happened with--you know, did mayors and elected officials say this is not our biggest problem now? Did criminologists conclude this formula is not the proper formula? That is what I would like to talk about, because it seems almost like--you know, they talk about the Know--Nothing Party in the 1880s. It is kind of like we have become anti- intellectual here, that, you know, the facts seem so obvious to me, and yet there is this consensus among many people, including my colleagues in Congress. You know, look, that formula does not work anymore, or that formula is not necessary. What is going on? Ted, did you want to make a comment? Sheriff Kamatchus. Well, it baffles me as much as anyone in this room and anyone who is listening or watching this today. Being a sheriff, I am a peace officer, but I am also a 20-year veteran of the political field. I have been elected five times. So I have to also balance that whole issue of the utilization of the taxpayers' money probably a little bit more because in 4 years I may not have a job. But I have to tell you something. I am baffled as much as you are, and the reason I am baffled as much as you are is because look at who is at this table, and then think back into the 1990s and who was at the table. And what happened then was the proverbial squeaky wheel got the grease, and maybe we as organizations, maybe you as--I will call you the father of this COPS program, and more. Maybe we got complacent and quit squeaking. Maybe we got quiet because--and that allowed the people, for whatever reason who are opposed to it, to turn around and beat the drum about the success. And they became louder. And somewhere along the line, they began robbing from Peter to pay Paul, as you said. It does not make sense to me either. You know, the COPS program was not perfect. It had its flaws. But, you know, a neat thing about the program was it was self--healing. When we could not hire people quick enough and train them quick enough, we shifted funds. And when we arrested a bunch of people and we could not prosecute them quick enough, we shifted funds. And then all of a sudden when we needed technology, we shifted funds. And that is the positive thing about the COPS program. And I think what happened was it became so easy to shift those funds and so successful that it became more the norm, the standard, if you will. I do not know what the answer is other than to say that I hope your colleagues--I hope that they look at this panel and they look at what is going to happen in the months ahead and they hear us. And I look back to the same argument that happened in the 1990s. And if there are some experts out there who walk the street like we do who are opposed to this and who have got a better answer than we do, I would like to have them come up. I have traveled across this country. I have been to 38 States in the last 11 months. I have driven a car from State to State. I have talked to people in small rural Kansas, all the way to Orlando, Florida, and L.A. and all over. And I do not see anybody against this, the funding. So to answer your question, I do not know. It has to be the fact that we have not beat the drum loud enough, and maybe we should take the blame for that. But I am here to tell you, you can see today, and you are going to hear more of it, we are going to beat the drum, sir, and we are going to stand with you on that issue. Chairman Biden. Thank you. Mr. Mayor? Mayor Palmer. I will say something that is obvious to everyone. Before I was a mayor, I was African-American. Or in my day I was a Negro, I guess, in the 1950s. And after I am mayor, I will be an African-American male as well. And it is very troubling as an African-American--take away being an elected official, a mayor--to see so many African-Americans and Latinos and poor people incarcerated. It breaks my heart that we would have to choose between prison and school. And I think, Senator, the question you ask is a good one, but it goes beyond your Committee. It talks to what we are dealing with in terms of race and racism and poverty. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, who is the mayor of the great city of Los Angeles, and Kwame Kilpatrick of Detroit and Francis Slay of St. Louis and others are on a task force about poverty within the United States Conference of Mayors. Poverty is at the root of all of these things, and poverty has to be addressed--how we look at poverty, how we get people out of the cycle of poverty, how we make sure that we have health benefits and those kinds of things, how we look at early childhood education, how we look at after--school programs, how we look at growing our economy in a green way that will produce more jobs. I mean, it goes beyond this Committee. And I think what has happened is the squeaky wheel does get the grease, but we have to recognize that in order to have strong cities, strong families, and a strong America, you are going to have to deal with the issue of race, racism, poverty, and getting our economy back on the right track, and that we are all our brother's keepers. You reap what you sow. You cannot