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While using federal dollars to put more police officers on the street probably will lower crime rates, it's a stretch to think doing so stimulates the economy.

Granted, cities would spend their grants to hire, but the limited number of new law enforcement jobs would pale compared to those created for building roads, bridges and other public works projects.

It boils down to truth in packaging. Consider that the rationale for the Obama administration's costly stimulus plan is to create jobs, boost consumer spending and stem rising mortgage foreclosures -- not to fight crime.

It's even debatable whether a down economy automatically leads to higher crime rates. The argument is that unemployment and indebtedness result in more property offenses and robberies. Yet some of the nation's highest crime rates have been recorded during boom times.

As proposed, the stimulus plan includes about $4 billion to revive grants dating back to the Clinton administration that funded drug task forces, after-school programs, prisoner rehabilitation and salaries for local police officers. In the 1990s, the money was used to hire more than 100,000 police officers nationwide.

Yet critics say the federal cash infusion was mostly ineffective in reducing crime and seldom cost-effective. Under President George W. Bush, funding was cut drastically.

Because those grants were good only for three years, local and state governments faced the tough choice of finding new local funding sources to cover the jobs or letting them disappear.

However, that inevitability tends to be overlooked, particularly by large cities looking for a quick fix. New York City's police commissioner has noted that ''getting police officers (900) at no cost to us is good news." Unfortunately, they may be expendable when the grant runs out.

And unless a beleaguered criminal-justice system and overcrowded prisons expand enough to handle the hoped-for rise in arrests, current logjams only will worsen. The financial burden of expanding those facilities likely will fall on state and local taxpayers.

The president's stimulus initiative runs the risk of being hijacked in Congress by those who see it as nothing more than another federal earmark. They argue that Main Street should benefit just as much as did Wall Street and the financial sector.

But such flawed reasoning jeopardizes the plan's effectiveness in addressing the lingering economic malaise.

A case can be made for additional federal law enforcement funding, but on its own merit -- not tucked away in the stimulus package.