By Lieutenant Cody Green
For many cities, May or early June is the time of year to dive into the books and roll out the annual or biannual budget. Usually, the discussions have already been had, and the fights have been worked out about who’s getting budget increases and who’s getting cuts. For the most part, the approval of the budget at the city council or county supervisors’ meeting is a mere formality. Sometimes there are minor tweaks, an adjustment here or there, but typically, the cake has been baked.
A surge in crime raises new questions
This year, something unusual happened. My city experienced a rash of high-profile incidents that were splashed across the paper:
- A woman was dragged into a restroom near the beach while jogging mid-morning;
- A 17-year-old girl was attacked by a sex offender;
- Two tourists were stabbed;
- A man on the pier put a knife to a 16-year-old’s throat;
- A woman in mental crisis kidnapped a 4-year-old child, taking the child to her hotel room. Thankfully, the child was recovered unharmed.
These incidents, combined with it being an election year, generated a lot of talk about getting additional funding for the police department. The City Council wrangled over adding four additional officers to our 228-officer budget. While I was happy to get more officers, I knew four officers were a drop in the bucket compared to what is needed; I have long thought we needed 300 officers.
Unveiling the funding discrepancy
The wrangling got me thinking. How could I conveniently show, without diving into the policy wonk rabbit hole, that my city was short-changing its police department, as I suspected? I looked at the city budget presentation shown at the Council meeting: $458 million in general fund spending and another $307 million in Capital Improvement Projects (CIP), for a total budget of $765 million. Your general fund spending is essentially your operating budget, while CIP funds are for fixing infrastructure like bridges, buying new cars, or upgrading equipment at a park — mostly large, one-time expenditures.
First, I started looking at other comparable cities. Each state has slightly different laws on reporting requirements, but in general, every city posts its proposed budget online. I pulled budget numbers from seven other cities in the state and one out-of-state city that is similar in size, tourist characteristics and other comparable areas to my city. For my research, I only used the general fund budget because CIP budgets can swing wildly from year to year, and a significant amount of CIP funds come through state and federal grants. I wanted to err on the conservative side to strengthen any argument.
The eye-opening findings
Next, I examined the size of the police budget for those same cities. My city had a general fund budget of $458 million for fiscal year 2024/2025 and allotted $118 million to the police budget, which meant the city was committing 25.7% of its general fund spending to policing the city. I then looked at each of the other eight cities I selected as comparables. The other cities were spending far more as a percentage of their general fund on their police budget. They ranged from 30.14% to over 40%.
I was floored! It put into perspective what I had long suspected — the city was way out of step with its police spending compared to other similar cities. No wonder we were always playing catch-up — always more calls than officers, more cases than detectives and more issues than we could effectively solve.
The link between funding and crime
I then wondered how underfunding might equate to crime. Would there be a correlation between police budget size, as a percentage of the budget, and crime stats? What I discovered was even more eye-opening. The cities that spent a larger percentage of their budget on policing had a lower violent crime rate, while those that spent less had a higher violent crime rate, at least in the cities I was comparing. Surprisingly, the correlation was very strong.
I used a database found online that was built off the FBI UCR data to compare crime statistics. Using the same database was the best way to compare apples to apples. Keep in mind, if you are doing this for public release, the first place people will attack you will be on your data sets.
The impact of going public
Once I had the data, I typed up an op-ed and sent it to my local paper as the president of my local officers’ association. I included some graphs in the op-ed to highlight my main points, but most importantly, the op-ed presented data in a way that the community could understand. I wanted to avoid going down the rabbit hole with budget discussions, as it’s easy to lose people. The local paper printed it, and it hit the target dead-on. I was flooded with calls, texts and emails. I’ve been invited to community groups to talk about the research and police funding. It struck a chord with what the community sees and feels about crime every day.
I fully expect those who oppose additional police funding to attack my work and try to twist the budget in ways that change the data. In only a few days after it was printed, a former mayor disputed my piece but presented no data to back up her accusations. I expect others to be trotted out to push back on my message and attack me personally in the media or, worse yet, behind the scenes. No doubt, pushing back on the budget publicly, as I did, can be a dangerous game, especially for those in states without union protections, so proceed with caution. But if you want to see how your city or county compares, this was a quick and easy way to get an idea of where you stand.
Lessons learned and future applications
One point of learning was to have someone check your numbers, preferably someone with experience in budgets. If you are going to release the information to the public, I would even encourage paying a professional. The data was gathered from public-facing websites, and some budgets are intentionally hard to navigate. Although the thrust of my op-ed is correct, minor discrepancies in proposed vs. actual budgets and other areas like enterprise funds could be hotly debated.
A comparison like this could show how well you are doing compared to other agencies if you are well-funded, or you might also be able to stave off pending budget cuts, as this tends to show that lower police budgets equal higher rates of violent crime. The uses are endless, and if nothing else, it is an interesting evaluation tool.
Doing the research was time-consuming but can be replicated by most people with some effort. Here’s a link to my op-ed for those interested in seeing how it reads.
About the author
Cody Green has 23 years of law enforcement experience. He is a lieutenant with the Santa Monica Police Department and the President of the Santa Monica Police Officers Association. He holds a Masters degree in Public Policy & Administration.