Of course it does. But politicians who ramp up the rhetoric and threaten to have people killed does not. Flint and Camden and other cities where the police sat down or walked with the protestors have no issues. People connecting to people with understanding rarely results in violence.
I think places where the police still walk a beat (or other regular outreach over a wide area) and get to know the locals rarely have issues with regular people. But cities don't want to spend that kind of money on these things as they would rather not tax people to pay for it. Yet it's an investment in cities' future; otherwise you wind up with this.
"As they would rather not tax people to pay for it"
I think you may be underestimating how much cities dedicate their budgets to police spending:
"Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while LA teachers are getting a pay decrease)
"New York City spends more on policing than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined."
"A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion."
Note, this is, to the best of my knowledge, solely police, not even adjacent forces like e.g. fire departments or ambulances.
This is off topic for the overall thread, but important for this thread.
> "Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while LA teachers are getting a pay decrease)
The Los Angeles Unified School District boundaries don't match the Los Angeles city boundaries, so comparison is tricky, but the most recent budget available (2018-2019) was $13.8 billion. [1]
In California, school districts are not connected to city government, despite like all the mayors ever always talking about them. Zero of the LA city budget goes to LA schools, because school districts get their money from the counties they're in and the state. I don't know if San Francisco has a county government separate from its city government, so it may be an exception.
San Francisco is unique in the state in being the City and County of San Francisco; city council members are also county commissioners, and the mayor is also county executive.
The broader Bay Area is closer to the LA system, although transit and utilities are more likely to be detached from cities than education.
Personally, I'd love California to try a ballot initiative putting a 10-15%-of-budget cap on police spending in cities. I think it could easily pass, and if NYPD's 2017 strike is any indication, crime rate could actually go down [1]. NYPD ended their strike voluntarily because city officials were recognizing that maybe they weren't as necessary, after all!
I live in a city with a monetarily constrained police force.
It's great. They take the big stuff (violent crime and trafficking in hard drugs) seriously but don't have time to be running BS task forces, procuring military equipment they don't need and sitting around watching for "sketchy looking" people to harass. I'm sure it sucks to be them and they're all over worked but frankly it's great for the people.
Not being seen as jerks gives the local police better freedom of operation than the much better funded state cops who are seen as being jerks who enforce every law to the letter and nobody wants to cooperate with. I kinda feel bad for the state cops because cities like mine are where they stick the fresh academy grads who have no connections or seniority to avoid a crap assignment and then they get locals hating them for doing what the state trained them to do (also goes to show you the conflict between what the state wants and what the people of the city want).
That said, were the Real Crime(TM) to vanish I can see the local police using their newfound free time to optimize enforcement for revenue generation which would be very bad.
Less officers overall and train the remaining officers better. Besides, given that the police already get so much money and we still have problems, it seems like throwing more money at them isn't the answer.
So you want even longer wait times for an officer to respond to your complaint of a stolen car/bike or other “quality of life” crime?
How are people thinking they will get better police service (or any police service) by reducing police budgets? Most of said budget is spent on pensions anyway from the breakdowns I’ve seen. It’s not like cops are rolling in it. Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
Why do you need a sworn officer with arrest powers to come out and record your bike's serial number? Most quality of life crime could be handled by the equivalent of an unarmed zoning enforcement officer.
>So you want even longer wait times for an officer to respond to your complaint of a stolen car/bike or other “quality of life” crime?
But even in well funded departments the response is laughable. At best if your stolen item is serialized they will record that number and it will be recovered at a later date when they happen to bust someone for something else and catalog everything they found in the vicinity and their computer system tells them your thing was reported stolen.
>Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
The Massachusetts State Police and their 2-5yr recurring "whoops it looks like a bunch of people were getting paid for working overtime that wasn't actually worked, we'll fire someone as a sacrificial lamb and go right back to what we were doing" scandal would beg to differ.
That said, as much as it pains me to defend them, the fact that the job can be easy money for anyone willing to step in line with the organization means that you get people who just want to slack and make easy money or want to over achieve and run a full fledged side business on company time (MSP isn't the only MA gov department where people do this but they're known internally for it) and not the people who want to LARP as soldiers and kick down doors. As a result they don't often wind up receiving allegations of excessive force.
Obviously this is by no means and ideal status quo but it's far superior to having a more violent police force.
Please don't use LA as an example. Its not a city that can be compared to any other because of its weird patchwork nature and stupid geographic boundaries.
I studied Los Angeles history of city planning and urbanism in university, as a minor (not that makes me an expert by any means, of course, but I'm no stranger to LA, plus I've lived here for 6 years) – it's a special city, yes, but it's not fundamentally different from most other large cities in the US, including my hometown, Dallas, so much as just further along the same growth pattern (sprawl and then densification) as most sunbelt cities such as Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, San Diego, and Salt Lake City. (And as far as "stupid geographic boundaries", please see Houston or even San Diego). We could argue about this greater point all day, but nothing makes LA fundamentally special from a city-planning point of view, though it is in my heart :'-)
Regardless, as far as policing goes, NYC's 5 borough/county/city system is _much_ more complicated, which proponents might say justifies their (imo insane) $6 Billion(!) annual budget allocation, but if you compare that to NYC's $34 Billion [1] education budget, it looks a little more reasonable than LA's $3 Billion LAPD budget compared to LAUSD's $7 Billion [2] education budget.
There were reports of planned riots in rural Polk County. Knowing they didn't have the resources to cover wide spread area, the sheriff instructed citizens to shoot anyone who broke into their home. I support this. Telling citizens you can't help them, and they must protect themselves is very different than threatening that the state itself will kill you.
Complete nonsense - if you believe for one second that those “reports” were legitimate or that this was a genuine public safety measure you’re an absolute rube and a mark. This was just an elected official pandering to his electoral base of suburban fascists by validating their heroic-murder fantasies.
I think it's clearly a message to people watching the looting in the cities thinking they can get away with that in a rural area. He says it plain and simple, rural people have guns and they will kill you.
So that people do not waste precious time in a dangerous situation trying to call and/or rely on law enforcement help. I saw this tweet making rounds last night [0].
> But cities don't want to spend that kind of money on these things as they would rather not tax people to pay for it.
I'm certainly no expert in police budgeting, but when you see some police forces literally buying tanks, at least in some cases there must be room for money to be better spent. John Oliver did an interesting story on police militarization after the Ferguson riots following the shooting of Michael Brown.
Thanks for clarifying as I hadn't watched recently and I was misremembering. But certainly there must still be some expense associated with training and maintenance.
I think places where the police still walk a beat (or other regular outreach over a wide area) and get to know the locals rarely have issues with regular people. But cities don't want to spend that kind of money on these things as they would rather not tax people to pay for it. Yet it's an investment in cities' future; otherwise you wind up with this.