Next president is asked to aid crime-fighting

Statistics show 50 young people a day are killed in U.S. cities, one mayor said.

PHILADELPHIA (AP) — U.S. mayors and police chiefs said Wednesday they would call on the next president to revive fading federal support for local crime-fighting efforts.

The officials, speaking at a U.S. Conference of Mayors forum, discussed ideas that could be presented in the first 100 days of the new administration. The proposals included spending money to hire more police, give them better technology and fight the spread of assault and rapid-fire weapons used against them.

Federal spending to bolster local law enforcement has dropped sharply since 2001, when it totaled $2.1 billion, Sen. Joseph Biden, D-Del., told a news conference Wednesday. “Add everything up now, it’s $400 million,” he said.

Miami Police Chief John Timoney, president of the Police Executive Research Forum, said backing for local law enforcement trailed off when federal attention turned to counterterrorism after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

That’s a mistake, said Doug Palmer, mayor of Trenton, N.J. Statistics show 50 young people a day are killed in U.S. cities, said Palmer, past president of the mayors’ conference.

“These gang members are domestic terrorists,” Palmer said. “If al-Qaida came into this country and was murdering 50 kids a day, we’d have more money and more help than we’d know what to do with.”

Among other things, the mayors and police chiefs recommend restoring federal community-oriented policing, or COPS, block grants to help local law enforcement.

Biden, who chairs a Senate subcommittee on crime, has proposed a bill that would pay for an additional 50,000 local officers and 1,000 new FBI agents to tackle crime on the streets.

The bill would cost more than $2 billion a year. Biden said that fellow Democrat Barack Obama supports it, and that he hopes Republican John McCain will too.

The U.S. Conference of Mayors is holding a series of August-through-October forums on recommendations for the next president. They will meet in New York City on infrastructure, in Los Angeles on poverty, in Chicago on the arts and in Miami on the environment.