Cutting into the blue line

OPINION:

America’s streets are safer than most of the world. That is no accident. Hundreds of thousands of local, state and federal law enforcement officers, folks from small towns to big cities across this great nation, keep them safe. These officers are fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters. Every morning, they quietly strap on a bulletproof vest and a handgun. They walk directly into danger’s way — so that you will not.

How do I know? Because I have gone to the funerals, more than I can count over 34 years, including that of my own partner, who died from a felon’s bullet. I have spent my life as a law enforcement officer, as has my father, wife and daughter. I am president of the National Narcotics Officers’ Associations’ Coalition (NNOAC), which represents nearly 70,000 police officers in 44 states.

Seldom have I taken up the pen in outrage, but today I must. Law enforcement officers — hundreds of chiefs of police, thousands of state law enforcement officers, sheriffs and troopers at every level across America — are in a state of shock. There is no other way to describe it. We feel betrayed by the White House and by those in Congress who sided with unprecedented, devastating cuts in law enforcement funding as part of the December rush to get home, the 1,000-page so-called “Fiscal Year 2008 Omnibus Bill.”

Last month, the administration demonstrated it does not care about state and local law enforcement. It cut the central funding program, called the Byrne Justice Assistance Grant (JAG) program. This program funds critical task forces in every single state in the country, from Maine to Florida, Maryland to California. These are the essential police task forces that find and prosecute drug-related and violent crime.

The White House attacked America’s thin blue line — with a blunt, silent instrument, the budget cut. The central pole in state and local law enforcement’s tent, the Byrne JAG program, was cut from $520 million, a cut already from the preceding years, to $170 million. Congress had actually agreed previously, as they watched drug and violent crime spiking across the country in 2007, to raise the program to between $600 million and $660 million this year, still below past high-water marks, but enough to keep state law enforcement alive.

Then, in the dark of the night, the White House said it wanted the law enforcement funding stripped to zero. The Congress, held hostage by this proposal, was forced to ax it by two-thirds, down to where states across the country are preparing to fire law enforcement officers and disband task forces viewed as fundamental to community safety.

How does one respond to a kick in the teeth from those whom you trusted and elected to protect this nation, to preserve the rule of law through programs like the Byrne JAG effort? Thousands of dismayed state and local law enforcement officers are trying to answer that unexpected question.

The simplest way is to speak the facts, and ask that this critical funding be restored in the pending emergency supplemental appropriation bill. If these funds are not restored, there will be deep cuts nationwide in public safety task forces, and the prosecution of violent drug-related crime. Crime numbers will spike — and the White House and those few members of Congress who took part in negotiating these deep cuts will be responsible. There will be a gathering storm of national regret.

Salt in a wound is never comfortable. Some in Congress issued press releases saying they had “saved” law enforcement by preserving the program. No, that is not what happened. Congress, complicit with White House indifference to the rise of drug-related crime, betrayed the average voter, who expects if nothing more, to live in a nation relatively free from such crime.

What’s so disappointing for me personally is that Congress, for the most part, understands. Without maintaining the bare-bones historic local-state-federal partnership that makes prosecuting major, mobile, drug-funded criminals possible — without the full and proper funding to the Byrne JAG program immediately — public safety will suffer.

Anyone in the White House or Congress who paused right now to talk to a sheriff or chief of police would learn just how devastating these Byrne JAG cuts really are. The federal government has a responsibility to strongly support effective multi-jurisdictional drug enforcement efforts, since our federal law enforcement agencies cannot secure our streets and borders.

What should be done? Congress needs to take immediate steps to remedy the cut to the Byrne JAG program. The fiscal 2008 wartime supplemental appropriations bill is where that can be done.

There is no more important war to win than one here at home, against drug traffickers and violent crime — a war that took more than 30,000 American lives just from drug overdose deaths last year alone.

No one can quantify the lost opportunities, shattered lives, chronic illness and death that results from drug-related violent crime. No one can quantify the loss of one child to drugs. What will happen next year, when we lose state and local drug enforcement, because the Byrne JAG Program was eviscerated?

For the sake of every citizen and every law enforcement officer in America, not the least America’s 70,000 narcotics law enforcement officers, Congress should reverse what was by all accounts a hurried and crippling decision, and restore the full and proper funding to the most vital law enforcement funding program — the Byrne JAG program.

Ronald Brooks is president of the National Narcotics Law Enforcement Officers Associations’ Coalition, representing 70,000 law enforcement officers nationwide.