Police Departments Budgets Grow, but Cities Aren't Any Safer

A Next City article argues that investing in job programs and other public goods would do more to make those communities safe than investing in police departments.

1 minute read

July 24, 2017, 12:00 PM PDT

By Casey Brazeal @northandclark


It's often said that budgets reveal what people, governments or companies really care about. Kumar Rao argues that the budgets for cities often reveal garbled priorities. "Most of the cities we profiled devote 25 percent to 40 percent of their general fund expenditures towards policing and criminalization, while shortchanging community investments," Rao writes in Next City.

He pulls numerous examples of cities with well-funded police departments that have histories of bad behavior or cities that need investment elsewhere. "New York City spends nearly $5 billion on a police force that still prioritizes discriminatory and ineffective broken windows policing, even as its decaying public transit system calls out for investment," Rao writes.

Wednesday, July 19, 2017 in Next City

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