Here's how we reduce the size of government in the Bush era:

Federal, local cuts pull cops off streets

The federal program that added more than 100,000 cops to local police forces and helped to cut crime to historically low rates during the past decade is being rolled back because local governments can't afford to keep many of the officers on the street.

The Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) program was a hallmark of the Clinton administration, providing more than $8 billion in grants to saturate crime-plagued areas with officers and forging unprecedented ties between cops and neighborhood patrols....

But now budgets are leaner, and law enforcement analysts say that the largest federally funded buildup of local police in U.S. history is being washed away by cutbacks and retirements.

The COPS program, which is being phased out by the federal government, has provided grants to pay for all or part of entry-level officers' salaries during their first three years of work. Agencies that received COPS grants were required to keep the officers for a fourth year. Now, many cash-strapped police departments that have met their obligation to the grants program are trimming their ranks to meet increasingly tight local budgets.

As a result, police departments are pulling officers off patrols at a time when crime rates are beginning to tick upward again....

That's from a USA Today story that largely focuses on Minneapolis, where

$6 million in COPS grants allowed the police department to hire 81 cops and boost the city's number of officers to 938 by 1997. But officials have had to cut 140 positions since then — including 38 this year. Officers are being shifted from neighborhoods to handle emergency calls; robberies are up by 20% this year, and burglaries are up 3%.

"Our long-term, grass-roots initiatives are starting to fade," Minneapolis Police Chief Robert Olson says. "We're seeing a resurgence in gang activity. We've got gangsters showing up in hospitals with bullets in them. The real impact will be seen in a year or two."

Sometimes I wonder: Do Republicans really care about preventing crime? Oh, sure, Rudy Giuliani focused on crime prevention -- but an awful lot of Repubs over the years have paid much more attention to punishment (the death penalty, making juveniles subject to adult sentences, eliminating parole) than to keeping crime from happening in the first place. And why not? The public associates the GOP with anger at malcontents -- thus crime, when it happens on a Republican's watch, can actually play to the party's strength. I wouldn't argue that Republicans actually want crime to increase, but the public just doesn't blame them when crime happens the way it blames Democrats, so I don't think a self-preservation instinct inspires them to press for crime-prevention measures that actually work.