Los Angeles is such a poorly run city that Mayor Karen Bass has to weaken the city’s police department even further for budgetary purposes.
Bass announced that her proposed budget would include around 1,650 layoffs and the elimination of another roughly 1,000 unfilled jobs as the city tries to make up a deficit of around $1 billion. In this process, Los Angeles will still be increasing its budget by 8.2%. The deficit has been driven in part by a $259 million increase in labor contracts and weaker tax revenues as people have continued to leave the city.
The Los Angeles Police Department will be the hardest hit by these cuts. Bass intends to cut more than 400 civilian positions at LAPD. These positions include 911 operators, detention officers who book and fingerprint criminals, and associate community officers through ACOP, the feeder program that helps transition LAPD youth program participants into becoming sworn officers.
This comes at a time when Los Angeles’s “nonurgent” 911 calls are practically being put on hold, and while urgent and nonurgent calls are being handled by the same operators. Meanwhile, Los Angeles’s police force is still declining. LAPD is projected to have 8,639 officers by July 2026, down from the 10,000 it had five years ago and the 8,735 it had last week. If Los Angeles does indeed lose another 100 officers by July 2026, as projected, it would leave the city with the fewest police officers it has had since 1995.
LOS ANGELES’S INCOMPETENCE TURNED THE CITY INTO A FIRE PIT
This all reflects back on Los Angeles leadership, including Bass. The city has allocated $1.28 billion in homelessness spending over the last two fiscal years, only to discover that $513 million of that has not been spent. Bass still wants to spend another $900 million in her latest budget proposal, even as she continues to enable homeless encampments across the city. Bass prioritized union giveaways over fire preparedness in the lead-up to the fires that torched neighborhoods earlier this year, making the city’s bad budget situation worse.
Los Angeles is finally starting to make some progress on crime, courtesy of the county’s new district attorney. That Bass would choose to further weaken the police department to solve budget issues that she and her fellow Los Angeles Democrats created jeopardizes that progress. It proves once again that Los Angeles Democrats and their incompetence are ruining one of America’s most iconic cities.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
