Budget Proposal for the Police Departments

Budget Proposal Strategy
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Budget Proposal Strategy
One of the biggest budget issues affecting the police as one of the three primary criminal justice system agencies is defunding. There have been growing calls for a reduction in police budgets as part of a broader reform initiative aimed at dealing with America’s high rate of incarceration and police killings. The widely covered killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor resulted in unprecedented activism at the state and local levels for lawmakers to slash police funds and reallocate the money to social services. Various racial justice groups succeeded in reforming state and local 2021 budgets to reinvest law enforcement money in health care, housing, food access, and mental health programs (Levin, 2021). This paradigm shift is founded on the idea that inefficient and underfunded social programs are the root cause of crime and poverty. Proponents of police defunding argue that investing in education, homeless services, and health care rather than spending on police and jails is the more sustainable way of reducing crime, cutting back on the country’s high rate of incarceration, and putting an end to routine police killings.
Several major cities across America are currently pushing for more budget cuts while stemming any efforts by law enforcement agencies, community groups, and some politicians at derailing the budget reforms. I chose this issue because it is a growing and serious budget challenge, particularly because the criminal justice agency has to work with few resources to conduct community policing and prevention programs. Despite the continuing defunding of law enforcement entities, police departments will have to maintain the same level of capacity and presence with regards to conducting readiness training and exercise, sustaining pro-active prevention methods, and strengthening community policing. Police defunding presents a serious budget issue for law enforcement agencies that are now expected to work with significantly reduced funds to achieve the same quality of public safety. For instance, in 2020, advocacy groups calling for the reinvestment of police funds in social services succeeded in defunding the US police department of $840 million.
The budget issue of police defunding is the same at the state and local levels. While police defunding at the local level was mostly tied to the activism of various racial justice groups, budget slashes at the state level were mostly the result of the economic crisis brought about by the Covid-19 pandemic. In addition to the growing public discontent over high incarceration rates and police violence, the Covid-19 recession put an enormous strain on local and state governments to reduce police spending (Auxier et al., 2020). During and after the pandemic, various states and local governments embarked on comprehensive cost-cutting strategies aimed at reducing direct general expenditures, such as slashing the budgets of law enforcement agencies. My approach to the budget issue of police underfunding involves law enforcement entities preparing accurate budget estimates of all spending and eliminating all unne...