zlacker

>>oftenw+(OP)
Of course it does. But politicians who ramp up the rhetoric and threaten to have people killed does not. Flint and Camden and other cities where the police sat down or walked with the protestors have no issues. People connecting to people with understanding rarely results in violence.

I think places where the police still walk a beat (or other regular outreach over a wide area) and get to know the locals rarely have issues with regular people. But cities don't want to spend that kind of money on these things as they would rather not tax people to pay for it. Yet it's an investment in cities' future; otherwise you wind up with this.

>>coldco+v6
"As they would rather not tax people to pay for it"

I think you may be underestimating how much cities dedicate their budgets to police spending:

"Mayor Eric Garcetti's 2020-2021 city budget gives police $3.14 billion out of the city's $10.5 billion. That's the single biggest line item, dwarfing, say, emergency management ($6 million) and economic development ($30 million)." (In fact, LAPD is getting pay raises while LA teachers are getting a pay decrease)

"New York City spends more on policing than it does on the Departments of Health, Homeless Services, Housing Preservation and Development, and Youth and Community Development combined."

"A whopping 39 percent of Chicago's 2017 budget went to police, and still the department got even more money, peaking in 2020 with a 7 percent increase to nearly $1.8 billion."

Note, this is, to the best of my knowledge, solely police, not even adjacent forces like e.g. fire departments or ambulances.

[1] https://www.gq.com/story/cops-cost-billions

>>thebra+nb
Please don't use LA as an example. Its not a city that can be compared to any other because of its weird patchwork nature and stupid geographic boundaries.

>>Jommi+5t
I studied Los Angeles history of city planning and urbanism in university, as a minor (not that makes me an expert by any means, of course, but I'm no stranger to LA, plus I've lived here for 6 years) – it's a special city, yes, but it's not fundamentally different from most other large cities in the US, including my hometown, Dallas, so much as just further along the same growth pattern (sprawl and then densification) as most sunbelt cities such as Houston, Dallas, Atlanta, Denver, San Diego, and Salt Lake City. (And as far as "stupid geographic boundaries", please see Houston or even San Diego). We could argue about this greater point all day, but nothing makes LA fundamentally special from a city-planning point of view, though it is in my heart :'-)

Regardless, as far as policing goes, NYC's 5 borough/county/city system is _much_ more complicated, which proponents might say justifies their (imo insane) $6 Billion(!) annual budget allocation, but if you compare that to NYC's $34 Billion [1] education budget, it looks a little more reasonable than LA's $3 Billion LAPD budget compared to LAUSD's $7 Billion [2] education budget.

[1] https://www.schools.nyc.gov/about-us/funding/funding-our-sch...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles_Unified_School_Dis...

>>thebra+Bu
Oh My god those boundaries are so stupid