Cops cut / Homeland security should begin at home

[RamboLiberal]

http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06240/716843-192.stm

If crime is up, why is federal funding for local law enforcement down?

What police departments hear from Washington are vague claims that the federal programs that once offered billions of dollars to cities, townships and counties to hire officers and equip them are now deemed to be "ineffective" or have "outlived their usefulness."

Such excuses are really just bureaucratese for, "We've found other priorities for the money." In the past couple of years, the White House has steered federal money increasingly toward programs in the broadly defined "homeland security" arena at the expense of local police.

For example, the administration asked Congress for an 8 percent decrease in discretionary spending for the Justice Department for fiscal 2007, cutting grants to state and local law enforcement programs by $1.1 billion. One of those programs is called COPS, for Community Oriented Policing Services, and it was the vehicle through which communities added officers to their forces in large numbers beginning in the mid-1990s.

[The Straight Story]

1. I posted an article a few days ago

About rural school funding - the program was to be continued by bushboy, and was to partly funded by selling off areas of forests to companies because those areas were too remote and not enough money to manage them anyway.

What a crock of shit.

[rubberducky]

2. Just the thought of 2 more years.........

of this administration makes me want to scream. If he is not removed or stopped soon, we won`t have much of a country left. I can only hope impeachment proceedings start by Dec.!! What a great Christmas gift!!

[Solo_in_MD]

3. The funding programs predate Bush Jr and 9-11

and were plussed up under Clinton. (http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/Pre_96/October94/590.txt.html) a program that never quite lived up to its PR, and was predicted to cause just this sort of thing.