Judging by the history of the Los Angeles Police Department and their own gangs, run by members of the department, policemen, getting rid of cops might actually help reduce crime!
"...why are we cutting fire department budgets when wildfires are becoming more frequent..."
If you're going to say we need more money budgeted to the Fire Dept. because fires are becoming frequent and then say in your next breath we need to cut the budget of the Police because crime is becoming more frequent....
The question is whether quality of life can be improved in the city with a better allocation of the $2 billion dollars.
Some should go to policing, yes, community policing should increase, working the stats should decrease, dedicated mental health professionals should be funded and replace a good number of police interactions, etc.
This is a large and complex topic that deserves better than ankle deep engagement.
My idea is to have [optional] speed limiters. The generalized speed limits are very crude. Setting different speed for [small] parts of roads using signs has its limits. We attempt to fix dangerous spots by design, it is a wonderful art but not perfect. You can probably solve a lot of congestion by raising the maximum speed where it makes sense. It also allows for limited control over how many cars try to uses the same road. Traffic jams become bugs. It can log your speed on different roads, if there is a violation it can be treated like a bug too rather than a violation. If you don't have a limiter you can still move along with traffic. If there is a mark on the license plate it is not going to fast.
Drastically cutting the police budget is almost certainly a good idea. The problem is that you can't just count everything you take from the police budget as extra money because even though the police aren't able to competently do a lot of the work they are currently being utilized for somebody still needs to do that work and they also have to be paid. At least initially it would require an investment to get a better agency to start handling that stuff.
That said, I'm sure there is plenty of opportunity to cut waste too and in addition to slashing the police budget a great way to recover some tax money being burned by the police would be to clean up the department so that taxpayers aren't on the hook for the millions spent in lawsuits generated by their repeated abuses, screw ups, workplace injustices, etc. Much of that actually would be free money.
For $2B you could save a lot of lives even through the overpriced medical system. With a number this big, whatever you do with $2B has to be way better than saving those lives.
no. not really. The spread of the viewline fire was contained, the getty villa was saved, the hurst fire is being contained and they were on the sunset one pretty quickly. There was one in culver city and woodley that they quashed quickly as well. They got the divide fire from igniting angeles national forest and the lidia. The royal fire is about where the 2018 fire was and that was taken down as well today as was the sunswept, freddy, and emma fire.
that's the past 24 hours.
If you've been following this, they've done a fairly amazing job at knocking out maybe a dozen fires in the past day. Many of these had the potential to be giant infernos and you can actively see very clear evidence of them being contained and suppressed as the fire crews responded.
The evacuation orders and rescue operations were also effective and remarkably little life has been lost.
On the contrary, with crime, there's things like the 1992 Watts truce, which is credited with a rapid decline in LA street violence, which happened without law enforcement at all.
So unlike with say fire-fighting, there's empirically more effective strategies for dealing with crime. They do, however, require us to not be ideologically committed to punitive incarceration.
