By Tracy F. Harris
I’ve been losing a lot of sleep lately. At night I lie in bed and wonder what the FBI is doing to keep me safe from terrorists — with only 12,000 special agents and about $4 billion to work with, I can’t imagine how it works.
So my heartfelt thanks go out to President Bush and his fiscal year 2006 budget proposal. He wants to increase the FBI’s funding to $5.7 billion, an 11 percent increase from last year. The money is earmarked for an additional 468 agents for counterintelligence and counterterrorism.
But there’s one little pea under my mattress. To fund this proposal, the Bush administration looked for overfunding elsewhere, and found it … in law enforcement. A 46 percent cut in funding to local and state police departments could disturb my otherwise peaceful slumber.
Grants to state and local law enforcement — the people who actually come save you in emergencies — are proposed to be cut from $2.8 billion to $1.5 billion.
Several major programs will suffer heavy losses, including Community Oriented Policing Services, which funds hiring and equipment purchases, and the Edward Byrne Justice Assistance Grant program, which is available to fund just about every aspect of law enforcement.
The COPS program will essentially be eliminated, dropping from $499 million in funding last year to $22 million. The Byrne program, which Louisville Metro relies heavily upon, is dropping from $634 million to zero, nada, zilch, nothing.
LMPD received $1.5 million this year in Byrne grants — to do overtime patrol, investigate cold case murders, run the narcotics division and pay the salaries for the crimes against seniors unit. Lieutenant Colonel Steve Conrad said it’s the source of outside funding they depend on the most.
According to Lt. Col. Peggy Emmington, an officer at the Jeffersontown Police Department and president of the Kentucky Association of Chiefs of Police, these cuts will "dramatically impact" local law enforcement.
"Maybe now isn’t the time to be cutting local law enforcement," she said in a recent interview.
For one example, she pointed out Kentucky had 963 car accident deaths last year — one-third of the number of fatalities due to terrorist attacks on 9/11. And that’s just our state. Cutting the funding to local law enforcement will derail a number of initiatives to make highways safer, including increasing patrols to stop speeders and catch drunk drivers.
The local law enforcement agencies do receive funding from the Department of Homeland Security, but that money goes to counterterrorism projects, like purchasing hazardous material suits. "But if you can’t afford patrol cars, where are you going to put the haz-mat suits?" Emmington asked.
"It’s not that we shouldn’t fund [antiterrorism]," she said, "but ultimately, our communities are facing crime on a daily basis."
The colonel is right. It’s not the FBI or the CIA or anyone else from the federal government who will be coming to your aid at 2 a.m. It is the police department down the street — the department down the street which is going to see Byrne grants, COPS funding and numerous other funding initiatives cut if Congress passes this budget.
Congress has not agreed to similar plans in the past, but Dubya has been getting his way for the past four years.
As Emmington said, its all fine and well for the government to move the funding to the FBI and assume local law enforcement can get along. But, in her words, "God help them if they’re wrong"?
Tracy F. Harris is a sophomore majoring in Communication and Assistant Managing Editor for The Cardinal. E-mail her at: tharris@louisvillecardinal.com
