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For My Local Town it’s Almost Exactly 55% to 45% cop Funding to Everything Else. What’s Yours?
(lemmy.world)
That does include parking enforcement. Which is done through that half of Townhall. Oh yeah, that’s the other part. They get literally half the real estate of town hall which is delightfully unsubtle.
But yeah, remember specifically that freaking the cops taking on all of these duties, or having these duties thrust upon them outside of their control whatever version of this that you buy into,. Having a whole bunch of unrelated social functions being addressed under the regions of the police forces is the criticism, it’s not some separate part. Why, does parking enforcement or local security or non union road crews get organized and paid from the police department instead of the local government?
In my township (a Philly suburb) the annual budget for the latest fiscal year was $9 million. The school budget (which is entirely separate from the township budget) was $93 million. Police budget was $3.6 million - which is 3.5% of the overall budget if you include the school money in the overall budget, but appears to be a whopping 40% of the township budget if you exclude the schools. I'm no fan of cops, but I think the inflated percentages reported for police budgets are generally the result of this sort of financial sleight-of-hand.
Fun irrelevant fact: I'm a school bus driver for my district and from time to time local cops will sail past my stopped bus with the red lights flashing, one hand on their steering wheels and the other holding their phones. Sometimes they look up briefly at the sound of my horn. At least they're not drinking while driving, I suppose.