People are hung up on what the City Council can or can't do. But the City Council is limited to that budgeting lever because other fiscal policy is devolved to other elected bodies. All those bodies together define the city's services. Nobody would live in Los Angeles if it weren't for LAUSD. Most of public health in Los Angeles is provided by the county, not the city. Some of streets & san is paid for by use fees. Water reclamation is another body.
Again: none of this is to say that LAPD can't be overfunded. It absolutely can be. You might even be able to demonstrate it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of the city general fund... over time. But you can't do a single point measurement of LAPD's allocation from the general fund and use it as a comparative metric. That's incoherent.
I'm stuck on this because it comes up over and over again in police reform discussions, and reformers/defunders/abolitionists (I'd call myself the first of those, I guess) keep making cringeworthy innumerate arguments. I'm just across the street from Chicago in a village with just 50,000 people, and even here people make the same mistake, trying to look at the village budget in isolation --- it sounds right! Just like "the Los Angeles city budget" sounds like the thing you want to look at! But it's just not.
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.
I don't think it's arbitrary at all. Just look at the tax breakdown for a Los Angeles resident --- there's a bunch of places to get it (every metro area publishes them! they're like the receipt for your property taxes!). Once you have the relative numbers, you can back out what it means for X% of the city general fund to go to the police. Of course, schools are so expensive, whatever X% is, the real number will be <(X/2)%.
Again: none of this is to say that LAPD can't be overfunded. It absolutely can be. You might even be able to demonstrate it by looking at LAPD as a percentage of the city general fund... over time. But you can't do a single point measurement of LAPD's allocation from the general fund and use it as a comparative metric. That's incoherent.
I'm stuck on this because it comes up over and over again in police reform discussions, and reformers/defunders/abolitionists (I'd call myself the first of those, I guess) keep making cringeworthy innumerate arguments. I'm just across the street from Chicago in a village with just 50,000 people, and even here people make the same mistake, trying to look at the village budget in isolation --- it sounds right! Just like "the Los Angeles city budget" sounds like the thing you want to look at! But it's just not.