A reader who knows more than I do about a lot of things left an interesting comment on a recent post here. He points out that the days of “defunding” the Portland police bureau are over, and the cops have way more money to play with than they did even before the “defunding” happened.
Upon reading his comment, I started poking around the city’s website to see what in fact has been going on with the police bureau budget in recent fiscal years, and here is my amateur tale of the tape. Click on it if you need to see it blown up bigger:
As you can see, if I’ve got the numbers straight, the current year’s budget, and last year’s, more than made up for the two years of “defunding.” The current year’s number, on an annual basis, represents a 2.9 prercent annual increase since 2018-2019, if you take into account compounding.
In other words, if you took the PoPo budget from five years ago, increased it 2.9 percent the next year, then increased the resulting number by 2.9 percent the next year, and did that five times, you’d get to where the budget is this year. Even in the worst of “defunding,” the police purse was cut only relatively slightly in absolute dollar amounts from what it was in 2018-2019.
Now, granted, inflation has run faster than the police budget’s growth. Here’s one cost-of-living measure, the “CPI-U”:
And so while the police budget has risen at a compound rate of 2.9 percent a year over five years, the cost of goods and services has increased at a compound rate of 3.9 percent a year over that timespan. And so the cops in town have been “defunded,” but only by inflation.