Crime is rampant, cut the police budget. I hear ya'.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Community_Resources_Against_...
"...why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent..."
If you're going to say we need more money budgeted to the Fire Dept. because fires are becoming frequent and then say in your next breath we need to cut the budget of the Police because crime is becoming more frequent....
Some should go to policing, yes, community policing should increase, working the stats should decrease, dedicated mental health professionals should be funded and replace a good number of police interactions, etc.
This is a large and complex topic that deserves better than ankle deep engagement.
That said, I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity to cut waste too and in addition to slashing the police budget a great way to recover some tax money being burned by the police would be to clean up the department so that taxpayers aren't on the hook for the millions spent in lawsuits generated by their repeated abuses, screw ups, workplace injustices, etc. Much of that actually would be free money.
If the strategy isn't working at $2 billion, what makes you think it will start working at $2.1 billion?
The responsibility is on the supporters to demonstrate the efficacy of the current approach. Where are the results?
that's the past 24 hours.
If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past day. Many of these had the potential to be giant infernos and you can actively see very clear evidence of them being contained and suppressed as the fire crews responded.
The evacuation orders and rescue operations were also effective and remarkably little life has been lost.
On the contrary, with crime, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, which happened without law enforcement at all.
So unlike with say fire-fighting, there's empirically more effective strategies for dealing with crime. They do, however, require us to not be ideologically committed to punitive incarceration.