U.S. awards $1 billion police grants, skips some cities

New York City Police Department officers stand at attention during the funeral procession for a slain NYPD officer in New York June 4, 2009.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The U.S. government awarded $1 billion in grants from the economic stimulus plan to police departments across the country on Tuesday, but it skipped four major cities, including New York.

More than 7,000 cities, counties and Indian tribes applied for money to hire and retain police officers, driving the total request up to $8.3 billion, the Justice Department said.

New York, one of the largest metropolitan areas in the country, did not see a single cent.

Money from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act that was passed in February to help pull the country out of recession and arrest the growth in the ranks of the unemployed, is being injected through a three-year grant program known as Community Oriented Policy Services (COPS).

"The decision to deny New York City funding from the COPS grant program is disappointing, to put it mildly," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg in a statement.

The New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said the city needs support given its World Trade Center was attacked twice, with thousands dying on September 11, 2001.

"There have been eight major terrorist threats against the city since September 11, 2001," Kelly told reporters.

The city had hoped to use the federal funds to start a police class with about 200 recruits around January but now will have to wait for the next fiscal year in July, he said.

"After two successful terrorist attacks at the heart of the nation's financial center, there should be substantial and continuing federal support for the NYPD in its counterterrorism and conventional crime fighting missions," Bloomberg said.

The large Texas metropolis of Houston did not receive any grant funding, because "our city budget is not distressed and our crime rates have gone down to the lowest levels in decades," its mayor, Bill White, said in a statement.

Still, he said, "this is the wrong decision for the wrong reasons."

Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Seattle, the dominant city of the Pacific Northwest, also did not receive any grants.

In deciding which requests to fulfill, the Justice Department weighed communities' fiscal health and crime levels equally. It distributed half of the funding to areas with populations of more than 150,000 people and the other half to areas with populations of fewer than 150,000.

Rep. Anthony Weiner, who represents Queens and Brooklyn in New York City, is demanding "a thorough explanation" from the Justice Department about why the four cities were skipped.

Speaking in Philadelphia, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder said the department received applications to hire 39,000 officers. The final awards will cover only 11.9 percent of those requests. They will save 881 jobs, by rehiring officers or averting layoffs, and create 3,818.

"The tremendous demand for these grants is indicative of both the tough times our states, cities and tribes are facing, and the unyielding commitment by law enforcement to making our communities safer," he said.

Nearly 30 police departments were barred from applying because they had histories of misappropriating grants or violating rules. New Jersey's largest police departments, Camden and Newark, were excluded.

(Reporting by Lisa Lambert; Additional reporting by Jeremy Pelofsky in Washington and Joan Gralla in New York; Editing by Kenneth Barry)