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.
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.
The police are already ridiculously well-funded (on average, there are exceptions). Look at their budgets and start asking "where the hell does the money go?"
They don't need more money. They need to be held accountable.
There's another side to that, which is that overfunding of the police is coupled to underfunding of other institutions; too many social issues are framed as law-enforcement problems, and tackled with a militarized version of the law enforcement mindset.
I agree that a single data point like this doesn't provide useful intuition about whether the police are overfunded; I believe they generally are but that's based on what they do (and don't do) with the funding they have.
If you want to boil the current funding in a city down to one number, though, I don't think there's an obviously better one. You can add the school district and utility district to the denominator, the school district police to the numerator, the county sheriffs to both, etc, but you'll have to draw a line somewhere and there's likely to be some arbitrariness. Where do you put the DA's office? How do you think about tax funds which are funneled up to the state and feds but then back down in more or less localized ways (including e.g. grants to police or other city programs)? How do you think about payments on one-off referendum-authorized bonds, or the Port of Los Angeles budget? Maybe you could show me that all of these questions have either clearly right answers or don't affect the numbers enough to matter, but extrapolating from what I remember from spending some time digging into the Oakland budget a few years ago, I'm skeptical.
Defunding the police addresses the overspending. Despite millions of dollars for training, outcomes in police interactions haven't gotten better. Purchasing military surplus is another area they've spent increased budgets on as well.
I'd rather "de-fang the police" than defund them. The problems people complain about aren't budget issues, they are behavior issues: Excessive use-of-force, Escalation instead of de-escalation, Casually committing crimes on the job due to immunity, Racial bias, and the culture of good officers covering for bad ones. These can be reformed while still recognizing the positive role a well behaved and well funded police force plays in communities.
Paying for more cops has its own problems. In a high-cop low-crime environment, e.g. most suburbs, cops spend most of their time harassing people for minor things or figuring out ways to increase ticket revenue.
This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Despite the "defined the police" bogeyman, it seems as though the police budgets of every city have done nothing but increase every year.
This is what happens when you overfund a department. Especially when you target the money for a particular purpose.
All this manpower would be more useful for more important crimes, but that's not how the budget was designed.
And departments ALWAYS use all their money.
It's hard to argue "so defund them", because then you hear of cases that are being ignored.
I think the best thing to do is merge as many departments as possible, then fund them in total, and hope that someone local can direct the money where it's needed - on the fly - rather than some centralized planning budget doing it.
Police departments in major American cities have bigger budgets than almost every other country's military.
Police officers earnings often rank in the top 1% of their communities.
Compare your city's police budget with their investments in communities and education and services - things that can actually make lives better and prevent the economic desperation that leads to crime.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, and police are the very inefficient, violent cure.
The next line of argument would be that the police are underfunded and understaffed and that they need a larger budget.
It's the same thing they do everywhere else. Here in Austin the police do absolutely nothing even when you have hard evidence of someone committing a crime, partially because the police union's realized they could use 'doing nothing' as a bargaining chip for larger budgets. It's maddening that you can simply not do the job you're paid to do and use that as a way to get paid more.
Police departments have budgets, not blank checks. If the police come to the local government saying they need an extra umpty-million this year because they keep getting sued for brutality, questions are going to be asked.
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