Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Hold on a second. LAPD might be more than 50% of the budget of some Los Angeles taxing body. But --- this comes up over and over again in these discussions --- most municipalities have multiple taxing bodies. Defund advocates were all over my town claiming that the majority of our money was going to the police. But of course that wasn't true; it was a big portion of the village budget, but 2/3 of our property taxes funded school districts, which are separate taxing bodies.

Are you sure LAPD is >50% of taxes paid by LA residents? Or is it just >50% of the budget of some taxing body that is essentially just "police, fire, and sewers"?

It would be pretty shocking if LAPD was actually 50% of all Los Angeles spending. It seems pretty unlikely. Compare "Los Angeles public schools budget" to "LAPD budget" in search results.

View on HN

I don't know the specific numbers for LA, but the city discretionary budget doesn't seem like an unreasonable choice for the denominator here. That's the budget from which the mayor or city council can either allocate more to the police, or not. The number probably doesn't include the school district budget but in California that's typically not controlled by the same governing body and doesn't necessarily have the same geographic boundaries; it's not just an accounting distinction. And school boards don't even have much say here; school district funding is mostly controlled at the state level.

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)%.

according to this: https://cao.lacity.org/budget22-23/2022-23Budget_Summary.pdf

the Los angeles Police is 1.9b of a 4.9b departmental operational city budget, but there are 600m appropriations and 6.2b non departmental that are in other areas, that aren't terribly clear. So if you have 1.9b of a 11.7b budget, that about 16%.

It looks like property tax accounts for the largest chunk of revenues--20%--but keep in mind that property tax usually fund school districts and county covernment as well (here in NM something like 90% of county budget is property tax.)

So yes, at any place you happen to live your taxes and other governmental fees can easily go to a number of different entities, so while it may be true that LAPD accounts for 16% of the LA budget, it amounts to a much smaller percentage of the taxes you pay.

(Its also possible that the LAPD budget receives funding from other sources and is not accounted in the 1.9b above.)

It's not 50%, it's more like 27%: https://spectrumnews1.com/ca/la-west/politics/2022/05/18/los...

Again, that appears to be of the Los Angeles municipal general fund. Look for the schools in those numbers. If they're not there, you're just looking at one taxing body.

I'd be surprised if schools weren't the most expensive thing in Los Angeles. They are everywhere else I've looked.

LAUSD is gigantic, spends about $20 billion a year (I think about 10x what LAPD spends) and to really throw aspiring accountants for a loop, has its own police force and police budget.

23%: see page 2 of https://ceo.lacounty.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/2022-23-...

23% seems shockingly high to the point that I wish activists would get the number right so that the story wouldn't be "activists heavily overstate how much of your tax dollars go to police" and instead "a shockingly high portion of your tax dollars go to police".

This percentage doesn't mean anything; it's a fraction of a single taxing body. You need the percentage across all taxing bodies.

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.

This is the county budget, for LASD.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com