LOS ANGELES — In Los Angeles, the county sheriff says local residents are in danger because 'defunding has consequences' -- even though his agency's budget is up more than $250 million since 2019.
LOS ANGELES — In Los Angeles, the county sheriff says local residents are in danger because"defunding has consequences" -- even though his agency's budget is up more than $250 million since 2019.
"In communities across the country, like in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York, Chicago, so many other places, it is this remarkable, incredible, outbreak of crime," Texas Gov. Greg Abbott said in a video posted on Twitter in August by the Republican Governors Association. ABC's analysis of police budget data shows police spending has increased in some of the very cities frequently cited by conservative politicians and pundits as places where Democrats' defunding has fueled violent crime waves.
President Joe Biden heralded this movement in his 2022 State of the Union address, saying,"The answer is not to defund the police. It's to fund the police. Fund them!" -- a line that drew bipartisan applause.A few cities did try to reallocate police spending following concerns from advocacy groups in the wake of the George Floyd protests.
Yet records show his agency's budget is up about 8% percent -- more than $259 million -- from 2019 to 2022. Following Floyd's murder in 2020, protesters in New York clashed with NYPD officers for days on end. Officers arrested hundreds of protesters each night, and the department says more than 300 officers were among those hurt.But the billion-dollar cut never happened. The NYPD's budget fell by just 2.8%, dropping from $5.6 billion in 2019 to $5.4 billion in 2022.
"As more cops quit, the workload becomes more crushing for those who remain," Lynch said."Public safety ultimately suffers."Criminal justice experts say that even if the cuts were real, the premise that lower police spending leads to increased crime -- or vice versa -- is counter to decades of evidence, according to public data.