Another Look At Police Funding and Crime in California

Yesterday I showed you the surprisingly high differences between police spending in various big cities in California. Here’s a different look at the same thing:

Spending on police does increase along with violent crime rates, but not by a lot. Los Angeles, for example, spends twice as much as Modesto to achieve about the same violent crime rate.

I wouldn’t try to draw any conclusions from this. It’s just a way of showing that police funding is surprisingly variable even when it achieves essentially the same results.

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Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And the essential ingredient that makes all this possible? Readers like you.

It’s reader support that enables Mother Jones to devote the time and resources to report the facts that are too difficult, expensive, or inconvenient for other news outlets to uncover. Please help with a donation today if you can—even a few bucks will make a real difference. A monthly gift would be incredible.

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