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Extraordinarily Inept. Mitchell's "decelerating rate of increase" is not to be discounted entirely; however misleading, it does represent progress of a sort—if the trend continues. But Nixon and Mitchell can take little credit for the improvement, just as they could not logically blame the Kennedy and Johnson Administrations for the rising crime rates of the early and middle 1960s. Crime is overwhelmingly the concern of local police agencies. Apart from trying to set up a framework of public order, and occasional FBI assistance, there is little the Federal Government can do to aid local law-enforcement agencies. Since 1968, Washington has been contributing funds to state and local police agencies through the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration (LEAA), but the handling of the program has been extraordinarily inept.
The history of the LEAA has been one of waste and mismanagement. A House subcommittee investigation last July turned up testimony that only a fraction of the $860 million appropriated by Congress as federal anticrime funds had actually reached the local agencies for which the money was intended. One witness described in detail the misuse of LEAA funds in Alabama; for example, $117,247 earmarked for a police-cadet program was used to pay college tuition for children of high-ranking officials in the state's department of public safety and their friends.
Boondoggling. Part of LEAA's difficulties can be attributed to its newness; birth pangs plague any bureaucratic infant. It boasts the fastest-growing budget of any federal agency: LEAA appropriations have jumped from $63 million in fiscal 1969 to $699 million in the current fiscal year. The agency also limped along for ten months without a chief administrator. Jerris Leonard, a Mitchell protégé who was less than a smashing success as the Justice Department's civil rights chief, finally moved over to run LEAA last April. Still, the one channel through which the Administration could have made a substantial contribution to combatting crime has been clogged by bungling and boondoggling.
The Democrats have yet to blast Nixon for his poor performance on crime. One reason is that they are equally short of answers. Once the 1972 presidential campaign begins in earnest, however, it will be awfully tempting for the Democratic nominee to take the President to task, a copy of Nixon's 1968 campaign speeches in one hand, the latest FBI crime statistics in the other.