We’re gonna need more than 50m. How about the 3b we give to LAPD?
Me: That can’t possibly be right. There is no way the LAPD costs more to operate than the entire country of Madagascar.
Also me: Well I’ll be damned
(It looks to me like 2b, not 3b, but that’s still a fuck of a lot of money, and still more than Madagascar)
(Edit: A fun side note to this is that it probably means that if the LAPD really wanted to, it would have the ability to win a war with Madagascar and take it over.)
It was 3b until the George Floyd protests. Then we defunded them. Now they’re trying to claw it back. They just got 500mill added to their budget last year.
Ah, got it. Makes sense.
Personally I do not like defunding as a primary solution. If you have a shitty police department, and you give them less money, you’re going to get a much shittier police department, of a slightly smaller size, and you’re going to have more crime. That doesn’t sound like progress. I can see it making sense where there is so much bloat in the budget that they’re getting tons of money they don’t need, but even then, you won’t have solved anything by giving them less money except for an economic problem, which usually isn’t the most pressing concern if you have bad police.
I feel like: Make the right reforms so that the department won’t be shitty, and then you won’t need to punish them, and they can do their jobs. Although where the LAPD is concerned that might involve sending them to Madagascar and starting over from scratch.
I’ve gone down that rabbit hole, looking over the FBI’s, statista’s, Brookings, and other published crime rates over the 14- years. Over that time the crime type fluctuations weren’t as drastic as the news or police departments would have you believe.
As an example here are the homicide rates for that time period:
Crime rates before George Floyd:
Homicide Based on the FBI Uniform Crime Reports data provided in the search results, the homicide rates for major U.S. cities from 2010 to 2019 showed the following trends:
- The national homicide rate declined from 4.8 per 100,000 people in 2010 to 4.5 per 100,000 in 2014.
- After 2014, there was an upward trend in homicide rates, which began in 2015.
- By 2019, the homicide rate had increased to 6.0 per 100,000 people. (It’s important to note that these figures represent national averages, and individual cities experienced varying rates) https://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm https://counciloncj.org/homicide-trends-report/ https://usafacts.org/articles/which-states-have-the-highest-murder-rates/
Crime rates after GF:
Homicide Based on the search results, a general average for homicide rates in the United States from 2020 to 2024 can be summarized as follows:
- 2020: 6.42 per 100,000 people
- 2021: 6.81 per 100,000 people
- 2022-2024: Declining trend, with rates approaching pre-pandemic levels
- 2024 (first half): On track to return to levels close to 2019 (While an exact average for the entire period isn’t provided, the general range appears to be between 6.0 and 7.0 per 100,000 people, with a peak in 2021 and a subsequent decline towards pre-pandemic levels.) https://www.brookings.edu/articles/why-did-u-s-homicides-spike-in-2020-and-then-decline-rapidly-in-2023-and-2024/ https://counciloncj.org/crime-trends-in-u-s-cities-mid-year-2024-update/ https://www.macrotrends.net/global-metrics/countries/USA/united-states/murder-homicide-rate
edited for lame-o formatting and removed some weird percentages from notes I didn’t finish looking up and therefore the stats weren’t complete and not referenced either.
