CRIME BILL RAISES FALSE HOPES OF SAFE SOCIETY

Watching our solons on Capitol Hill finally grind out a crime bill wasn't exactly a confidence-building exercise. It is, after all, late August. Ordinarily, Congress would have been dismissed weeks ago, with representatives and senators sent home to visit with constituents or to go off on vacation, with plans to return rested and refreshed after Labor Day.

Washington, located as it is in a malarial swamp in the Potomac lowlands, is a place best escaped from during the dog days of summer. It is easy to agree with the old lawmaker who observed that the place started going downhill when all those huge buildings on Capitol Hill were air conditioned.

It is time to say it: the crime bill Congress spent so many weeks debating is a farce, unredeemed by its levity.

This past week, on one of the network morning shows, the interviewee was Kansas City Mayor Emmanuel Cleaver. Mayor Cleaver is a distinguished African American with impeccable liberal credentials. As mayor, however, and unlike members of Congress, he is an executive who must deal in the gritty, budget-conscious realities of running a city. Mayor Cleaver said he didn't want the police that are promised in the bill. The police are, of course, the Clinton administration's proudest boast. The real and legitimate complaint of Mayor Cleaver is that after a couple of years these additional police officers get dumped on the cities. Federal money for cops is in the bill for only a few years. After that, they are just another dreaded, unfunded federal mandate for localities.

Scrutinize the bill more closely, however, and you will find that there aren't 100,000 police officers, as is repeatedly claimed, but more like 20,000. There are two or three social workers for every new cop in this bill. This led some opponents to observe that the American people need to be certain that when they call 911, they get a cop, not a social worker. We know that many of the denizens of Washington believe themselves to be smarter than the average American, but really: How dumb do they think Americans are?

In this farce, the closest thing to humor comes when some administration flack or liberal senator gets up to make the case that the law-abiding members of the National Rifle Association, three million strong, are the reason we have a serious crime problem. Give us a break.

Assault weapons? Give us another break. Florida's Commission on Assault Weapons showed that over the previous three-year period, assault weapons were used in 0.14 percent of violent crimes. In congressional testimony last year, the Trenton, N.J., deputy police chief, Joseph Constance, said: "Since police started keeping statistics, we now know that assault weapons were used in an underwhelming 0.026 of 1 percent of crimes in New Jersey. This means that my officers are more likely to confront an escaped tiger from the local zoo than to confront an assault rifle in the hands of a drug-crazed killer on the streets."

Need more evidence of the bill's farcical nature? How about these, hidden away inside it: $567 million more for child center activities, $45 million for six new sports centers developed by the U.S. Olympic Committee, $2.7 million to track missing Alzheimer's patients and a new task force to study nonindigenous plant and animal species. If this is crime control, then Pee Wee Herman is chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Joseph McNamara, former chief of police in San Jose, Calif., called this crime bill a "$30 billion dollar boondoggle." He is right.

Every high school civics student learns that the criminal justice system -- especially those parts dealing with violent crime, which so concerns Americans today -- is primarily a function of local and state governments. In spite of this, the crime bill sent by the Senate to President Clinton last Thursday federalizes scores of crimes. The American people aren't buying the administration line that federalizing a host of property and violent crimes is going to stem the tide of vicious crimes in our local communities.

We salute Missouri Sen. Kit Bond and Rep. Bill Emerson for their votes against this monstrosity. We are sorely disappointed to see Sen. John Danforth make the crucial difference in going along with a badly misconceived bill.