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.
https://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-proacti...
> "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)
The Los Angeles Unified School District boundaries don't match the Los Angeles city boundaries, so comparison is tricky, but the most recent budget available (2018-2019) was $13.8 billion. [1]
In California, school districts are not connected to city government, despite like all the mayors ever always talking about them. Zero of the LA city budget goes to LA schools, because school districts get their money from the counties they're in and the state. I don't know if San Francisco has a county government separate from its city government, so it may be an exception.
[1] http://ssr.lausd.net/BudgetTransparencyDistrictGrp1.aspx?Fis...
The broader Bay Area is closer to the LA system, although transit and utilities are more likely to be detached from cities than education.
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...
How are people thinking they will get better police service (or any police service) by reducing police budgets? Most of said budget is spent on pensions anyway from the breakdowns I’ve seen. It’s not like cops are rolling in it. Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
It's great. They take the big stuff (violent crime and trafficking in hard drugs) seriously but don't have time to be running BS task forces, procuring military equipment they don't need and sitting around watching for "sketchy looking" people to harass. I'm sure it sucks to be them and they're all over worked but frankly it's great for the people.
Not being seen as jerks gives the local police better freedom of operation than the much better funded state cops who are seen as being jerks who enforce every law to the letter and nobody wants to cooperate with. I kinda feel bad for the state cops because cities like mine are where they stick the fresh academy grads who have no connections or seniority to avoid a crap assignment and then they get locals hating them for doing what the state trained them to do (also goes to show you the conflict between what the state wants and what the people of the city want).
That said, were the Real Crime(TM) to vanish I can see the local police using their newfound free time to optimize enforcement for revenue generation which would be very bad.
But even in well funded departments the response is laughable. At best if your stolen item is serialized they will record that number and it will be recovered at a later date when they happen to bust someone for something else and catalog everything they found in the vicinity and their computer system tells them your thing was reported stolen.
>Even if you rake in overtime you still have to work during that time.
The Massachusetts State Police and their 2-5yr recurring "whoops it looks like a bunch of people were getting paid for working overtime that wasn't actually worked, we'll fire someone as a sacrificial lamb and go right back to what we were doing" scandal would beg to differ.
That said, as much as it pains me to defend them, the fact that the job can be easy money for anyone willing to step in line with the organization means that you get people who just want to slack and make easy money or want to over achieve and run a full fledged side business on company time (MSP isn't the only MA gov department where people do this but they're known internally for it) and not the people who want to LARP as soldiers and kick down doors. As a result they don't often wind up receiving allegations of excessive force.
Obviously this is by no means and ideal status quo but it's far superior to having a more violent police force.