Elk Grove Police Miss Out On Fed COPS Stimulus Cash

In announcing the federal stimulus funding for police departments yesterday, there were several winners and lots of losers. Unfortunately for the Elk Grove Police Department, they came up on the short end.

As part of the $787 stimulus package passed last February, the Community Oriented Policing Services program, or COPS, was allocated $1 billion for community grants.


According to Elk Grove Police Chief Robert Lehner, the Department of Justice administered programs are highly competitive and skewed to communities with high violent crime rates. “Obviously, Elk Grove doesn’t fare well as a candidate for those programs,” Lehner said.

Lehner said the program used a complex formula that included factors such as economic distress to determine which communities would qualify. When requesting the grant, Lehner said the application did not included information indicating that such a formula would be used.

While the grants allocated $1 billion, there were request from over 7,000 communities requesting a total of $8 billion. The program is expect to pay for over 4,700 officers over the next three years nationally.

Locally, Sacramento City received $9.5 million which it expects to help fund 35 additional patrol officers while the Sacramento Sheriffs department received nothing. Sherriff John McGuiness said his department will lay off as any as 130 officers as early as this Saturday.