It means exactly what it says it means. It's a percentage of the operating budget of the city. You don't in fact need the percentage across all taxing bodies in order to think that this percentage is too high. This is the number that the governing body of the city is in control of. They can't do anything about expenditures on other things by outside taxing agencies. Why are you so desperate to overcomplicate a city budget? This doesn't require arcane knowledge or special mastery. It's an operating budget, and when people bitch about police funding they're talking about operations expense. Nobody gives a crap if the percentage changes when you include estuary maintenance or school district vehicle maintenance. That stuff is not in the purview of the city governing body, and it's not going to affect the percent of the municipal budget that goes to police operations. What is with the insistance that this be buried in pedantic bureaucracy?
There's nothing arcane about adding up what a city spends on parks, libraries, public safety, administration, and schools.
There is something deeply weird about finding the one taxing body in a municipality that is responsible for funding the police and then freaking out at what a big chunk of that taxing body's budget the police are. It's like complaining that parks are almost 100% of the parks department budget.
It's entirely possible that LA spends way too much on LAPD. You can demonstrate that by absolute dollars, by dollars spent per capita, or by a percentage of all tax dollars spent on policing. You probably† can't reasonably do it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of a single taxing body.
† (There might be a city where you can do that; I don't think Los Angeles is one of them).
Well, it's certainly confusing. But LA County isn't the only source of funding for the police either. The city appears to contribute ~1.9B a year out of a 10.5B budget in discretionary police spending. https://cao.lacity.org/budget20-21/2020-21Budget_Summary.pdf
My understanding is that if you include non-discretionary spending (pensions etc) that number goes up significantly.
Let me just say that I don't doubt LAPD is too expensive. I'm just saying, if we're making assessments based on percentages, those percentages only make sense in the context of all taxing bodies. Observing that something takes up 23% (or 51%) of a single taxing body doesn't mean anything at all; it just establishes that particular taxing body owns the LAPD.
