Jesus when did Texas become so cucked

It's Austin. It's where all of the Californians move.

Where’s the other 4/5ths of the money gone

Think of it this way: Cities have problems and challenges. They have crime, fires, sanitation issues, infrastructure needs, parks, etcetera, etcetera. To address these things, they have a budget and they put that budget into tools to get the jobs done, tools like police and fire departments, sanitation departments, and so on.

Now suppose they’ve got another set of problems: homelessness, drug addiction, and mental illness.

What most cities have done is underfund solutions to those problems and handed police the job of dealing with them. Police departments are the wrong tool for the job; like if you’ve got a screw stuck in the wall and you decide to use a hammer to get it out. Sure, a hammer’s a pretty all-purpose tool. You can try to pry the thing out like a nail, or just smash the wall around it, but you’d really be much better off with a screwdriver.

Same thing here. The LAPD’s budget is more than half the entire cities’ discretionary budget. Their mission has grown well beyond crime fighting and prevention (or more precisely, crime fighting and prevention has been defined too broadly.) The idea behind “defund the police” is to narrow the mission of the police and their budget, and shift that money into tools better suited for the job.

Decriminalize drug addiction so police don’t spend their time arresting addicts. Address homelessness with housing and support programs. When a mentally ill person is acting up on the street, call a squad of mental health workers instead of 911.

We’re in the middle of an explosion of outrage over an outrageous murder, and some of the solutions are over the top. No city of any size is going to defund their police forces to zero. But before the protests the proposed Los Angeles city budget was $4.5 billion, of which $1.8 billion was for police. Under pressure from the demonstrations, the mayor has now announced he wants to see about $150 million shifted from police to other needed services like housing. If he gets that into the budget it’s an 8% defunding. More likely, there’ll be a lot of pushback and entrenched interests and the defunding will shrink.

The LAPD is already pushing back like hell, everyone hates having their budget cut. But a budget bloated in order to address an expanded task list is worse than just inefficient. When you try using a hammer for all kinds of inappropriate jobs, things get smashed. In the last few days, since the cold blooded murder of George Floyd, police have knocked down old men without provocation, smashed a car and tazered it’s occupants, driven into a crowd, shot a guy in the head who’s now in critical condition, yanked off a guy’s mask to pepper spray him in the mouth, tear gassed a peaceful assembly so the president could have his photo op, shot a guy through the cruiser window and killed him while he was literally kneeling, because they thought he was a looter with a gun (no gun, probably not a looter) etcetera etcetera. Defunding isn’t the only thing that needs to happen to address police use of violence, but it’d be a good start.

*Snip*.

Private citizens taken from a voter's pool. I would be willing to watch the police for free. I would love to do that, somebody needs to put that dog on a leash.