Obameter #224: $2 bn for Bryne/JAG

Back in 1994, then-President Bill Clinton signed into law an omnibus law enforcement bill that became known as "the Crime Bill" (as if there were no others). It was a major centralizing reform of law enforcement which, among other things, instituted a federal law enforcement grants system wherein states and local level law enforcement agencies can petition the federal government for funding called the Bryne Justice Assistance Grant (one of the few things Wikipedia does not have a page for, by the way).

In his late-term attempts to cut domestic spending, President Bush (hefting his veto-stamp menacingly) convinced Congress to cut the funding of the Bryne/JAG program from $520 million down to $170 million. Democrats generally and Obama specifically were appalled by the cuts, spouting rhetoric about police agencies crippled by the cuts and, as a result, crime running a muck.

Obama promised to refund the program, and fulfilled his pledge with a $2 billion stimulus to Bryne/JAG.

The idea seems to be that anytime law enforcement needs money for a new task force or a new police helicopter or whatever, they dig through some red tape and find Uncle Sam's out-stretched fist full of dollars on the other side.

Now, it makes perfect sense to my right-wing brain that a Republican would be cutting domestic spending and a Democrat would be increasing spending and centralization. But it instantly struck me as bizarre that the law-and-order Republican was cutting law enforcement spending while the same Democrat President that recently declared the de facto decriminalization of medical marijuana at the federal level was restoring funding to the major source of most anti-drug task forces and enforcement programs.

Even stranger, I couldn't find any Republican articles defending the choice. The only article I found that favored cutting JAG funding was from StopTheDrugWar.com. Bush allied with legalize it libertarians... that's just plain strange.

The JAG program limits grant approvals to proposals that fit into one of these distinct areas:

1. Law Enforcement
2. Prosecution & Court
3. Prevention & Education
4. Corrections & Community Corrections
5. Drug Treatment & Enforcement
6. Planning, Evaluation, & Technology
7. Crime Victim & Witness (except compensation)

The amount of funding available for each state (and territory) is calculated by the population and by the violent crime rate in the area. That funding is then split 60/40 - 60% for state-level programs, and 40% for local and tribal law enforcement agencies. (My source uses BlueTube, which is YouTube for cops. Seriously. That actually exists.)

As for the program itself, I don't like the centralization aspect of the program. If two local governments are enforcing dramatically different rules in different precincts and on populations with with different local cultures and habits, why should they get the same funding from the same source? I can see a police station in Nebraska trying to crack down on marijuana use and a station in coastal California trying to keep people from hassling the potheads both using the same funding, and one of them seemingly in contradiction to the administration's position on marijuana use.

There's also the issue that the program dispenses money with little oversight. Isn't that one of the major causes of the financial collapse? It seems pretty stupid to be doing the same thing again when we're not even out of the pit dug by doing it the first time.

I also expect a good deal of that funding to be going to "solutions" to crime of questionable efficacy that I expect to hear from the American left: prisoner rehabilitation, job training programs, community corrections (actually I don't know what that is, but it sounds like it fits), and other plans straight from after school specials. Not every prisoner is Jean Valjean.

But all of these are rather vague impressions, not solid fact-based reasoning. For that, I'm going to have to trust the Office of Budget Statistics: they described the program with the phrase "results not demonstrated." They scored it weak in it's Management (67%) and just terrible in it's Purpose & Design (20%), Strategic Planning (38%), and Results/Accountability (13%). In other words, they find it to be a half-formed idea, badly implemented, mismanaged, unaccountable, and ineffective. If it was that incompetent with half a billion dollars, what is it going to do with two billion?

Still, despite this reasoning, it weirds me out to be ruling with StopTheDrugWar.com and against law enforcement funding. I mean, their overall reasoning is basically sound: don't make overly restrictive laws you can't enforce. But their solutions continue to be "nothing works, so try nothing." Opposing JAG doesn't oppose law enforcement universally, it just opposes a specific, ineffective funding mechanism... right?

This whole issue feels like a setup. It's too weird to be true.