President Clinton says he will veto a crime bill that changes his "100,000 cops on the beat" law. Almost all Democrats support him on this. That was demonstrated in the House vote on the Republican version of the bill which makes the change.
The funds now used to help local governments pay for more police would become crime-fighting block grants to localities under the Republican legislation. We favor that, because, as Republican drafters of the bill explain it, the block grant approach is far more beneficial to a city like Baltimore than is existing law.
For one thing, existing law sets up a competition among applicants. There will be winners and losers year by year. The House-passed bill formulizes the grants. They're guaranteed.
Another advantage is that the House bill gives greater weight to the amount of violent crime in a locality in determining how much federal aid is made available. A third plus is that under the block grant approach the recipient gets a steady 90 percent of the cost of new officers for five years. The present law requires the locality to come up with a larger and increasing share of the cost each year -- and there is no federal money available after three years.
Another advantage to the block grant approach is that if a city chose to use its federal aid for prevention rather than law enforcement, it could. That includes even the much maligned -- but, in our view, important -- midnight basketball programs. And such things as drug courts.
Maybe the fine print in the Republican bill undermines all of the above in some way. Maybe not. Democratic senators concerned about crime-ridden big cities ought to look very carefully into this when the crime package comes before the Senate. If the above interpretation is correct, such senators as Paul Sarbanes and Barbara Mikulski should not let partisanship or a veto threat prevent them from doing the right thing by Baltimore.
We have said before and we say again, that while crime is a problem in most communities, it is in the bigger cities that the threat is the greatest -- by far. That is the battlefield on which the war on crime must be fought most vigorously, with the most resources -- and with the most discretion by the local battlefield commanders.
A second part of the Republican crime package, alas, does not stick with this locals-know-best philosophy. Federal grants for building and in some cases operating state prisons would have strings attached: Sentences for "serious violent felons" would have to conform to federal guidelines. The purpose of this is to reward "tough" states and coerce "lenient" ones to get tough. Tougher sentencing for the violent is something we favor, but it isn't always the best approach and certainly not the only approach. Why not let states decide what is the best way to handle their violent criminals?