The Journal Sentinel has decided to blame George Bush for Milwaukee's ills again:

Bush has been phasing out former President Clinton's Community Oriented Policing Services program, called COPS, which enabled cities to put more officers on the streets. Congress prevented Bush from abruptly ending it. Also, under Bush, federal financing of after-school programs has been flat, while costs have risen. Congress fought to keep funding level. Meanwhile, Bush's failure to push for a hike in the minimum wage helps explain why poverty has intensified under his watch. No doubt, there are other factors.

Bush must reverse his stand on COPS and after-school programs and institute policies that actually boost incomes at the bottom of the wage scale. And communities like Milwaukee must brainstorm on how to keep a year's upturn in gun crimes from marking the start of a trend.

But like so many of the Journal's positions, they seem to forget to research any of their stands.  It's no surprise that they're big on a program like COPS.  After all, it has two things going for it already.  It is a Clinton era program... which to the Journal is like saying it came as a pronouncement to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Secondly, it is a large federal program which redistributes money to serve no Constitutional federal government purpose.  That's like a liberal governmentgasm right there.

The reality of course is that COPS did very little to actually help crime go down in the 1990's and was abused by most communities who used it.  USA Today had a very good article explaining many of the problems with COPS last year:

Federal audits of just 3% of all COPS grants have alleged that $277 million was misspent. Tens of thousands of jobs funded by the grants were never filled, or weren't filled for long, auditors found. And there's little evidence that COPS was a big factor in reducing crime.

The audits, conducted by the Justice Department's inspector general and reviewed by USA TODAY, allege that some police agencies wrongly used the hiring grants to cover routine expenses at a time when local budgets were tightening.
...
Meanwhile, few crime analysts say that COPS grants were significant in reducing crime. Analysts such as Stanford University's Joseph McNamara say that a much bigger factor has been the strong economy, which has kept many young people employed and away from crime.

Of three studies on the issue, only one - which was funded by the Justice Department - found that the police hiring program was chiefly responsible for drops in violent crime rates among big cities. The General Accounting Office, Congress' research arm, dismissed that study as "inconclusive."

The link between COPS grants and lower crime rates has been further obscured by the experience of cities such as Oklahoma City, which did not participate in the police hiring program - and yet saw crime rates drop by as much as those in cities that got grants.

Because of funding loopholes and book keeping tricks, some departments actually shrunk because of COPS grants.  How's that sound?  The other irony is that many police departments never used COPS money to pay for "beat cops", which was the original purpose of the program.  Instead they used it to create narcotics squads and SWAT teams, which are anything but community oriented, and a waste of resources in most cities other than the largest in the nation.

Via to Elliot... who makes some damn good points of his own.