have people living in abject poverty concentrated in cities and other areas, poor education systems without the resources needed to get the best teachers in the most challenging situations, you cannot continue to have drugs and those things happen, you cannot continue to have single parents and that whole moral issue, you cannot abandon kids and have people live in poverty and have drugs and illegal guns and expect that these individuals are going to grow up and be good. They are not. It requires a total comprehensive response, a total comprehensive commitment on behalf of all Americans--liberal, conservative, Democrat, Republican, Independent--in order to address it. So what we are talking about here is just the tip of the iceberg, but in order to do what really needs to be done, we need, in my opinion, and in the opinion of the mayors across this country, we need a whole comprehensive not only plan, but we need a new vision and a real commitment for America that says we are our brothers' and sisters' keeper. Chairman Biden. You know, Mr. Mayor--and before I go to you, Professor, and I am anxious to hear what you have to say, but this is on point. The irony was, in all those hearings--and literally probably a thousand hours of hearings I held in the 1980s and early 1990s--one of the things that we did in this Committee and through the crime bill was actually try, to be very blunt about it, to embarrass the rest of society into dealing, through the crime bill, with things that really were not within the purview of the crime bill. For example, in the prevention program, I put in money for after-school programs. That should not be coming from the criminal side. That should be coming from the education side of the equation. We put in $20 million, which was a small amount then, for Boys and Girls Clubs, because we found that studies done on public housing projects that had them and did not have them, there was a 33 percent less crime rate, arrest rate, of folks, the same economic circumstance, same inner-city circumstance, where there was a Boys and Girls Club in the basement of a public housing project. So what we tried to do--and you have hit on what I was trying to get at. What we tried to do through the crime bill, as a weak read and weak vehicle, was to get a change in attitude about the overall point you are making. How can we have in this society a circumstance where the one thing every cop here will tell you, you see a direct correlation between truancy and juvenile delinquency. As the professor pointed out, I remember when I wrote a report 20 years ago saying everybody thinks most violent crime occurs in the deep of the night. It occurs between the time the kids get out of school and before their parents come home, including rape, including other violent crimes. And so what we tried to do was put in initiatives that were designed to deal with--for example, we know if you start kid in a troubled neighborhood in school at age 3, they have got something like--do not hold me to the exact number; I do not have it in front of me--something like a 70-percent better chance of finishing school than if you start them at age 6 in school. I mean, these are things we know. But I just want to make it clear to you all, I do not see adding cops as the answer. I see adding cops as the bridge here, as the dam, because the irony is--and I want to say this with the police officers here--they will be the first one to tell you, give them a chance to have full-blown treatment programs in their communities. Give them a chance to have full- blown after-school programs. Give them a chance to have full- blown early education programs. Give them a chance to have full-blown summer work programs versus adding 10 percent more cops. They will take the former, not the latter. Mr. Fox. In fact, the organization Fight Crime, Invest in Kids that you know of--they are centered here in D.C. It is an organization of crime victims and police officers and prosecutors. It has polled police officers and police personnel and supervisors and chiefs. Overwhelmingly, the belief is that the best way to solve the crime problem is not with more cops but prevention. May I respond to your question? Chairman Biden. Yes, sure. Professor, you are allowed. Professors are allowed to do that. Fire away. Mr. Fox. It was a great question about what happened to those three parts to the stool in the crime bill. It had a balance, the crime bill, and, by the way I remember even there was money in there for dance programs, because not every kid was looking for midnight basketball. Some kids were looking for dance and music and art. Let me take each of the three. In the prevention area, there was $9 billion of prevention money in the 1993 crime bill, and then what happened is the 1994 takeover of Congress. I do not want to make this too political, but it really is. You know, the Contract With America. ``Prevention'' is now a bad word, a dirty word. I remember, for example, that Vice President Gore was supposed to be coming up to Boston for a conference and give a talk to criminologists about prevention. Canceled