The COPS program influenced the development of community policing in three immediate ways:

• Police chiefs became more open to adopting community policing strategies.

• COPS funds enabled law enforcement agencies to add new community policing programs without cutting back on existing programs or increasing the amount of time needed to respond to calls for help.

• COPS funds created an incentive to implement community policing strategies.

Overall, jurisdictions that received COPS funds were more likely than nongrantees to report increased use of community policing strategies such as citizen surveys and joint crime prevention projects with businesses. These agencies also were more likely to have made organizational changes in support of community policing, such as adopting new dispatch rules to increase officers' patrol time, new rules to increase officers' discretion in the field, and revised employee evaluation measures.

In spite of these advances, however, the evaluation also found that "adopting community policing" meant something different in each jurisdiction and that COPS funds were more likely to have been applied to existing initiatives—such as school truancy programs, bike patrols, and structured problem solving—than to new initiatives. That such programs were adopted by agencies that did not receive COPS funds supports such a view. There also was little evidence that COPS funds were used to establish substantive problem-solving partnerships with communities; many existed in name only or as temporary relationships.