When asked by KABC about his defunding claims, Villanueva acknowledged that his budget is higher — but not enough to cover rising costs. He said that if day-to-day costs grow faster than his budget, that is “direct defunding, of course.”
Barger, in response, said that cost increases impact many county departments and are not unique to the sheriff’s department.
“He plays as though he’s being targeted,” Barger said of Villanueva. “And he’s not.”
In fact, Los Angeles County’s 2023 budget will increase the sheriff’s department budget by another quarter of a billion dollars.
An ‘impossible environment’
Some in law enforcement say that even more than budget cuts, what’s really hurt police departments is anti-police rhetoric.
Following Floyd’s murder in 2020, protesters in New York clashed with NYPD officers for days on end. Officers arrested hundreds of protesters each night, and the department says more than 300 officers were among those hurt.
Seeking accountability, some politicians called for $1 billion to be cut from the NYPD’s budget.
But the billion-dollar cut never happened. The NYPD’s budget fell by just 2.8%, dropping from $5.6 billion in 2019 to $5.4 billion in 2022.
MORE: Photos: How protests erupted across the country after the death of George Floyd
Nevertheless, Police Benevolent Association President Patrick Lynch said the defund movement hurt officer morale.
“More than any budget cut, the greatest damage from the ‘Defund the Police’ movement was done by its anti-police, anti-public safety message,” Lynch told WABC in New York. “It has created an impossible environment on the streets, one where even the simplest interactions turn into a confrontation.”
The result was a massive NYPD exodus. Retirements in 2020 skyrocketed 72% from the previous year, and this year the NYPD lost more employees through the month of August than it had during that same time period in any previous year.
“As more cops quit, the workload becomes more crushing for those who remain,” Lynch said. “Public safety ultimately suffers.”
Being ‘all things to everybody’
Criminal justice experts say that even if the cuts were real, the premise that lower police spending leads to increased crime — or vice versa — is counter to decades of evidence, according to public data.
An ABC analysis of state and local police funding and overall violent crime data in the U.S. between 1985 and 2020 found no relationship between year-to-year police spending and crime rates. An analysis by the Washington Post found similar results from 1960 to 2018.
Further ABC analysis of Los Angeles County’s own crime data shows that, over the last decade, violent crime numbers haven’t moved up or down in relation to the amount of money spent on law enforcement or the number of officers on patrol.
Kimberly Dodson, a retired law enforcement officer who is now a criminologist at the University of Houston-Clear Lake, said that’s because police largely respond to crime instead of deter it.
“Crime happens. Somebody calls the police, and they come and take a report. Then they try to solve the crime after the fact,” Dodson told KTRK in Houston. “So saying that the police deter crime is not actually accurate, because they’re more of a reactive agency.”
Dodson said one reason police agencies feel stretched is because communities have been asking them to “be all things to everybody — and that doesn’t seem fair.”
For example, said Dodson, police these days are asked to respond to problems caused by longstanding mental health issues, family conflicts, or issues related to entrenched poverty that’s taken hold over decades.
“We always talked about, as police officers, we go out for 10 minutes and we fix something that’s been wrong and put a Band-Aid on it, something that’s been wrong for 10 years — and it’s just an impossible task,” said the former officer.
Changing that would mean changing the way emergency calls get handled, says Ray.
MORE: As crimes rise, battles rage on about police funding
The Brookings Institution senior fellow is researching ways to narrow the mission of police so they only handle crime and safety, allowing government resources to be reallocated so problems not requiring police intervention could be handled by others.
“Are there better ways by which to think about calls for service, whether that be with mental health responses, whether that be with different sort of traffic officers handling those particular issues?” he said.
Such an arrangement could provide police even more time to focus on solving crimes and protecting people.
“It could actually free them up,” said Ray.
ABC’s John Kelly, Mark Nichols, Maia Rosenfeld, Lindsey Feingold, Nick Natario, Maggie Green, Lisa Bartley, Carlos Granda, Jared Kofsky and Tonya Simpson contributed to this report.
Despite ‘defunding’ claims, police funding has increased in many US cities originally appeared on abcnews.go.com
Article Appeared @https://www.yahoo.com/gma/despite-defunding-claims-police-funding-123407785.html