Clinton Grant to Fund 710 LAPD Officers

WASHINGTON â€”  Continuing his efforts to fulfill a critical campaign commitment, President Clinton will provide federal funding to subsidize the hiring of 710 new police officers in Los Angeles and thousands more across the country, administration officials say.

Clinton plans to announce the $53.2-million grant--the largest to any city in the nation--in a conference call this morning with 15 mayors, including Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan, the officials said. Overall, the administration plans to announce grants totaling $604 million to subsidize the hiring of 8,900 new police officers for about 2,500 jurisdictions.

Sources said $20 million of the money for Los Angeles will be earmarked especially for community policing.

The three-year grant is exactly what Riordan’s office requested, and $5 million more than the mayor’s office anticipated in its proposed budget for next year. Worried that the federal funding might not come through and that Riordan’s warp-speed expansion of the LAPD was sacrificing quality for quantity, a City Council committee on Monday recommended scaling back police recruitment from 90 to 70 new officers each month.

Mayoral staff declined to comment on the pending federal grant until it is announced, but hinted that the windfall might help sway the council to return to Riordan’s proposal, which is the centerpiece not only of his $4-billion budget but of his entire administration.

Like Clinton, Riordan made public safety a focus of his 1993 campaign, vowing not to run for reelection before adding 3,000 officers to the force. Riordan inherited a department of 7,600 officers upon arriving at City Hall; the LAPD now has about 8,500.

Still, mayoral staff members were cautious about the pending announcement in Washington.

“We cannot speculate about that funding,� Riordan’s communications director, Steve Sugerman, said late Tuesday. “When and if something real is announced . . . then we’ll evaluate with the council.�

But council members have warned that federal money alone is not enough to shore up their confidence in the massive police expansion. Too much reliance on grants such as the one Clinton is set to announce today could leave the city with a larger police force than it can support down the road, if and when the grants end.

“In the long run, the biggest objection of the public will be that we keep building a bigger and bigger cliff of one-time money,� Councilwoman Jackie Goldberg, who is on the special committee reviewing Riordan’s budget, said recently.

City staff have estimated that the overall public safety plan, which would give the LAPD the equivalent of nearly 11,000 officers, will cost more than $200 million by 2000.

“We have to be sure that we are prepared for three years from now, when we’re not going to be getting that boost any longer and it’s going to be coming out of the general fund. That’s not peanuts,� Budget Committee Chairman Richard Alatorre said upon hearing about the $53-million grant Tuesday.

“Everybody wants more police, but when the day of reckoning comes. . . .�

The police officers’ union and the council’s Public Safety Committee chief also have raised concerns that the department cannot support the huge numbers of recruits graduating from its academy with adequate training, equipment or space in stations. Riordan addressed this by adding funds for facilities and other resources in his proposed budget, but the council committee still voted unanimously to scale back recruiting and overtime spending.

For Clinton, the grant Los Angeles is scheduled to receive marks another milestone in the administration’s dogged and systematic courting of California--the richest prize in the fall election. It comes on top of about $50 million the city has already received to subsidize hiring hundreds of police officers, as well as federal grants for equipment and overtime meant to free additional officers for street deployment.

The money for these grants comes from the 1994 crime bill, which provided about $9 billion to subsidize hiring police officers around the country through 2000. The 1996 appropriations bill Congress recently approved included $1.4 billion for another program subsidizing local police.

With these grants, administration officials say Clinton will have helped deploy 43,000 police officers nationwide, nearly half the 100,000 new officers he is promising to add to the streets by 2000.

Republicans say those numbers are misleading because cities still must pay one-quarter of the expenses, and pick up the entire tab after the federal grants expire.

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Brownstein reported from Washington and Wilgoren from Los Angeles.