right after the election. Cannot talk about prevention. I was on several committees for President Clinton, and I remember his frustration about how although $9 billion was authorized for prevention, what started to happen after 1994 is a lot of that money was moving away from prevention. There was this whole belief that, oh, it is all midnight basketball. Of course, most of it--that was sort of the rallying cry. It was all midnight basketball, and it was silly. Most of it was not midnight basketball, and the basketball was not even at midnight. It was in the after-- school hours. It just got sort of a bad name, and the administration, frankly, did not want to talk about prevention. In fact, I was working with Rahm Emanuel, who was the chief domestic policy adviser, and he said to me, ``If we can push one prevention program, what would it be?'' And that is, in fact, when I talked to Rahm about the after-school program, the fact that 49 percent of juvenile crimes occur between 2 and 8, and that led to the 21st Century Schools Initiative, and you may remember that the President in the State of the Union address in the late 1990s sort of advocated for after-school programs. So you basically could not talk about prevention because there was this belief that prevention is just soft on crime. Policing. Again, political. I know that you had a strong hand in the crime bill. Let's also recall that President Clinton campaigned on this idea of 100,000 cops. And when the new-- Chairman Biden. Let's get it straight. He did not adopt the crime bill until September, and he had a very good idea. He had a good idea. He called me on the phone and said, ``How many cops will your bill buy?'' I said, ``A hundred thousand.'' And he was very smart. He said, ``Why don't you call it the 100,000 COPS program?'' That was the totality of the commitment. Mr. Fox. OK. Chairman Biden. Keep going. Mr. Fox. But he did sort of talk about it, and it would seem that when the new President came in, you distance yourself from one of the pet projects or ideas of the previous administration, and I think that part of it was playing politics with protection and the fact that that was such--that was the last administration, and you throw out the last administration, and you sort of change the equation. Finally, in this whole area about corrections, I remember talking with Adam Walinsky, who you know is heavily behind the Police Corps idea. We were talking about the fact that so many more Americans were going to prison. We had 2 million Americans behind bars, and the idea was that people were not thinking about what is going to happen when these people eventually get out down the road. It was, like, well, we will deal with that bridge when we come to that. That was the bridge to the 21st century. Well, that bridge is here, and it is as firm and fortified as the Ted Williams tunnel in Boston, which, of course, as you may know, is falling apart. What happened is we did not take--we said let's put them in prison, but let's ignore them once they are there. Citizens said, I do not want to spend my tax dollars on education programs for inmates. I cannot afford to send my own kid to college. Why should I be spending money for education for inmates? They did not want to spend money for job training or other skills for inmates. And so we just basically housed them. It is great now that we are deciding that re-entry programs are critical, because they are now all getting out, but the process begins not the day they are released from prison, but the day they go into prison. So I think also, besides having re-entry programs, we have to do something more about rehabilitation programs in prison, which, again, do work, but we are kind of shortsighted there. Chairman Biden. Well, the reason I ask the question is I think there has been a fundamental philosophical change that took place over the last 6 to 8 years, and it did begin in 1994, although it was not successful, and that was that, first of all, this is a State responsibility, not a Federal responsibility, the devolution of government argument, the neoconservative notion to devolve power to local government. The second thing I think that happened is that there is this emphasis on sort of a self-improvement as if somehow kids in the ghetto can pull themselves up by their bootstraps and make it out. And, third, there was this fundamental shift, Mr. Mayor, from any focus on cities and the problem about cities. We just walked away--housing, every other aspect of what you deal with. And so I guess the reason I ask the question is mainly for the record, because I think as we begin to try to rebuild--what I think the public is ready to do. I think the public is ready to go back and look at this comprehensively again. I do not think they are afraid. I think they get it. I think that the election in 2006, having nothing to do with the partisan notion, but every once in a while, the American public closes a chapter on a political philosophy. They closed the chapter. They closed the chapter on the New Deal in 1980. They closed the chapter on compassionate