Political Memes

Weirdly enough, that almost exactly reflects how much safer a cops job is when compared to, say, a food delivery drivers

My town:

"We're going to reduce the increase in the police budget from a planned $260 million a year to $224 million a year."

"ZOMG! YOU'RE DEFUNDING THE POLICE!"

(Somehow $1 billion in 4 years is "defunding").

City budget is $8.2 billion. 224 million / 8.2 billion = 2.73%.

For my (Canadian) city:

Total expenses are $207.6 million

Police, Fire Rescue, and Ambulance are listed together at $35.7 million, or 17% of expenses.

The biggest expense is Social Housing and Welfare at $72.5 million or 35% of expenses.

It's 31% of my city's entire budget. Our parks service gets over 5 times less and we have a crazy number of parks here.

But hey, the police needed a new station! The old one was all of 7 years old! And it only had a regular 50 inch TV, not a 4k one!

Meanwhile the best playground in the city has had all it's mulch piled to the side for months, with nobody, including several city and county officials I've spoken to, knowing why.

Fun thing: that police budget is actually down percentage wise. Money wise it's up by a million, but our wonderful mayor decided it would be brilliant to not renew our garbage pickup without another option on the table. Now we have trash pickup that's twice as expensive and won't pick up trash in the back yard for the elderly without them paying almost $150 a month for the service.

I hate this town

I think something like 54% of my city's budget goes to police. Every year they ask all departments to make cuts and the police always come back asking for more.

If you need help, the police will not help you here

1.4% (I live in Germany)

I refuse to look mine up because I am just not ready to be that angry today.

We're doing really well! Only ⅓ of my city's budget goes to the cops 😬

Public Health and citizen security is 14% for my city.

This department includes local police, firefighters, garbage recollection, air quality, pest control etc...

Police by itself should be between 5 and 10% I'll guess.

Also I'm not American. And here anyway local police is kind of small, most of our police force is National.

About 35% here in my little corner of Ohio.

For the 2024 budget, police get about 22% of the operating budget in my city, and happened to get 3.6% of the capital expenditure budget. Capital budget can fluctuate a lot from year to year; for 2023, it was 1.6% for police.

Which validates my usual feelings about Madison, WI. We didn't go all in on some of the bad ideas that have plagued American cities since the end of WWII. Certainly some, but we're in a much better place than most.

It’s a little complicated, because the school district gets its own budget even though the town and the school district have the same boundaries, and school and town taxes are billed and payed together.

School: $51M Town: $19.2M Police expenses: $3.5M

So 18% of municipal expenses, or 5% of municipal + school.

Interestingly, only 3/4 of the municipal income comes from property tax. The rest comes from licenses, permit fees, service fees, registration fees for rec council programs, and even the concession stand revenue at the municipal ice rink.

ok now do the military (that isn't in any wars)