Bush's war on cops: welcome back to the '80s. Thanks to White House policy, police departments are understaffed, cops are overwhelmed, murders are up, and killers are getting away.

• Author: Wallace-Wells, Benjamin

I am riding through Richmond, Va., with Sergeant David Wallis of the city police, and it is raining at a nearly biblical level--silver-dollar sized fat splats of water slapping against every surface. It's one of those late afternoon summer thunderstorms that starts out looking like it's got to be over in half a minute, and somehow just lasts and lasts. The city's streets are deserted and, Sgt. Wallis says, it's a good bet anyone still outside is a threat to public safety. We find them, camped outside an impregnable-looking housing project called Whitcomb Court. A few teenagers are standing spaced sentry-like, every thousand feet or so, along the project's main road. They have umbrellas cocked over their shoulders, but are still getting drenched. They're street-level crack dealers, says Wallis, the advance guard for the municipal menace. Even in these conditions they stay outside, like hardy weeds, peering jumpily down the road, hoping for a sale. Wallis drives by slowly, but the scrawny, soaked dealers don't scamper away, they just shoot him pugnacious you-can't-touch-me smirks. This is usual, Wallis says: "They know we've got no backup, and so they're not even scared of us anymore?

It wasn't always like this. Ten years ago, Wallis mad a 25-officer narcotics squad cleaned out Whitcomb Court. They set up surveillance teams in the elementary school that abuts the project and staged regular raids, cops piling out of a suddenly arrived line of six, eight, 10 cars to snatch all the dealers and guns they could. Within three months, the dealer pyramid in Whitcomb Court had been broken, its principals in jail and the project quiet.

Afterwards when Wallis and his squad would ride through Whitcomb Court, the older residents would sometimes cheer.

Richmond's police were praised from all points on the political spectrum--from the Clinton administration to the NRA--for halving the city's murder rate in the 1990s. One hundred and sixty people were killed in Richmond in 1994, and 70 in 2001. Richmond's method was simple: a concentrated program of aggressive beat policing and strict enforcement of gun laws.

But now, Wallis and many of his colleagues report, they simply can't mount such focused campaigns. Richmond is in the throes of a manpower shortage that has stripped cops off street beats and forced the city to change its neighborhood policing strategies. "All we're able to do right now is respond to calls which come in," the department's chief, Andre Parker, told me. "We don't have enough men to do any proactive policing. It's very worrying."

Aggressive programs like the ones Richmond used to bring down crime require extra officers, so that while some cops are responding to ongoing crimes, others can stalk crooks. Now, Richmond deploys 90 fewer active officers (the department has 670 total) than it did when crime was plummeting. It's no coincidence, police officials here and criminologists nationwide argue, that the city's murder rate, after seven consecutive years of decline, jumped by 20 percent in 2002 and by another 15 percent in the first six months of 2003. With fewer detectives, fewer of Richmond's murders can be solved--only 22 percent of murders were solved last year, compared to 35 percent in 2000. Other crimes, particularly robbery, are also increasingly common--trends, say community leaders, that are endangering inner-city Richmond's fragile revitalization.

Richmond is a dramatic example of a trend that is beginning to appear around the country. After eight straight years of decline in the 1990s, the murder rate has begun to increase: by 2.5 percent ha 2001, and then another 0.8 percent in 2002. Those two sight increases have meant hundreds more violent deaths each year.

Dips and surges in the crime rate, locally and nationally, depend on many complicated factor, from the health of the economy to the number of criminals in prison to the abundance of guns and drugs on the street. Criminologists have said that the present surge in many cities' crime rates is due in part to the recession and in part from a simple law of averages--crime can't go down forever. But more police on the street is one of the most effective ways to keep crime down--it's also the one factor that lies immediately within the control of government.

Tellingly, those cities, like Richmond, that suffer from the worst cop shortages are also experiencing the most dramatic spikes ha crime. Police ha Portland, Ore, which is 64 officers short of its full 1,000-officer staffing, have noticed a rise in crime across the board in the first four months of 2003. Chief Mark Kroeker says he thinks the "scariest" jump in violent crime is yet to come. Minneapolis, normally a 900-officer department, is some 200 cops short, and crime is up 46 percent since Sept. 11, 2001. Los Angeles is more than 1,000 cops short of full staffing. Crime there jumped by 7 percent in the last half of 2001 and by another 1 percent ha 2002, a year in which the murder rate jumped by 11 percent.

How can cities be so foolish as to cut their police forces and spark an inevitable rise in crime? Part of the problem is the state and local fiscal crisis that has hit communities across the nation. But faced with the need to trim budgets, most cities have first cut health, education, and transportation spending, and tried to preserve their police forces. The real cause of the police shortage is not in City Hall but in the White House. The Bush administration's first budget eliminated all direct funding for street cops. The war in Iraq, fought largely without allies, has required the call-up of huge numbers of reserves, many of whom are cops. And instead of using the men in blue as eyes mad ears on the domestic war on terrorism, the administration has, in effect, used them as glorified security guards. The federal government's repeated directives to local police to beef up patrols at potential terrorist targets have taken officers away from their regular duties. And because the reds have not paid for many of these extra patrols, homeland security has stretched local budgets even further.

On his Sept. 14, 2001, visit to Ground Zero, the president famously addressed a group of cops and firemen through a bullhorn, from the top of a pile of mangled steel. When someone in the crowd called out that he couldn't hear the president, Bush said, spontaneously: "I can hear you. The rest of the world can hear you." But now many cops feel they're not being heard. During an interview in late July, Richmond's Chief Parker told me he's been "dismayed at the current administration's attitude towards local law enforcement." The administration, he said, has not "seemed to grasp what we face."

The Thinning Blue Line

If the sudden disintegration of police forces and, in Richmond and so many other cities, the correlative return of crime have not yet caught the attention of most of the public, it may be at least ha part because after eight straight years of declining crime in the 1990s, most of us have come to assume that the issue has been defanged. Much has been written about that dramatic drop. Criminologists, journalists, and criminal scientists ascribed crime's decline to the decade's sustained economic boom, the subduing of the crack epidemic, and a profound national shift in policing--a change often described as community policing. The new model, which emphasized a tangible police presence in the community, solving neighborhood problems, and talking with residents, became working doctrine in the nation's...