| Expert
credits prevention program with crime reduction
By Timm
Herdt,
therdt@VenturaCountyStar.com
August 6, 2006
SACRAMENTO —
At election time, elected officials like nothing better than to
stand side-by-side with the local sheriff or police chief and
proclaim that they are dependable supporters of public safety.
One time-tested way of ensuring the
police chief's presence is to vote to put a few extra dollars in his
department's budget.
So it was that in the mid-1990s a
state program was created to provide annual grants to local law
enforcement agencies. To avoid any ambiguity about the purpose of
the program, it was called Citizens' Option for Public Safety: COPS.
State lawmakers set aside $100
million a year, and local police departments used the money to hire
patrol officers and buy crime-fighting technology.
In 2000, with the state treasury
flush with revenues from the soaring Silicon Valley, some lawmakers
decided that a good way to complement the assistance to local police
departments was to also create a program to assist counties in
preventing juvenile crime.
The Schiff-Cardenas Crime Prevention
Act of 2000 was born, named for then-Sen. Adam Schiff of Burbank and
then-Assemblyman Tony Cardenas of Los Angeles. It allocated $100
million in grants to local probation departments. The authors also
added a politically clever twist: They joined the program with COPS,
meaning that the program's future would eternally be tied to
dependable political support for law enforcement.
"We put as much money and revenue
into crime prevention as we did in suppression through the COPS
program," said Schiff, a former federal prosecutor and now a member
of Congress.
The prevention program, now called
the Juvenile Justice Crime Prevention Act, has continued ever since,
each year receiving dollar-for-dollar what lawmakers allocate to
local law enforcement assistance. This year, both programs were
boosted to $119 million.
"There's no question in my mind that
the fact that it couldn't be cut without also cutting police
assistance made it possible for it to stay in place," said Jason
Ziedenberg, executive director of the Justice Policy Institute, who
credits the prevention program with helping reduce juvenile crime in
California.
"Beginning in 2000 was the first time
California stepped up in a big way in attacking juvenile crime,"
Schiff said, "and if the numbers took a turn for the better ...
maybe the Legislature should get some credit. After all, the
Legislature gets blamed for a lot of things it doesn't have control
over."
Copyright 2006,
Ventura County Star. All Rights Reserved.
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