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Fighting Crime With COPS & Citizens
More About the Study Summary/Full Report Case Studies
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How the Study Was Conducted

The evaluation of the COPS program was funded by the National Institute of Justice and conducted by The Urban Institute, a nonpartisan policy research organization located in Washington, D.C. The study was conducted in three "waves" of telephone interviews with law enforcement agencies and focused on the following areas:

  • Measuring differences between law enforcement agencies that received COPS grant funds and agencies that did not.

  • Measuring how grantee agencies changed over time as a result of their COPS award(s).

  • Comparing changes over time between grantee agencies and nongrantee agencies.

The findings posted on this Web site apply to roughly the first 4 years of the COPS initiative, with primary focus on the COPS FAST, AHEAD, and MORE programs, as well as the Universal Hiring Program (UHP). The pool of potential survey respondents was composed of approximately 21,000 agencies that were eligible to, but did not necessarily, receive COPS funds. Respondents were stratified according to jurisdiction size and grant program.

Steps in the Process

The telephone surveys were conducted by the National Opinion Research Center.

Wave 1 of the survey compared 1995 grantees with nongrantees in terms of hiring and deployment processes, the implementation of technology, and the rates with which the agencies adopted community policing tactics in the first year following the COPS awards. Wave 1 also asked grantees about their satisfaction with the application process. Wave 2 expanded the initial sample by interviewing agencies that received COPS awards in 1996 and reinterviewing agencies that received COPS MORE funds to implement mobile computers.

Wave 3 reinterviewed approximately half of Wave 1 and 2 respondents to check implementation progress and, because some grants were about to expire, anticipated post-grant retention of COPS-funded officers. These surveys were limited to 2 subgroups of municipal and county police agencies: (1) all grantees receiving COPS MORE funds and (2) grantees and nongrantee agencies serving jurisdictions of more than 50,000 residents. These 2 groups of interviewees had received more than three-fourths of all COPS funds.