The Edward Byrne Memorial Competitive Grant Program-Good Intentions Gone Awry

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The Edward Byrne Memorial Competetive Grant Program, or Byrne Grant for short, was created in 1988 by the Federal Government after a New York City narcotics officer was killed by a drug dealer. The Byrne Grants were aimed at providing state and local law enforcement with federal funding to combat gang violence and drugs in communities across the country hit hardest by them. Though sound in theory, they created incentives for law enforcement to increase arrests for petty crimes such as possession of small amounts of drugs, which coupled with harsher sentencing guidelines, sent more and more young men, usually of color, into the criminal justice system. The incentive for more arrests was created because of a fatal flaw within the grants, which determined where the funds would go based on quotas and statistics. Communities that reported higher crime and drug use received more funding, leading jurisdictions across the country to compete with each other for the most arrests. With all the extra funding, police departments across the country began looking more and more like military units than police officers, as they created SWAT teams, armed themselves with high powered weapons, swooped down on homes in helicopters and armored vehicles, and adorned themselves in garb that looked more like army fatigues than the traditional blue uniform of police.

Related: Ten Worst Police Raids in History
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SWAT teams, body armor, helicopters, and tanks are expensive; so expensive that when the troops in Iraq complained of insufficient protection, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said, “You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time.” It’s not surprising that the grants were severely cut under the Bush Administration, which saw a need to better equip our army fighting threats abroad than the army terrorizing US citizens at home.

This cut was short lived, however, as a flood of new funding for the grants was included in President Obama’s Recovery Act of 2008. It’s not surprising that with the increased funding, we saw a spike in marijuana arrests in cities like New York . Vice President Joe Biden has long been a fan of the Byrne, and related COPs Grants (which also provide federal funding for local and state law enforcement) stating that the grants were responsible for the decrease in violent crime that occurred in the 90′s. If Biden had taken Sociology 101, he would know that increased police presence and harsher sentencing do not decrease or deter crime, but in fact have the opposite effect. Studies have shown that the legalization of abortion may actually have been a significant contributing factor for the sharp decrease in crime that the country experienced in the 90′s after the bloodbath of the 80′s. Bush was right when he decided to cut the funding for grants like Byrne and Cops, but erred in his strict Anti-Abortion policies, just as Obama erred in re-establishing major funding for the grants. For either party to make such an absurd claim that their party’s policies “fixed” crime is absurd. If only we could see some sort of bipartisan cooperation, then we might see some real change.

Michael Komorn-Criminal Defense Attorney

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