Portland police "defunding" is ancient history
A reader who knows more than I do about a lot of things left an interesting comment on a recent post here. He points out that the days of "defunding" the Portland police bureau are over, and the cops have way more money to play with than they did even before the "defunding" happened.
Upon reading his comment, I started poking around the city's website to see what in fact has been going on with the police bureau budget in recent fiscal years, and here is my amateur tale of the tape. Click on it if you need to see it blown up bigger:
As you can see, if I've got the numbers straight, the current year's budget, and last year's, more than made up for the two years of "defunding." The current year's number, on an annual basis, represents a 2.9 percent annual increase since 2018-2019, if you take into account compounding.
In other words, if you took the PoPo budget from five years ago, increased it 2.9 percent the next year, then increased the resulting number by 2.9 percent the next year, and did that five times, you'd get to where the budget is this year. Even in the worst of "defunding," the police purse was cut only relatively slightly in absolute dollar amounts from what it was in 2018-2019.
Now, granted, inflation has run faster than the police budget's growth. Here's one cost-of-living measure, the "CPI-U":
And so while the police budget has risen at a compound rate of 2.9 percent a year over five years, the cost of goods and services has increased at a compound rate of 3.9 percent a year over that timespan. And so the cops in town have been "defunded," but only by inflation.
Portlanders voted overwhelmingly for Mike Schmidt and Measure 110, and then helped elect the only candidate for Governor who didn’t want to repeal Measure 110, and now demand law and order. For humanity’s sake, I hope these people are sterile.
ReplyDeleteDefunding cut Portland’s law and order off at the knees. Saying that the money is replaced, ignores the cultural damage that needs to be repaired. Money won’t solve the damage to morale.
ReplyDeleteding, ding, ding
DeleteTell me more about "cultural damage".
Delete"Please, please, please police our streets and arrest the criminals. We are so sorry that we hurt your feelings. The gigantic 4% defunding cut has been restored and then some." How's that?
DeletePotter Stewart said it very well.
DeleteAs with most things with the City it’s not the money…there is plenty! The administration and allocation of the money is controlled by the bobble heads in office, and they are all incompetent idiots!
ReplyDeleteUntil Schmidt goes why should the cops bother arresting anyone? And how can measure 110 be legal if the supporting infrastructure is not there?
ReplyDeleteThat's a very good point.
DeleteAll a product of people Voting Under The Influence.
ReplyDeleteDemocracy is the theory that the common people know what they want, and deserve to get it good and hard.
ReplyDelete-H. L. Mencken
I can hardly wait for your comments on this:
ReplyDeletehttps://www.wweek.com/news/2023/08/06/proposal-for-new-city-police-oversight-board-faces-resistance-in-city-hall/
They spent 2+ years coming up with this hottest of hot messes. They coulda just saved everybody a lot of time and money if they'd just farmed it out to Hardesty...who probably had a big (unseen) hand in it anyway.
What stuck out for me was the lowering of the bar for "conviction"..."preponderance of the evidence" (the same as in small-claims court) as opposed to "beyond a reasonable doubt".
And you think you cops are scarce now...
The proposal has a lot of problems, but preponderance is standard for these kind of things. It's a personnel matter, not criminal.
Delete