Many Big-City Democrat Mayors Defunded Police While Spending Heavily on Their Security Details, Watchdog Finds

The Epoch Times ^ | July 20, 2021 | Mark Tapscott

[Zakeet]

Democratic mayors in 20 of the nation’s 25 biggest cities slashed police department budgets and positions even as they spent millions of tax dollars on their own security details, according to data obtained by a government watchdog.

[Snip]

In San Francisco, for example, the costs of the security detail protecting Mayor London Breed and other city officials spiraled from $1.7 million in 2015 to $2.6 million in 2020.

Breed has proposed shifting $120 million from the city’s police department to mental health and workforce training programs. City officials declined to say how many officers are assigned to the security details, according to OTB.

In Chicago, Mayor Lori Lightfoot claimed to be opposed to defunding the police, but OTB found officials quietly abolished 400 police department positions last year.

Those positions were eliminated even as the city’s “security detail costs peaked in 2020 – up $700,000 over five years ...

Etc. [Snip]

Notable among the other cities examined by OTB were these:

• Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, cut $8 million from the police budget to launch a mental health team to respond to certain 911 calls.

• Oakland officials cut the police budget by $14.6 million. Even bigger cuts are expected in the near future.

• Despite two years of near-continuous rioting led by Antifa and Black Lives Matter (BLM) activists, Portland officials slashed $15 million from the police budget and disbanded a gun violence reduction unit and transit team that had been accused of over-policing Black communities, among other cuts.

• Milwaukee officials are cutting 120 police officer positions, beginning with the current year’s budget. The reductions are to come mainly by not replacing retiring officers. Sixty positions were eliminated last year.

[Zakeet]

You Freepers should know this is fake news ... cause Rats are never hypocrites ...

[SES1066]

For those who want to know without opening the source article, “OTB” is the acronym for ‘Open The Books’, a Chicago non-profit that uses Freedom Of Information Act (FOIA), and other ‘sunshine’ & public ‘right-to-know’ laws, to monitor government (local/state/regional & Federal) spending of taxpayer dollars. Their goal is to detail “every dime online in real time.”

[Phinneous]

Kudos. I KNEW it before reading the source and verifying. They are an incredible group. Yeoman work. And worth a follow on Twitter.