Numbers the article lacks. In 1993 the LAPD budget was $555m, or $985m today. The proposed budget for next year was $1860m, almost double. The population of LA has increased about 15% in the interim but the number of reported crimes fell from 80k/year to 30k/year. The real-dollar cost per crime reported has gone up more than 5x.
Not sure if this was your point, but you just made a case for keeping the funding. Funding went up between 1993 to today, and crime went down by 50k reports per year, even as the population increased. Read another way, funding doubled, while crime reports were cut by more than half, even though the population went up by 15%.
I know this is potentially a case of correlation doesn't equal causation, but if your goal is to argue against police budgets, these aren't the numbers to use.
> The real-dollar cost per crime reported has gone up more than 5x.
Yes, but that's a terrible way to look at something. You're not trying to reduce the cost per crime reported; you're trying to reduce the crime reported itself. That's going to take more money to accomplish, so the cost per crime going up is a good thing. It means you're getting good value for money.
EDIT: Doing some simple math, the cost per crime today is way less than the cost per crime back in 1993, according to your numbers. Drastically less.
(for the record, I don't know enough about this whole situation to have an informed opinion; my gut feeling is reducing the funding of your peacekeeping force by drastic amounts in a short time frame during a time of unrest is perhaps not wise)
Please feel free to ignoring the fact that cost of living in LA has gone up above inflation rate. Check your bias at the door please.
"For example, the Bureau of Census reports that the average price of a new home in January 2000 was $194,800.4 According to the inflation calculator, that price in January 2020 should be $297,705.3 The same report places the average sale price for January 2020 at $402,400, more than 35% higher when accounting for inflation alone."
Great, now do the LAUSD budget. It has gone up less than baseline inflation in the same period. So why are police getting a huge real-dollar increment in their budget while schools get none?
