Does Anyone Remember The Bill Clinton "COPS" Initiative?

Now, with President Obama heavily pushing for a jobs package to keep teachers, police, and fireman working, it would be a good time to recall President Clinton's initiative called C.O.P.S. (Community Oriented Policing Services) whereby, as part of the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, 100,000 new police officers "were" to be put on the streets to combat crime.

But the problem with C.O.P.S. is that it actually didn't put that promised number of police on America's streets.  Depending on which study you looked at, the number added by the program was somewhere between 50 and 80 thousand.  In many cases, police departments used the money to hire already-budgeted officers or to fill vacancies.  Others used the money to buy computer systems and equipment that would keep more cops in the streets and away from doing desk time and paperwork. Though, often, that freed up time away from the desk didn't even equal the cost of hiring a single full-time police officer.  In some extreme cases, one-man and two-man police departments, in low-crime sleepy towns, were given money to hire a totally unneeded additional officer.  Lastly, the program was a one-year cash program; leaving the community holding the bag for the cost of the police officers they hired a year prior.

C.O.P.S. proved that a top-down, federal program to hire people should always be suspect.  When Obama talks about adding 280,000 teachers to the state payrolls and keeping thousands of police and fireman on the job, one would be wise to cut that optimism by as much as half or more; especially with his lousy track record. Back in 2009, President Obama instituted a mortgage assistance plan (called HARP) that was touted by Obama to help as many as 9 million families.  By last count, only 900,000 benefited from his plan.  His stimulus plan was supposed keep unemployment under 8%; yet, it shortly zoomed to over 10% and has been above 8% ever since.  So, now, we are all supposed believe his latest fairy tale.  You know, the one about jobs.