conservatism in 2006. They are waiting for us to construct a new paradigm, as they love to say here in Washington. And so what I would like to do, as a prelude to this question, and you do not have to answer it here, but I have ``redrafted'' a comprehensive crime bill that I would like to get to you all. I know it is a whole lot of work to go through it and read it. You know, I understand I am asking a lot. But I would like you to take a look at it and get your eyes on it and give me an honest assessment of whether or not you think I am barking up the right tree here, number one. Second, I do think there is a change. Whether or not the change would be enough for us to be able to do something in 20 months, I do not know. When I reintroduced the new crime bill to add 50,000 cops, a new COPS bill, we were able to get the money for it in the budget. Both the House and the Senate passed the bill that I introduced, passed the resolution authorizing the Budget Committee to spend money on it. Now we have got to go back and fight it through the Appropriations Committee. But there is a $1.15 billion per year for each of the next 5 years for hiring cops. I want to make it clear for the record, I do not see that as the end. I do not see that--but we have to begin to rebuild this sort of dike. The last point I will raise here is one of the things that has disappointed me the most--and I have to take blame for it-- is I am the guy years ago that crafted the drug czar legislation, the idea of getting one person in charge of all the Federal agencies, cooperating with the States and the cities about the drug problem. One of the reasons for that was to force the Federal Government to look around the corner, to look down the road and anticipate what was likely to come, like we did with ice, what used to be called ice, then meth. And one of the things I somehow think we have missed--and I need your help. I need your help. In particular, I need help from cops. They expect mayors to be enlightened. They expect criminologists to get it right. They expect you guys only to be asking for--I mean, when I say today that cops helped me write the prevention money into the crime bill, people look at me like I am lying. That was a cop idea. That was cops. Your predecessor as President of the Sheriffs, your predecessor as President of NAPO, your predecessor, the predecessor of the Chiefs, FOP. They were the ones who insisted on the money, and that is the only reason it got done, because you all showed up in people's offices wearing your uniforms, and you said we not only want more cops, we want the money for prevention in here. You know, I do not know what--because I do not do this every day like I used to because I am now the guy that does Foreign Relations, foreign policy stuff. It used to be the statistic, Professor, was a drug addict, meaning someone who consumed a controlled substance more than 3 times a week out there, committed on average 154 crimes a year, some of which related to just purchasing the drugs, others related to getting the money to get the drug. When they put him in drug treatment programs and you just kept them there for 6 months, what happened is you found that dropped down to about 22 crimes per year. Even if it was wasted time, it was cheaper than prison. It was cheaper than hiring more cops to figure out how to solve 125 of those crimes a year--if my numbers are correct. I used to know them off the top of my head. But the bottom line here, and somehow the thing that disturbs me the most about this is you guys see what is coming. You guys see what the professor said is that you had these teenagers 15 years ago who got into a system whereby we gave them some help, they ended up not being--or 10 years ago. But now you have got a whole new cadre coming up, and they did not hear of any of this stuff. And so it just disturbs me, and it--I do not know, it disappoints me that somehow we can so quickly forget the basic lessons we learned just 10 years ago. I wish old Ronald Reagan were around because he was the guy that coined, at least in the political context, ``If it ain't broke, don't fix it.'' This thing wasn't broke, but we have got to fix it. And so what I have done here--and I am not going to keep you--I have half a dozen specific questions that I would like to submit to you, and over the next couple weeks, if you get a chance, I would like you to respond to them for the record. But I cannot tell you how much I appreciate the fact that you uniformed officers are talking not just about more cops, and, Mr. Mayor, that you have, along with your fellow mayors, pointed out that--I mean, one of the senior colleagues on this Committee sits right here, Ted Kennedy, who has helped me and been a leader in this area, points out that one of the significant correlations that has occurred now is the increased dropout rates. The increased dropout rates in major cities in America have fueled this crime surge, that the idea we are just going to have more cops and think we are going to do something fundamental about this without dealing with the dropout rate, without figuring out