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US Authoritarianism @lemmy.world

alphanerd4 @lemmy.world

3mo ago

For My Local Town it’s Almost Exactly 55% to 45% cop Funding to Everything Else. What’s Yours?

That does include parking enforcement. Which is done through that half of Townhall. Oh yeah, that’s the other part. They get literally half the real estate of town hall which is delightfully unsubtle.

But yeah, remember specifically that freaking the cops taking on all of these duties, or having these duties thrust upon them outside of their control whatever version of this that you buy into,. Having a whole bunch of unrelated social functions being addressed under the regions of the police forces is the criticism, it’s not some separate part. Why, does parking enforcement or local security or non union road crews get organized and paid from the police department instead of the local government?

Political Memes @lemmy.world

For My Local Town it’s Almost Exactly 55% to 45% cop Funding to Everything Else. What’s Yours?

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I live in a county, without an incorporated city; so, our budget reflects the whole county. And thankfully, the county already breaks the budget down by percentages:
#1 - Public schools - 50%
#2 - Capital Improvements - 7.7%
#3 - Debt Service - 7.6%
#4 - Fire, Rescue and Emergency Services - 7.4%
#5 - Law Enforcement - 6.3%
#6 - Social Services - 5.6%
Everything else drops off sharply from here
Honestly, not all that unexpected. Education is expensive and is mostly done at the State and Local levels. So ya, that's most of the budget. "Capital Improvements" could probably be titled "roads, and a couple other things which barely count". So again, not a surprise. Roads are not cheap to maintain, especially in a rural county. I was surprised that law enforcement was as far down the list as it is. And also seeing Social Service being more than a rounding error was nice. All in all, not terrible.
- In my township (a Philly suburb) the annual budget for the latest fiscal year was $9 million. The school budget (which is entirely separate from the township budget) was $93 million. Police budget was $3.6 million - which is 3.5% of the overall budget if you include the school money in the overall budget, but appears to be a whopping 40% of the township budget if you exclude the schools. I'm no fan of cops, but I think the inflated percentages reported for police budgets are generally the result of this sort of financial sleight-of-hand.
  Fun irrelevant fact: I'm a school bus driver for my district and from time to time local cops will sail past my stopped bus with the red lights flashing, one hand on their steering wheels and the other holding their phones. Sometimes they look up briefly at the sound of my horn. At least they're not drinking while driving, I suppose.

Our city stopped spending money on cops, so the state passed a law saying that the city had to pay even more money to the cops. Then the city voters passed a law that basically said, "nuh uh!"
So then the state passed a constitutional amendment that mandated spending levels for our city, and only our city. The whole state got to vote on an issue that they weren't even involved in.
And that's how Kansas City lost free public transportation.
- That’s both sad and unsurprising. Except for the part where it seems like every blue city outside my stupid state at least gets to try having good public transportation.
  
  Laughs nervously in a Boston accent….
- Can you please make a post here or message me with more information? That kind of local knowledge is desperately tricky to write about.
- Wait, didn't KC renew the free bus service for the coming year? Or are you referring to something else?
  KC also still has the free trolley last I checked although that has a pretty limited range.

How do I even find this out? Is there a specific resource for this, or do I have to ask my City Hall?
- Web search “[city name] budget” and see if it’s posted.
  SF’s document is yuuge. Apparently 9% per secondary source:
  
  Oh my, my Police dept has a THIRD of the total city budget (if I'm reading this correctly).
  Edited for clarity, I’m not in SF and can do basic math.

My town is better than I thought. $25.6 million in expenses, $1.49 million of that is law enforcement. Or 5.7%
Edited because my decimal was over one place too far.

Hard to get my exact town but it does not seem very high but the closest large city is 15% but its unclear if that includes lawsuits for police misconduct which are common and large.

This was interesting to look up. My town's budget documents are laid out really well with lots of detail and commentary about WHY they spend money on things.
They lump all emergency services under one category which is 11% of the budget. Fire&Rescue is 1/75th of that and police and admin are the rest. Worth noting we have a volunteer fire department which I guess accounts for their extremely low budget.

Thicc blue line needs less donuts

Where are these numbers coming from ? My town looks like 7% and I see many others here around 10%, so how is there such a difference? OP should check their numbers or give more detail on what they included

Over in Lynnwood WA, it takes a lot to give people speeding tickets.
Just imagine how much it costs to park a cop car on the side of the road and to have someone judging how shiny the paint on each car is.... Too shiny? That's a rich asshole, let him thru. Mat finish? 🤔 Could be a car enthusiast.Toyota with mat finish, oh you don't live here! Here's your ticket! Don't think about coming back thru here, even if they closed the road and this is the only freeway entrance road left!
- it's matte, not mat btw.
  Figured you might want to know.
  
  It's math!

That’s a thick boy

38% or ~160 million here.

Looked it up for my city. The budget is about 20% police budget. It's the 2nd largest expenditure for my city.

can we just start making satirical flags that aren't real?
Putting up a pride flag is cool and all but im not keen on idiots ripping into me for that shit for no reason (i dont care, literally go complain anywhere else please) nor am i keen on becoming a public target. It's also just a really nice flag, unironically, a good flag.
i'm just so bored of people caring about flags.
- I want to have a sign or shirt which counters those "if this flag offends you" and "freedom" people. It has a trans or LGBT flag, and says "If *this" flag offends you then you don't know what freedom is."
  
  that would be pretty funny tbh.

28 comments