Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Delivers Remarks on the 30th Anniversary of the COPS Office

Remarks as Delivered

Thanks, Hugh, for that generous introduction. And thank you for your leadership of the office.

Before we begin, I just want to note that the FBI is continuing to investigate an apparent assassination attempt against of the former President that occurred on Sunday in Florida.

We are grateful he is safe.

The entire Justice Department — including in particular the FBI, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Florida, and the National Security Division — are all coordinating closely with our local and state law enforcement partners on the ground.

We will all work together to — and tirelessly — to determine accountability in this matter. We will spare no resource in this investigation.

It’s an honor to be here today as we celebrate 30 years of the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS Office).

It is fitting that the Department is celebrating the COPS Office with our community partners because it is these community partnerships that have made the work of the COPS Office possible.

Whether you are a current or former COPS Office employee, a community member, an advocate, a law enforcement professional, a city, state, or Tribal leader — thank you. Thank you for being here today. And thank you for all you have done to ensure the success of the COPS Office for the past 30 years.

That success has been built on the concept of community-oriented policing.

For this office, for this audience, community policing is not a catch phrase. It is not an isolated program or an adjunct unit. It is the foundation of effective public safety.

Community policing is based on the idea that public trust is essential to ensuring public safety.

It is a model of policing focused on engaging the community as a full partner in ensuring that the safety and the civil liberties of every person are protected.

And it is a model that the COPS Office has worked to perfect for three decades.

One of the many privileges of having served multiple tours of duty here at the Justice Department is that I am now getting to celebrate institutions whose births I witnessed.

It was during my third term, my third tour of duty at the Department, that Congress created the COPS Office.

The office then had the enormous task to put 100,000 new police officers on the streets. And it succeeded.

But the COPS Office mission is more expansive than just hitting a target. It sought to give officers access to improved training and technical assistance to support their work — and to play an active role in developing partnerships with the communities they protect.

Because of so many of you in this room, and so many who came before you, I am pleased to say that the COPS Office has more than lived up our expectations in 1994.

Over the last three decades, the office has also awarded grants to more than 13,000 law enforcement agencies across the country through programs that support hiring police officers, advance school safety, combat fentanyl and other drug trafficking, and promote officer safety and wellness.

Those numbers look impressive on paper — and they are. But they are far more impressive in action.

For 30 years, the COPS Office has shown us what it looks like when you put the values that underlie community-oriented policing in practice in the field.

It looks like police departments across the country that have been able to hire more law enforcement positions to serve and protect their communities.

In Georgia, it looks like a county police department hiring enough officers to assign personnel to critical missions like mental health crisis and co-responder teams and community outreach.

In Missouri, it looks like a police department that reported that adding just one COPS Office-funded officer to focus on community policing produced a 30% decrease in calls for service and an increase in crimes solved.

In South [Carolina], it looks like a school district that was able to hire a new security specialist with COPS funding. That specialist developed a new safety assessment process that makes school administrators an integral part of the holistic approach to safety and security at their schools.

In communities across the country, the work of the COPS Office means much-needed resources for law enforcement task forces working on the frontlines of the deadly opioid epidemic.

From 2019 to 2022, communities that received Anti-Heroin Task Force grants from the COPS Office reported 141,000 seizures of heroin, 43,000 seizures of fentanyl, and 59,000 arrests or prosecutions for fentanyl as a result of the task force’s operations.

In addition to partnering with state and local law enforcement through its grant programs, the COPS Office has helped put community policing into action through its comprehensive range of technical assistance programs.

This means no-cost training programs for police officers across the country on topics like building trust, de-escalation, and officer wellness and safety.

This means engaging with communities during some of their most difficult times.

In the wake of the horrific shooting at Robb Elementary School, Uvalde’s then-mayor asked the Justice Department to undertake a Critical Incident Review of the law enforcement response to the shooting.

Earlier this year, I traveled to Uvalde and met with some of the families whose loved ones were stolen from them.

I told them what our report found — that the loved ones they lost deserved better.

As a result of the COPS Office’s Critical Incident Review, I was able to tell the Uvalde community that the law enforcement response at Robb Elementary School on May 24, 2022 — and in the hours and days after — was a failure that should not have happened.

