More Cops On Streets Should Be A Priority Anti-Dare Popular Program Simply Does Not Work, Despite Best Of Intentions

Who wouldn’t support DARE?

After all, the Drug Abuse Resistance Education program has the noblest of goals: Keeping our children off drugs. Historically, it has been supported by educators, law enforcement officers, parents and this newspaper.

And the kids love it.

So who wouldn’t support it? The Spokane Police Department, for one. Faced with budget cuts proposed for 1996, the department has decided it can’t afford DARE.

“We had to prioritize,” Assistant Police Chief Dave Peffer said, explaining the program’s deletion from next year’s budget.

That’s right. The department was told to cut at least $1 million next year. The $550,000 spent on DARE in 1995 would pay for seven officers on patrol duty in 1996, helping to deal with a rapidly rising violent crime rate.

Despite the public’s recent cost-cutting mood, the proposal will meet resistance. Why? According to a recent editorial in this newspaper, “DARE is one of the few things communities do, as a community, to pass along their values concerning drug and alcohol abuse and to equip kids with the refusal skills they will need to resist it in the future.”

Who wouldn’t support that? It sounds like basic parenting. The message is viable. But this messenger isn’t.

A major nationwide study funded by the Department of Justice - which hardly could be labeled anti-DARE concluded the program’s “impact on drug use is small.”

In other words, we’re spending our hard-to-come-by tax dollars on a program that just doesn’t work.

The study, released in September 1994, found that DARE’s appeal “cuts across all racial, social and socio-economic lines.” That’s the trap. DARE makes us feel as if we are doing something to combat one of our nation’s greatest ills.

But we’re not.

Spokane’s Police Department is on the right track. “We need to take the message of DARE, but use non-police people to deliver that message,” Peffer said.

The Justice Department’s report stated DARE was no more effective than other anti-drug programs. That means the school districts’ programs were working. And our local Police Department wasn’t shelling out $550,000 a year. And more police officers were on the street. Who wouldn’t support that?

, DataTimes MEMO: For opposing view, see headline: Crime prevention should be a priority

The following fields overflowed: SUPCAT = COLUMN, EDITORIAL - From both sides