In a 1969 petition called "The Forgotten Cities," sixteen mayors from the urban Midwest complained to Attorney General Mitchell about the way state planning agencies kept law enforcement funds from the places in the state with the most severe crime problems. Instead, crime control block grants were awarded to powerful state legislators representing rural constituencies. These mayors as well as like-minded policymakers contended that urban crime was as much a threat to the security of the United States as was Vietnam. "The forces of lawlessness appear to be alarmingly close to victory over the forces of peace," Indiana Democrat Vance Hartke told his colleagues in Congress in support of the petition. "If positive action is not taken, and taken soon, a crime crisis of unprecedented proportions will soon surely envelop the nation." It seemed to Hartke and many other politicians and law enforcement officials that the LEAA did little more than build criminal justice bureaucracies at the state level. Not only did state criminal justice planning agencies use substantial portions of LEAA funding for other agencies, such as the Federal Housing Authority and the Department of Defense, but planners in Hartke's own state of Indiana used block grants for seemingly foolish programs.
Concerned about the misguided use of block grant funds, LEAA administrators debated "the degree of federal intervention required to achieve national purposes." Even if state criminal justice expenditures failed to address the problems stemming from urban street crime as policymakers had intended with block grants, the White House and the Justice Department shaped the course of the national law enforcement program with novel use of discretionary aid to ensure that "high crime" neighborhoods would be adequately patrolled and that "hard-core" criminals would receive swift and sure punishment. Treating the "all-out war" on black urban street crime as a "military operation," Nixon officials sought to "first establish the machinery that enables us to gain control of the problem before we can hope to solve it," as White House aide Tom Charles Huston put it in a March 1970 memo. This meant not only appropriating more discretionary funds but also creating new opportunities for the arrest and sentencing of the citizens whom the White House held responsible for the nation's crime.
The Nixon administration led Congress in a series of steps that successfully expanded the carceral state at the local level and maintained the War on Crime's intended focus on low-income black urban communities…
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