Anthony Weiner: “I thank the chairman for both his confidence and his leadership of our committee, and I also want to thank Bobby Scott…”

“I thank the chairman for both his confidence and his leadership of our committee, and I also want to thank Bobby Scott, the chairman of the Crime Subcommittee. We are really here for three reasons. We are here because the COPS program has been a singular success. It has been a success because we identified in the 1990s that crime was not a program that only localities could get a handle on, that we had a Federal role. It is a success because it was a singularly democratic, with a small ``d,'' program. And small towns and big cities throughout all 50 States wound up benefiting from the over 118,000 police officers that were put on the street because of this program. We know, for example, that 82 percent of the grants went to cities with 50,000 people or less. And while cities like mine did very well because there were more police on the beat, we know that there were a large number of very small towns that benefited. We know, as you can see, that the COPS program provides resources to all 50 States. This wasn't a political program. If you were a police department and you showed a way to get more cops on the street, the Federal Government wasn't going to sit back; they were going to be actively involved. And we know that it was successful. We know it because the Government Accountability Office looked at the connection between police officers and the reduction in crime and found a correlation.…”