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The Power of the Purse: How the Feds Drive Local Law Enforcement

By Jonathan Simor

Since its origins forty years ago with the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe Streets Act of 1968, the war on crime has been fomented by the federal government. While states have done the hard work of building and filling prisons, the federal government has helped build both public demand, and the revenue resources, to lead states into escalating crime wars.Sometimes these overt efforts to buy the attention of local law enforcement and prosecutors, overriding the constitutional order of local choices about police power, come to surface in embarrassing ways. On Monday, San Francisco DA, Kamala Harris issued a statement promising a full investigation of why her office took over 5 million dollars of federal money since 2004 as part of the Southwest Border Prosecution Initiative intended to compensate local prosecutors for prosecuting border enforcement related crimes...continue to full post

Full post as published by Governing Through Crime on April 09, 2008 (boomark / email).