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?
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.
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, the Police dept has a THIRD of the total city budget (if I’m reading this correctly).
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.