For eight months, the Los Angeles City Council and Mayor Karen Bass have butted heads over police hiring amid a budget crisis.
The conflict began last spring when the council voted to reduce LAPD hiring to 240 new police officers this budget year — just half the officers Bass had requested — in order to close the city’s $1-billion budget gap and stave off layoffs of other city employees, including civilian workers in the LAPD.
Last month, the council bumped the number of hires up to 280 after the LAPD said it had already hired its 240 allotted officers just halfway through the fiscal year. But the council still declined to fully fund up to 410 positions, which the mayor had called for in a letter.
On Wednesday, the council finally approved the hiring of up to 410 officers this year after hearing back from the city administrative officer that the money used to fund the positions this year will come from the LAPD’s budget, and not from the city’s general fund.
The hiring of the officers delivers a modest victory to Bass, who promised she would find the money for additional police hires when she signed the budget in June. Bass said the additional hires — which would bring the police force to around 8,555 officers by the end of the fiscal year — still would not match the number of officers lost through attrition this year.
“The second-largest city in the United States cannot have an effective police department when it is operating with the lowest staffing levels in years,” she said. “And with only five months until Los Angeles welcomes tens of thousands of fans from around the world for the FIFA World Cup, investing in more police officers is critical to public safety.”
Still, the mayor’s victory comes after months of tension, with some council members questioning the fiscal wisdom of hiring more officers than the city budgeted for during a time of fiscal crisis.
“An overwhelming majority of us support additional … hiring,” said Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky, who chairs the council’s powerful Budget and Finance Committee. “My concern has been and continues to be the fiscal impact to next year.”
While Yaroslavsky said she would have preferred to stick to the original council plan of 240 hires this year, she thanked the city administrative officer and the Police Department for finding funds to hire the additional 130 officers for the rest of the fiscal year.
The motion to continue hiring up to 410 officers passed in a 9-3 vote.
The funding for the hires, which is about $2.6 million in total for this fiscal year, will come from pots of money within the Police Department, including a tranche from the “accumulated overtime” bucket, which is used to pay out overtime to officers who are retiring. The city found the $12 million allotted for that was not being fully drawn down this year.
Some on the council took issue with the additional hiring, saying the city did not know how it would pay for the ongoing cost of the hired officers, which will grow to about $25 million in the next fiscal year.
“How are we going to pay for the ongoing cost?” asked Councilmember Hugo Soto-Martínez, who voted against the new plan. “We are sort of back to where we were in December where we are committing ourselves to a $25-million price tag with no plan for where that’s going to come from.”
In a report, the city administrative officer said the $25 million should be found in “ongoing reductions with the Police Department” that would not result in layoffs to civilian staff at the department or take from the city’s general fund.
“This is robbing Peter to pay Paul,” said Councilmember Monica Rodriguez about the funding decision.
Police Chief Jim McDonnell, who attended the City Council meeting, took issue with council members criticizing the increased hiring.
“We’re working on a skeleton crew,” he said. “This department is doing amazing things for the residents of this city, but it doesn’t seem to be appreciated.”
