President Barack Obama's stimulus plan may provide funds for the Philadelphia Police Department to hire additional officers.
The bill, which was signed into law last week, allocates $1 billion nationally for the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services of the U.S. Department of Justice. The office will give grants to law enforcement agencies around the country.
Luke Butler, a spokesman for Mayor Michael Nutter, said Philadelphia will apply for a grant. "It's a very welcome investment in public safety," he said.
The money the stimulus plan gives to the COPS office will be spent on hiring approximately 5,500 additional officers nationwide.
The grants will be used to pay for the salaries of these newly hired or rehired officers for three years. After that time, local governments must pick up the tab themselves.
Specifics on how to apply and how much money Philadelphia could receive are still unclear, Butler said.
"On COPS, as with all of the elements of the recovery bill," he said, "there are details that are still to be worked out."
Applications for funding will be available on the COPS Web site by the end of March.
The funds will be distributed by the Bureau of Justice Assistance, according to an e-mail by Tara Mead, a spokeswoman for the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.
"[It's] hard to say at this point how it will be spent in [Pennsylvania]," Mead wrote. "It depends on how many cities and other municipalities apply, and their success in applying for the money."
Since the stimulus plan was revised in Congress before it was passed earlier this month, the terms of the COPS funding have also changed.
"One of the provisions in one form of the proposal was that cities would have to match some of the funds coming through the federal government," Butler said.
But Nutter and other mayors successfully lobbied to have this matching requirement removed from the bill, according to Butler.
As a result, "any additional costs for higher salaries or benefits for particular individuals hired will be the responsibility of the grantee agency," wrote Timothy Quinn, acting director of COPS, in a press release.
The COPS office was created by the Violent Crime Control & Law Enforcement Act, signed by former President Bill Clinton in 1994. Its aim was to distribute $8.8 billion over six years.
Funding for COPS saw a significant decrease during former President George Bush's administration, and Philadelphia has received no money since 2004.
The $1 billion Obama allocated for COPS in his stimulus plan is in addition to other expenditures of $2.76 billion to prevent crime and $225 million to combat violence against women.
