As a PA resident, I've been hearing one of many reasons for the poor infrastructure is that a fairly big chunk of the road and bridge maintenance budget is being redirected to the State Police: https://www.lehighvalleylive.com/lehigh-county/2019/04/42-bi...
What happens in town after town is that the anti-tax folks decide that there's no need to fund a local police department when the PA State Police is obligated to take over policing. There's currently no mechanism for the state to charge these towns for this service and their state reps fight any effort to put one in place. So year after year the State Police's budget grows out of control and infrastructure funds are an easy way to cover the costs.
I think the headline sounds like the police took all the money, but that's not quite the case.
> The department’s overall budget is $10.2 billion, and it allocates $2.5 billion to construction projects annually. Richards said, last year, $802 million went to state police.
And regular reminder that dollars are fungible, and despite theoretical earmarks, it's really hard to say that this dollar was supposed to pay for that. If the budget didn't work, they'd just push it around in other ways. But still, fixing bridges before collapsing would be nice.
At face value, many police departments do seem overfunded. In many small towns you'll see too many patrol cars for the area, new patrol cars too often, unnecessary improvements to the department, etc. while other areas of the budget languish because it's politically unpopular to go against the police department and people fear retaliation for advocating against them.
Why bring it up? Because cities are special purpose vehicles to fund police/firefighter pensions which have a side hustle in providing civic infrastructure. That's quite relevant to the question of why costs are increasing (because politically powerful people got placated), whether investments in infrastructure will reduce costs (strictly impossible), and whether property developers are to blame for underfunded infrastructure (they do not receive checks from the city every month).
20-25% is about average for non-pension expenditures on police.
It's easy to lose context of just how massive a part of PA Philadelphia is. The city proper alone has more than 10% of the state's population (1.5MM to PA's ~12.7). Add in the other PA counties and you're close to 4. Add in the out-of-state parts of the Metropolitan area and you're quickly closing in on 6.
I've always felt safe when I've been there but given the sheer volume of people, I'd surprised they're not spending a larger amount of police forces.
I live in a small Pennsylvania borough with an operating budget of about $1 mil/year (this includes all services for the entire borough of 3-4 precincts).
Our police department is 8 full-time officers and 3 part-time officers with I believe 2 full-time admin/support staff in the office. We have 5 cruisers, 4 SUVs and at the last borough council meeting the council approved the purchase of a 6th brand new cruiser and a new fleet of AR-15 style rifles for the officers.
Well then, the administrators of roads and ambulances should probably lobby to have the police taxes be separable, before too many people decide to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Local police are locally funded which creates huge issues even for private companies. IMO, removing all local police funding would 'solve' most of these issues much more directly.
PS: Ditto schools. Also, this is about funding nothing says control can't remain at the local level, but traffic ticket revenue for example should not end up in a small towns budget.
A contributor to that dynamic is that it isn’t always going straight towards the police department: it’s corrupting even if it is going into a general fund for the locality which sets the police budget.
Further, that doesn’t address the potential for decreased costs for law enforcement.
It's not as though cities and towns are using fine dollars to educate children and feed the homeless. They're not. They're using it to pay more police salaries so they can write more tickets. They're simply using the money to further their own existence. God forbid the towns be forced to find an alternate way to pay for, reduce or cut a service in the face of shrinking revenues.
Except that there's a complex system or corruption that got things into that state. Moving money from the police will probably not be spent on anything beneficial, but instead into what ever political agenda comes up next.
You should look at how much of the budget the police dept takes of an average town. In my med-small town they're 50% of the city budget. Police depts are shockingly well funded compared to the problems they actually end up solving.
For all the talk of "defund the police," state and local police departments don't actually have the budget to hire someone who knows which way is up in choosing third-party contractors for online services (much less the budget to contract with services that aren't lowest-bidder).
Actually, this is yet another example of why defunding the police is so important---they don't even spend the budget they have well.
Honestly, I don't have a lot of sympathy. Many PDs have done this to themselves with bullshit like asset seizures, buying military-grade equipment for no reason, dragging their feet on officer investigations and complaints ("paid administrative leave"...what a joke) just to name a few.
Over the past ~60 years as municipal budgets for infrastructure, parks, social services and the like have shrunk, you know what part hasn't but actually got larger? Police budgets. And look where it's got us today.
What happens in town after town is that the anti-tax folks decide that there's no need to fund a local police department when the PA State Police is obligated to take over policing. There's currently no mechanism for the state to charge these towns for this service and their state reps fight any effort to put one in place. So year after year the State Police's budget grows out of control and infrastructure funds are an easy way to cover the costs.
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