Anthony Weiner: “I have yet to hear a single opponent of the amendment say the words ``with full funding we will have a statistical…”

“I have yet to hear a single opponent of the amendment say the words ``with full funding we will have a statistical undercount adjustment.'' And the reason we cannot is that the Census Bureau is not committed to that. It is not a matter of collecting the information, I say to my colleagues. It is a matter of what you do with it. And simply collecting the information, as we learned in 2000, is not the problem. When you have a Census Bureau that is unwilling to make adjustments, we are arguing for the wrong thing. I can tell you this though, in the census figures, when they do employment, they are going to have less folks for cops. It is what they will have as a result of this idea of ending the COPS program. Let us try to remember here what we are talking about. We are talking about a program that has not only hired over 125,000 cops, not only paid overtime in over 4,000 different jurisdictions, not only bought radios and repeaters, and Sprint systems for inside cars in dozens of police forces, it has resulted in the reduction of at least 150,000 violent crimes. It is an enormously successful program. Let us keep our eyes on the ball. We all recognize here that both programs are good. It is just a matter of whether one will be ramped up very much at the expense of the other. That is all this amendment seeks to do, is to just try to restore the COPS program to a barely living, barely heartbeating pace.”