I was able to tell the community that the victims and survivors should never have been trapped with that shooter for more than an hour as they waited for their rescue.

I was able to tell the families of the victims and survivors that they deserved more than incomplete, inaccurate, and conflicting communications about the status of their loved ones.

That the community deserved more than misinformation from officials after the attack.

And that responding officers in Uvalde — who also lost loved ones — deserved the kind of leadership and training that would have prepared them to do the work that was required.

I was able to do this because for over a year, the professionals of the COPS Office worked tirelessly to conduct a review that prioritized honoring the Uvalde community and the memories of those whose loved ones were taken from them.

The COPS Office partnered with law enforcement and trauma and communications experts and examined more than 14,000 pieces of data and communications.

They conducted interviews — hundreds — with survivors, family members of victims and survivors, law enforcement, and others with first-hand or expert knowledge of the incident.

And they prepared an authoritative accounting of the response that day.

In the Critical Incident Review, the COPS Office identified cascading failures: failures in response, in training, and in communications that made a devastating day worse.

The report also made more than 270 recommendations to improve future preparation for, and responses to, mass shootings.

As important as the practical lessons outlined in the report were, the COPS Office also showed the Uvalde community that they were not alone. The United States Justice Department saw them, and the horror that they went through.

With that report, the COPS Office and the entire Justice Department made a promise to honor the victims and survivors by working with other communities and law enforcement to try to prevent anything like Robb Elementary from happening again.

The dedication that the COPS Office showed in Uvalde and in the days after in helping many many other police organizations learn new strategies is emblematic of the way the office does everything: with care, compassion, and a clear-eyed understanding of the importance of community policing.

We know that we still have much more to do to advance the ideals of community policing and to keep communities safe. But I have never been more confident in our ability to do that work together. And this is in large part because of the work that the COPS Office has done over the last 30 years.

I am so proud of you and of all that you have accomplished. Thank you.

Today, in celebration of this milestone for the COPS Office, I am proud to announce a new round of critical investments that will allow the office to continue to build on its extraordinary work for decades to come.

In the coming year, the Justice Department will provide $157 million for 235 departments to hire nearly 1,200 additional police officers to enhance their community policing capacity as part of the COPS Hiring Program.

We will award $73 million to help protect schools through the School Violence Prevention Program and funding under the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act.

We will award $31 million to meet the most serious needs of law enforcement in Tribal Nations through the Tribal Resources Grant Program.

We will award $46 million to combat the spread of opioids and methamphetamine in our communities.

And we will award $10.5 million to help train first responders to counter active shooter threats.

These resources will help police departments hire more officers, improve school safety, and earn and build the public’s trust.

They will help us continue to turn the tide against violent crime.

Last year, we saw an historic drop in homicides nationwide and one of the lowest levels of violent crime in 50 years.

And newly released data indicates this trend is continuing. Just two weeks ago, the Justice Department’s Violent Crime Reduction Steering Committee announced new data from across 88 cities that indicate that violent crime has continued to decline considerably in 2024. That included a further 16.9% drop in murders.

Three and a half years ago, the Justice Department launched an ambitious strategy to combat violent crime rooted in exactly the kinds of partnerships that are represented in this room today.

I believe deeply in those partnerships.

I got my start as a violent crime prosecutor when I served as a line prosecutor in the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office. And I very quickly came to understand that the success of my cases would depend on earning the trust, both of the local police department, and of the community we served.

In order to effectively prosecute the violent gang members who were terrorizing a public housing community here in Washington, D.C., we needed the families who lived there to trust us, to work with us.

We had to promise community members that, if they trusted us, we would keep our word to help make their home safe.

That was not a responsibility I took lightly. And I know it is not a responsibility that anyone in this room takes lightly today. It is the core of what we do.

As we celebrate 30 years of the Office of Community [Oriented] Policing Services, may we all recommit ourselves to its mission, and to what brought each of us to public service in the first place: the belief that everyone in this country deserves to feel safe, and to be safe, in their communities.

I am so proud of what the COPS Office has done over the past 30 years. I am so proud of our leader, Hugh, who’s done just a terrific job preserving and enhancing that legacy.

May we continue to work together to make the vision of the COPS Office a reality.

Thank you so much.

Department of Justice
Office of Public Affairs

Source: Justice.gov