Grant funds not vital to growth of Metro force

Christina Littlefield and Dan Kulin

Thursday, Dec. 11, 2003 | 9:41 a.m.

The federal grant program that helped police departments across the country add more than 100,000 officers since the early 1990s is being rolled back by some cash-strapped local governments who are now trimming their police force.

But not in the Las Vegas Valley.

With the booming population growth in Southern Nevada, Metro Police and Henderson and North Las Vegas police departments are looking to continue adding police officers in the coming years with or without the help of federal grant funds.

The Community Oriented Policing Services program, a hallmark of the Clinton administration, funneled $8 billion in grants to local law enforcement agencies, helping cut crime to historically low rates during the past decade.

But the program, known as the COPS grant, is being phased out by the federal government as many police departments reach the end of the grant term. The grant had paid all or a portion of new officers' salaries for three years and required local agencies to keep those officers on the payroll for a fourth year. But now that some departments have reached the end of that term they are cutting those positions.

In Southern Nevada, attrition and population increases have police agencies needing to add officers annually just to keep pace with increased demands.

The North Las Vegas City Council recently accepted its first COPS grant, a $1.8 million infusion that will help pay a portion of 25 new officers' salaries for the next three years.

The new officers will be hired over the next 10 months, and City Finance Director Phil Stoeckinger said the city will use money from an existing tax override fund to pay for those officers' once the grant runs out.

"We made sure we had the financial capacity to keep them indefinitely," Stoeckinger said.

North Las Vegas police spokesman Justin Roberts said the new officers are needed to keep the pace with the expected increase in population.

"With the growth we would have to add these officers anyway," Roberts said.

"The grant eases it," he said about the cost of increasing the police force, which is projected to have 240 officers in a year. "The grant is a great relief."

In Henderson, a $2.25 million COPS grant has helped pay for the addition of 30 officers since Sept. 2001.

The first 21 Henderson officers hired with the help of the COPS grant are now being fully paid by the city, and the other nine positions will be 100 percent city-funded by the end of next year, said Jean Santry, the city's internal auditor.

The added officers helped boost the total number of Henderson officers from 219 in 2001 to 259 now.

Steve Hanson, Henderson's finance director, said the city hasn't ever cut the number of officers, and he predicted the city will continue to add officers annually for years to come.

But the recent increase did little to improve the ratio of sworn officers to Henderson residents.

There are about 1.1 Henderson officers per 1,000 city residents today, compared to just under 1 officer per 1,000 residents three years ago, Officer Shane Lewis said.

Metro Police, the department responsible for Las Vegas and unincorporated Clark County, has significantly more officers -- about 1.7 officers per 1,000 city residents. But that is significantly below the national average of 2.5 officers per 1,000 residents, Metro Sgt. Rick Barela said. Those numbers also do not take into consideration the 36 million tourists Las Vegas hosts each year, Metro officials have repeatedly noted.

Metro never accepted any of the COPS money because of the problem other police departments are seeing now, where officers have to be laid off when the money runs out, Barela said.

"We would never hire people on a grant that has the possibility of expiring," Barela said. "We would never do that to a commissioned officer."

Barela said the department hires police officers within its normal budget as much as possible. But neither Barela nor other people within the department to whom the Sun's questions were referred were able to say how many new officers have been added to Metro over the last few years, or how many officers the department planned to hire in the future.

Lynn Jantz in the personnel department did say that the department has a hiring freeze on noncommissioned positions and that the 911 operators were especially in need of more people. She said the department is still hiring officers but that recruitment at the academy was down.

Supervisors who should have been able to provide more information were either out of the office or did not return phone calls made last week.

According to previous Sun reports, the department received extra funding to pay for 35 new officers this year from the Las Vegas City Council and the County Commission, but Sheriff Bill Young had asked for 389 new officers, at the cost of $400 million.

Young asked for an audit of the department in October to help convince the public of the need for a tax hike on the 2004 ballot to pay for more officers. But while Las Vegas area police departments continue to grow, some departments around the country are headed in the opposite direction.

USA Today

contributed to this report.