these kids we are just dumping like a bucket on a front-end loader, you know, onto the street is, I think, very, very shortsighted. So hopefully--I do not want to--you have never heard me use the phrase ``war on crime'' or ``war on drugs.'' It is a daily battle every day. There is no such thing as a ``war on crime.'' But there are incremental things we can start to do right now to stem what is the reverse of a trend. The reverse of the trend for 10 years was crime was going down. We had ourselves in a situation where things were getting a little better. And now it is starting to tick back up, and I think that is just like a little bit of--you know, being at a dike where there is a little bit of a leak and a small hole. That hole is going to get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger. And we are going to be right back to the flood we had in 1989 in terms of crime. So I want to submit three things to you all: a copy of the COPS bill that has been authorized, at least in terms of funding in the budget, not done yet but I will need help on it. And I may very well be asking you all to come up in uniforms again. You know, you all have an effect when you show up in uniforms. I mean, you really do. You really do. That is what happened last time, if you remember. You kept marching up here and going into offices, you know, people get the message. Secondly, I would like you to take a look at this comprehensive piece of legislation I have put together, have not introduced yet, and I genuinely am inviting constructive criticism of it and things you think should change. It is working off of a template that I think would work, but it may change. And, third, I am going to, especially with you, Mr. Mayor, if I may, as the President of the Conference of Mayors, lay out some matters that do not relate to the criminal justice system that I believe impact significantly on the criminal justice system, to see if we can get your input, because this time I think there has to be companion legislation introduced as well to re-engage the public in the debate about things we know, if we do, if we spend the money on, they work. And I think it is pretty important we change--my conservative friends love this word--the paradigm. We have got to change the paradigm here. You have got to invest money to save money. You have got to invest money to save money. If we can do something to keep your kids in Trenton in school through grade 12, the cost savings for the expenditure needed to do that is astronomical. It is a factor of 10 or 12. A kid drops out of school in ninth grade, the cost associated with that kid dropping out is gigantic. And so we have got to change the debate, like we did last time. We changed the debate so it was not liberal-- conservative. It was practical, when we put all three of these things together. I think you have got to change the debate. Mr. Mayor, I am going to, with your permission, submit ideas not all of which are original to me by any stretch of the imagination, but ones that I think that maybe we can get a--when we get the mayors and the cops, we get the sheriffs and the county executives, we get the local people sitting down, again, and working out some basically grand compromise here as to how we should be spending what is not a lot of money relative to a several trillion dollar budget, but it is important to do it. Anyway, I cannot thank you all enough. I promised I would have you out by 12 and it is 1 minute after. I have breached my promise. I apologize. But I thank you very much. I know how busy you are, and unless any of you want to make a closing comment, I would--yes, Professor. Mr. Fox. Professors always like to have a closing comment. I am glad that you mentioned that about other things we can do. You know, we have changed the way that we run our schools. We have gotten rid of all the extracurriculars. We do not want to pay the money. Also, we are so focused on test scores, some kids are dropping out because they just cannot--they are not going to make it to graduation, other kids because we have taken away from school all the things that gave them a sense of pride, satisfaction, and maybe even enjoyment of school, the music and drama. We need to put these things back into the curriculum because it will keep kids engaged. And I know that is not crime fighting, but in the long run it is. I will address that in my comments. Chairman Biden. I would ask you--I was just reminded by staff. The statements of Senator Leahy and Senator Feinstein will be entered in the record as if read. They both offer their apologies. They are in other committees. I do not want you to think that lack of participation here is a lack of interest. There is a real interest here. I think there is a resurgence, Mr. Mayor. I think we are finally getting it again. I hope that is what it is. If it is not, we are in deep trouble. We are in deep trouble if it is not. I thank you all. We are adjourned. [Whereupon, at 12:01 p.m., the Committee was adjourned.] [Questions and answers and submissions for the record follow.] [GRAPHIC(S) NOT AVAILABLE IN TIFF FORMAT]