Kansas City Is Still Giving The Police Too Much Money (and getting poor results)
Do you ever daydream about winning the lottery?
Or even just eliminating something in your budget that you might need but are overpaying for?
You think about all the cool and or helpful things that money could buy.
Maybe you could get a new AC unit. I need one. My bills are too high.
Or you could splurge on getting some help to get in shape.
Now put yourself in the shoes of a major American city who has lots of things to fix but has been overpaying by at least $40 million per year and that $40 million isn’t getting the job done.
Well…that’s Kansas City and its police budget is bloated and the overall department is ineffective.
$270,000,000. Two Hundred And Seventy Million Dollars. Or 37% of Kansas City’s general fund, which is the portion of the budget we have the flexibility to change year to year.
That’s the requested 2022-2023 budget for the Kansas City, Missouri Police Department.
If you add in the Fire Department and the small municipal court budget, you get close to 70% of the city’s general fund spent on public safety.
Public safety in a city that has consistently fluctuated from having record homicide rates to just below record homicides rates. The news is constantly flooded with nameless victims and a call for basic needs like housing, infrastructure, and decent wages to be met.
Kansas City consistently ranks as one of the most dangerous cities in the country despite year over year investing more and more money in law enforcement.
If you don’t spend time looking at other cities’ budgets, you wouldn’t blink twice when seeing that number.
But compared to similar sized cities, Kansas City is an outlier. No, really, like an off the graph outlier.
Atlanta (population 533,000) has a police budget of $230 million
Sacramento (population 531,000) has a police budget of $166 million
Kansas City (population 508,000) has a police budget of $270 million
Colorado Springs (population 495,000) has a police budget of $158 million
Raleigh (population 488,000) has a police budget of $117 million
Kansas City funds its police department $40 million more than even Atlanta, a bigger city in a huge metro.
And Kansas City dwarfs many of its peer cities. Check out that $117 million budget in Raleigh!
But wait…the absolutely insane thing is the police want to take up even of the budget. Partnering with conservative legislators, they are trying to require the city to pay 25% of the entire budget (which includes debt payments and other funds that really can’t be adjusted).
This could mean the city would have to give the police even more money. And I’ve written several times about the police department's Enron-like accounting here and here.
All for what?
After years of bloated budgets with no systemic success on making Kansas City significantly safer, no one is really sure.
If you can separate yourself from the ideological arguments of Back The Blue, Defund The Police, and the political posturing in Jefferson City, and simply ask yourself: are the police the right solution to solve crime? And compared to plenty of other cities, are we paying too much?
My answer to those questions is no the police are not the answer to the vast majority of crime. Most of the time, police respond to crime rather than prevent it. And in a city of 319 square miles that response time is often slow.
And most definitely we pay way too much for the level of crime that has been the norm.
Most crime dealt with by the police is driven by poverty, lack of opportunities, and a disinvestment by both the public and private sectors. (There is plenty of white collar crime going on too.)
And that disinvestment is exacerbated when you spend 37% of your discretionary budget on the police.
City leaders need to invest in people, places, and opportunities.
They already have a blueprint. They just need to follow it.
And they need money to make it happen. They can find that money by reallocating police dollars to fix the root causes of crime.
Most Kansas Citians don’t want to abolish the police but most also don’t want to spend more than $40 million extra a year with poor results either.
Just imagine what the city could do with tens of millions of dollars each year.
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