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Republicans are for "small government" unless they control the state and it is a local gov.
25% of a city budget to police? Wtf?
All those armoured tanks they buy aren't cheap.
A lot of towns and cities spend way more than that.
Speaks volumes what those in charge think of the population doesn't it?
Here I am bitching at the metro because the grocery store has weight sensors on the self checkout because no one trusts me as a consumer.
Those stores see significant theft so I don't blame them. Or we could stick to the honor system and pay 2X.
If it bothers you, use a cashier.
I just checked, in Helsinki, Finland (my instance's location), 25% of the city budget (~1,25B€) would cover the police expense for entire country and more (~900M€).
Here police is managed by the state but I tried to make things comparable. And I don't believe the police is extremely underfunded there. Is the US police driving tanks or wtf?
Is the US police driving tanks or wtf?
Yep. They literally are 🤬
That’s an M113 (variant), an APC (armoured personnel carrier) is nowhere near a tank.
That's a distinction without importance.
What's important is that it's military hardware that they don't need and which reinforces their toxic mindset of being at war against certain neighborhoods, ethnicities, income brackets, and political ideologies.
If two-thirds of a populace is opposed to something, and their government approves it anyway. Then their government is illegitimate.
Yep. Most governments are illegitimate
Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government,
Core concept, really.
The issue here is what to do when you have multiple levels of government. One government entity may be against a policy, but a larger government entity which includes the smaller entity may be for a policy.
This case is regarding police funding, but this could apply to school or welfare programs as well.
Yes, that's capitalist "democracy" for you. Almost everyone agrees on increased funding and auditing to public healthcare, education, pensions and welfare in general, and yet we see all western capitalist countries heading in the opposite direction for the last 20 years.
That's not democracy tho. that's a plutocracy.
Fully agreed, there's only plutocracy and no democracy under capitalism
Yeah, and I know this sounds trivial by comparison, but we had something similar here recently and it was a proposed ban on fox hunting that the government scooched away that the populous were wildly in favour of.
I have to say that if 25% of my city's money was being spent on police I'd be making them earn their fucking money and you may infer from that what you will.
Imagine the opportunity cost. And guess who lost the most in that trade? The most vulnerable.
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Yep, the state loves to control the two largest metropolitan areas. They also own St. Louis' police. They want full control over the cities because we're the cash cows for the state, despite all the lip service paid to farmers and rural people, who all depend on the money we generate here for their welfare.
It's a remnant of Civil War-era law and unlikely to ever change.
Yep we damn well didn't want to give the pigs anymore than they already get. And you aren't wrong about the situation in St Louis. People don't even understand how that shit can be like that. It's completely fucked up in the eyes of most the rest of the world but in Missouri it's just Tuesday.
Yup, I hate the KCPD.
It wasn't that long ago that they were just letting break-ins happen because they wanted to make Jackson County Prosecutor look bad and try to kill her reelection hopes, all for having the temerity to criticize the shitty job that cops do here. I see them when I'm out walking the dogs a lot and they're always friendly to my face, but I keep in the back of my mind that these people are a piece-of-refuse gang and they'd happily shoot me and my animals in the head if it were convenient for them.
Remember the cardinal rule, friends: Don't talk to cops. Ever.
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Hey this happens in Canada too. In BC, the capital city has 23% of budget go to VicPD. The city has tried turning down budget increase requests, then the province stepped in and forced them to do it.
Alright, well I guess this transit expansion is going under the police file. I hope you like driving buses, cops.
But more seriously...
Adding insult to injury for Kansas City, local officials will have no say in how their money gets spent by the police department—even as they are required by the state to pour more funds into it.
Talk about a corruption machine.
Missouri is a very corrupt state. Besides what you just mentioned, which is true, we also voted in an anti-gerrymandering law in 2018.
Before it could go into effect, the Conservative Party got a repeal of the law onto the ballot with very shady text to trick voters into repealing their own votes.
Wow, scumbags
Guess how much police overtime will go up now.
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Why can't the city just put all sorts of social services under the police department. Heck do the whole city and everyone gets better pay and benefits.
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I wonder if you couldn't start hiring social workers and garbage collectors under the police's budget. Pitch it in some ridiculous but slightly connected way. Garbage collectors could be 'gathering evidence' as the law allows garbage to be searched without warrant, and social workers could be some sort of 'post-incident contact follow-up-ers.' Hell, expand it to wildly mildly connected things, like roadwork and bike paths, you know, to make the cops able to get around faster.
Social workers, Crisis intervention teams, psychologists and a whole lot more. Police work doesn't necessarily just consist of shooting people. But I guess in the US that's a radical viewpoint.
Policing in the US rose largely out of slave patrols. You can’t just tell them to hire social workers and expect any change. The problem is so deeply rooted and systemic that you have to eliminate the entire concept of police and start from the ground up.
If I was in charge of replacing the police, part of the changes would be limits on serving as an officer and other roles. This would encourage fresh blood to replace the old, and help prevent corruption: Former police officers can end up under the batons of their successors, if they don't ingrain good values into the next generation.
By breaking up the career and authority of police officers into discrete chunks, we can also prevent power accumulation via social bonds among them. Something like:
1 year of academy -> 3 years as officer -> 1 year paid remedial education -> 3 years as officer -> 1 year paid remedial -> 3 years as officer, etc.
While we would lose raw efficiency due to elections, education requirements, and so forth, I think something like this would help prevent police from becoming a vile cornerstone of society.
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The problem is the KCPD doesn’t report to the city. They don’t have to do what the mayor says so they just do what they want.
It’s gross and they end up paying out a lot in lawsuits.
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I wonder how much of that 25% is being spent to pay for lawsuits it settled or lost? I'm sure that's not just an LA thing.
"Small government" red states love doing stuff like this. The state of Indiana passed a law banning 'no turn on red' signs, just to spite Indianapolis.
These states are run by rural losers who resent the fact that they depend on the predominantly blue cities for all their economic activity.
Yes, we are in the rare situation of not being in control of our police department. They do not report to the mayor and he has very little say in how they behave.
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this post was submitted on 17 May 2026
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