Wikipedia[0] says that "[austerity] is a set of political-economic policies that aim to reduce government budget deficits through spending cuts, tax increases, or a combination of both." That strikes me as a correct definition of 'austerity'. But we've not had any spending cuts in real terms or in terms of GDP. Nor have we had tax increases for the past "40 years" -- sure, Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama raised taxes, but Presidents Reagan, Bush, and Trump cut taxes.
Yes, reducing budget deficits has been a stated goal of most Presidents since 1980, but that's mostly been lip service. None bothered to actually try. President Clinton did manage to reduce the deficit, but not because he wanted or tried to, but because of the unexpected revenue growth caused by the unexpected economic growth caused by the unexpected IT revolution.
> For example, in the city of LA, 53% of the city's unrestricted general fund budget went to the LAPD.
What was that in 1980? Was there a step in this, say, around 1996? Did it go up in 1996 when Federal funding for 100,000 new police officers dried up? I.e., did President Bill Clinton's well-meaning 100,000 police officer initiative have unintended consequences?
> On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
I don't doubt this! We saw in Ferguson, MO, that the police was giving out an inordinate number of traffic fines every year! It's almost... exactly as if... they were paying themselves with that -- a terrible corruption. As I recall the number of citizens in NYC who have fines in arrears is staggering. Police department funding via fines is a form of corruption, and strongly indicative of police departments being too large.
And the invention of civil asset forfeiture (in the 80s, IIRC), and the rise in its use (in the mid-90s, IIRC), also seems like police (and prosecutors) paying themselves with poor people's assets. And it is invariably the poor who have been hardest hit by civil asset forfeiture.
The police have to be sized appropriately to:
- investigate and close most cases
- support investigations appropriately
- provide a minimum of neighborhood police
presence to deter crime and build a rapport
with the community
The police departments of most large U.S. cities are almost certainly oversized at present. One of the first steps in remediating some of iniquities of our system should be to end police department funding via fines and civil asset forfeiture (by simply ending civil asset forfeiture -- as clearly unconstitutional a practice as any). In some States fine revenue is shared with the State, but perhaps the amounts of the fines should go down and the percentage that goes to the issuing jurisdiction should go down significantly. At the very least the parameters of traffic violation fining need fine-tuning. Once the police can only be funded by general revenue of the local town/city, and the towns/cities cannot fund themselves with fines / civil asset forfeitures, we'll see a proper reconsideration of police funding.
I.e., the police need to be not so much defunded as right-funded, and today that would generally mean spending less on police. I'm not sure that in 1993 it was the case that the police needed to be funded more, though I'd be happy to see evidence to the contrary. Crime rates did go down significantly in the 90s, but those extra ~80,000 new police officers are not the only cause of that, and probably not even a major cause at all. The main cause of the fall in crime rates in the 90s seems to have been demography.