By Cody Green

At the June 25th City Council meeting Mayor Brock pleaded with other Council members to increase funding to the Police Department in an effort to stave off a rash of high-profile, violent incidents that have occurred in the City.

The request was to have other departments in the City give 4% of non—salary funds to the Police Department to hire more officers. It was thought to be a shift of between $2 million to $3.5 million dollars.

After some wrangling and an attempt to have City staff study the proposal and bring it back to Council in December (after the election), it was agreed to calendar it in September.

Let me be clear, this directive sent shockwaves through the City. Santa Monica has always been aspirational with its city governance and giving up 4% for any City department is no small ask. Every Department within the City is pursuing a noble cause. Even the Police Department was asked to give back. In 2020 the Police Department, in part, was defunded.

Having worked for the Police Department for 23 years it always seems as if we are borrowing from Peter to pay Paul with personnel. For example, the DART Team was formed partly to direct resources to the out-of-control vendor issue on the Pier, and they were very successful at gaining back some sense of normalcy.

The sacrifice was those employees had to be pulled from elsewhere in the department. The Police Department no longer has a plainclothes unit, a street interdiction team, a full-time mounted unit or a fully staffed downtown unit, all units the department formerly staffed.

It’s always seemed like a game of Whack-a-Mole, solve an issue here but one pops up somewhere else. There are just never enough officers to keep the City as safe as everyone wants.

A few years back the City engaged Rand to do a study to get an independent analysis as to how many police officers Santa Monica needed. After some months, and tens of thousands of dollars, the study was mothballed without explanation. Many in the Police Officers Association believed the study may have shown just how understaffed the Police Department truly was.

So, without having the resources of a large research firm, I did a dive into other cities’ general funds and police budgets compared to Santa Monica's. What I found nearly knocked me off my chair! Santa Monica is underfunding its police department by millions of dollars each year compared to other cities.

Santa Monica is spending 25.70% of its general fund budget on the Police Department. If you compare the police budget to the whole budget (general fund and CIP budget), it’s a paltry 15.38%.

In comparison, Manhattan Beach and Glendale commit over 40% of their budget to keep their cities safe, Torrance and Huntington Beach spend 35.5% and 34.07% of the budget to keep their city safe, while Culver City commits 30.14% of its general fund. Even other liberal cities like Berkeley, California proposed 32.28% of its 2025 budget to fund its Police Department.

One may argue that it’s only a few percentage points, what’s the difference between Santa Monica’s 25% and Culver City’s 30% or Manhattan Beach’s 40%?

That difference, because it’s percentage points of the whole general fund, adds up to literally millions of dollars. Millions of dollars that could have officers responding to your call for service faster, preventing crimes from occurring in the first place, and keeping our visitors feeling safe (and spending money) in our business districts.

The proposed budget for the Santa Monica Police Department is nearly $118 million for 2024-25 which is no small amount of money. But think about it like this, if Santa Monica committed the same amount of its budget to keep its residents, businesses and visitors safe as Glendale or Manhattan Beach, the Santa Monica Police budget would be $194 million as compared to Glendale and $183 million as compared to Manhattan Beach!

This represents a whopping $76 million dollar shortfall compared to Glendale! Even if you compared it to the Culver City budget it would represent over a $20 million dollar shortfall.

I was shocked by what the numbers revealed; that we are out of step with nearly every comparable city around- Torrance, Huntington Beach, and even Berkeley, CA have made a commitment to appropriate police funding that we have not.

Miami Beach, Florida is one of the few like cities in the country that is comparable to Santa Monica in terms of a high-profile destination, large beach, multiple shopping destinations, number of residents (87,000), and size of the budget. Even they commit more of the budget in actual dollars and as a percentage of the general fund to their Police Department than Santa Monica. They also field nearly 400 officers!

When delving into this I speculated the less money you spend on your police department the higher the crime rate in your city would be and in terms of violent crime that correlation matches nearly perfectly with the 8 cities examined. Glendale spent the most on their police department and had the lowest incidents of violent crimes per 1,000 residents.

Santa Monica spent the least and guess what? You’re right! They had the most incidents of violent crime. Other than Beverly Hill and Hunting Beach swapping the 4 and 5 positions on spending and violent crimes, there was nearly a perfect correlation between violent crime and the percentage of the budget committed to the police departments. The less you spend on police, the more violent crime you get. Who would have guessed?!

For the Police Officers Association, it’s not just about the money, but the reality is that money equals officers and officers offer more of an opportunity to prevent crime before it happens, rather than to just respond to crime. By looking at comparable cities it shows that, without question, cities are safer when they appropriately fund their police department. It is literally, a harm reduction program.

This is no money grab by the Police Officers Association. SMPOA has worked with the City in adding private security on the Pier, in the downtown parking structures, in the Downtown area in general and on the Big Blue Bus.

SMPOA members fully backed and assisted in standing up all of the following programs; Alternatives to Incarceration (ATI), the Department of Mental Health clinicians working alongside officers in the field, the Salvation Army Mental Health Teams, the C3 Mental Health and Homeless Outreach Teams, HaMSTER Outreach Teams and the Therapeutic Transport Van.

As of now the Police Chief has been asked to present to City Council what he believes he needs to be successful. In other words, the Chief will now have to fight with other department heads to pick the bones of scraps knowing that any request he makes means less for other departments, effectively pitting him against all other department heads. A pretty unenviable position to be in.

The fight over whether it’s appropriate to divert $2-$3.5 million to the police shouldn’t be the shockwave felt around the City. Even in the best-case comparison that still leaves the police budget between$17 million and $73 million short of what other cities' funding levels are.

Let me be clear, Santa Monica is by no means an unsafe city, but the reality is with a Police Department funded to the same levels as other cities it could be safer.

By underfunding the Police Department we are hurting the residents, the visitors, and the businesses. The facts are the facts. How we prioritize and respond to the facts is vitally important and we should not have to position our Chief against other departments to keep this community safe. Getting the funding level of the Police Department right is of utmost importance.

The fact Santa Monica has so underfunded its police department and expects the results to be anything different than what we are currently getting is the shockwave that should ripple across this community.