Political Quotes

“the amendment I am sponsoring would earmark the remaining $5 million balance in unobligated, community- oriented policing services from Fiscal Year 1998 to the Department of Justice for the expansion of community prosecution programs across our Nation. Let me emphasize that these dollars are not committed and my amendment does not take funding away from any other law enforcement priorities within the bill. Community prosecution programs represent the next step in community- based crime prevention programs. Just as police officers are assigned to a beat under community policing programs like COPS, community prosecutors work with residents of specific communities to identify, interdict, and remove those conditions in neighborhoods that become breeding grounds for crime. Too often people only have contact with prosecutors when they are victims of crime. This $5 million will provide much-needed resources to help prosecutors join with police to address local crime problems by reorienting their emphasis from assembly-line processing of cases to taking on quality-of-life issues and preventing crimes from happening in the first place. The thinking behind this concept is this: If we fix the broken windows early on, we can stop crime before it starts. These programs are supported by groups like the National District Attorneys Association, and have been successful across our Nation in towns as small as Rosebud, Montana to cities as large as Chicago, Illinois.”