Office of Community Oriented Policing Services Grant to the Benton Harbor Police Department, Benton Harbor, Michigan

Audit Report GR-50-08-006
May 2008
Office of the Inspector General


Executive Summary

The Office of the Inspector General, Audit Division, has completed an audit of a grant awarded by the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) to the Benton Harbor, Michigan, Police Department (BHPD). The purpose of the COPS in Schools (CIS) grant program is to provide funding directly to local, state, and tribal jurisdictions for the hiring and deployment of new, additional, career law enforcement officer position(s) in and around primary and secondary schools. The BHPD was awarded a total of $1 million to hire eight new, full-time police officers for 3 years, starting September 1, 2004.

We reviewed the BHPD’s compliance with six essential grant conditions.1 We found the BHPD to be in material non-compliance with COPS’ grant requirements for each of the grant conditions, including budgeting for local officer positions, hiring of additional officers, source of local match requirements, requesting reimbursements, retaining officer positions, and community policing strategies. Because of these deficiencies, we question a total of $743,701 in reimbursements received by the BHPD.2

These items are discussed in detail in the Findings and Recommendations section of the report. Our audit objectives, scope, and methodology appear in Appendix I. We discussed the results of our audit with BHPD officials, and we included their comments in the report, as applicable. In addition, we provided our draft audit report to the BHPD and the COPS office and received written comments. These comments have been appended to our report along with our analysis of the responses.



Footnotes

  1. Additional information about our audit objectives, scope, and methodology appear in Appendix I.

  2. The Inspector General Act of 1988 contains our reporting requirements for questioned costs and funds to better use. However, not all findings are dollar-related. See Appendix II for a breakdown of our dollar-related findings and for definitions of questioned costs and funds to better use.



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