(RepublicanNews.org) – Leftist mayors who have overseen massive budget cuts for their respective police departments are refusing to give up their own protection. In what reads like a satirical movie script, city leaders are ending up with expensive private security details while their constituents are left increasingly less protected.
An example from Los Angeles speaks for itself. In 2020, $150 million was slashed from the Los Angeles PD’s budget. That cut ended the careers of around 500 city officers and led to an enormous spike in crime.
The LA Times covered the events and said that officers were “hemorrhaging” from the city’s ranks. LA has continued to bleed officers. The force currently fields almost 1,000 fewer bodies than its 2020 budget had called for. Dwindling numbers have forced city leaders to offer both new and transfer hires a $15,000 sign-on bonus.
While those budget cuts were being called for and implemented, the combined cost for private security for LA’s mayor and city attorney alone was a whopping $17 million.
Elsewhere, a similar situation unfolded in Milwaukee. A police force that has already been subjected to heavy cuts from the city’s mayor is now facing a further 25 percent reduction. While Milwaukee citizens were left with fewer safety resources, city leadership spent millions on private security protection between 2015 and 2020.
During the same period, the city of Denver spent almost $4 million protecting their mayor while cutting funding and officers from their PD. The 2015 to 2020 stretch also saw almost $1 million spent shielding the mayor of Minneapolis from his own citizens. Budget cuts aside, worsening morale at the city’s PD in the post-George Floyd era has led to one-third of its officers quitting.
Local leaders are not alone in their hypocrisy. It was recently revealed that members of “the squad” shelled out $1.2 million on private protection while publicly calling for policing budgets to be slashed.
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