Anti-police activists in cities around the country are finally getting what they've been after: Police departments emptying out, a smaller and smaller police presence in urban areas, just an ongoing collapse of policing in general.
Unsurprisingly, municipal leaders, like those in Los Angeles, are not happy about it:
The LAPD is hemorrhaging officers, with more leaving the force than are joining it. Police Chief Michel Moore reported last week that sworn staffing had fallen to 9,103, down nearly 1,000 from 2019, the year that preceded the outbreak of COVID-19.
That major decline — roughly a 10% reduction in force — represents a complete reversal of major policing gains Los Angeles made ten years ago, when it reached an historic milestone of 10,000 police officers on its force.
That may seem like a high number of police officers. It's actually less than one cop for every 400 L.A. residents.
Los Angeles is a big city. It needs lots of police officers. For a brief moment it had them. And now they're gone.
Newly minted Mayor Karen Bass, meanwhile, is trying to get them back:
Mayor Karen Bass is looking to confront the issue head on by ramping up hiring and lifting barriers to recruitment. Her proposed budget, which will be released Tuesday, will call for the city to restore the department to 9,500 officers — an extremely tall order, given the ongoing staff exodus.
"I know that that is ambitious, but I think it needs to happen." she said.
Of course it "needs to happen." Murders in the city have run at 15-year highs for the past three years. Like so many American cities, Los Angeles is in the grip of a miserable crime wave, brought on by progressive crime policies, useless prosecutors, and ruinous COVID policies. A dynamic, well-staffed police force is more necessary than ever for L.A.'s survival.
But don't expect it to happen anytime soon. Lacking institutional support and burned out after years of miserable governance, police are leaving and will continue to leave. And in Los Angeles at least, official hostility toward them will likely continue for the foreseeable future:
Bass will send her budget proposal to a council that is ideologically further left, and more skeptical of police, than it was when she launched her campaign in 2021. Two of the council's newest members, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez, argued against police hiring during their campaigns.
A third, Councilmember Nithya Raman, ran in 2020 on a platform that called for transforming the LAPD into a "much smaller, specialized armed force."
Things will almost certainly get worse in Los Angeles — possibly a lot worse — before they get better.
