Thread by @cylussec

On Friday, the Baltimore City Council will have a hearing on the police department budget. I scraped the numbers from the last 10 years of budgets and found the police allocation has gone from 20.02% of the 2010 budget to 26.5% 2021.

That's not the whole picture. 1/16

Note I am not a budget guy. I am a numbers & data guy. Most of what I know about the BPD is coming from the historical budgets, which are available on the city website. You too can see how the city has spent $4.74 billion in city funds on the police. 2/16

bbmr.baltimorecity.gov/budget-publica…

There has been a lot of reporting on the $509 million budget of the BPD, but that does not include a lot of things.

Do you think the Citiwatch camera program is part of the police budget? Its not. That's in the Office of Criminal Justice. 3/16

Between 2013 and 2016, the 911 system was moved from the BPD budget to the Mayor's Office of IT. It was moved back in 2017, but was removed this year. The budget does not say if that was moved into another part of the budget, or another department. 4/16

The city has budgeted $150.5 million for the police and fire pension fund. Those are not broken apart in the budget, so its hard to tell how much of that is for the BPD, but is that part of the $509 million?

No. 5/16

If you include the $150.5 million for the pensions, then the BPD is costing $662 million, which is 34.3% of the general fund.

There is no mention in the budget if that includes police lawsuits or overtime, which cost $50 million in FY 2018. baltimoresun.com/maryland/balti… 7/16

Previous budgets have alluded to the fact that the BPD facilities are not under their budget as well. There is not a 'facilities' line item, but given the condition of facilities, that would make sense.

Federal forfeiture is paying for the Sun Building. 8/16

The homicide rate is held up as the gold standard for safety. While calendar and budget years don't line up, we can roughly see that giving more money to the BPD does not result in a lower homicide rate. Correlation != causation, but this shows the opposite. 9/16

Note, that the $509 million number is only the city's contribution. There is another $5,214,035 federal money, $26,723,056 from the state, and $8,772,267 from 'special revenue'. 10/16

The largest part of the budget is '622: Police Patrol'. Last year, there was a huge drop because 515 positions were transferred moved within the BPD "in an effort to
more accurately reflect where Police personnel are assigned." It was not a cut. 11/16

The second biggest budget item is ‘621 - Administrative Bureau’. This budget item has ballooned to 301% of its 2016 level. 12/16

It might be worse. The new '807 - Compliance Bureau' was allocated $35 million, and its taking over a few roles that were in the Admin Bureau in FY 2020. 13/16

In fact, there were a few budget lines that were zeroed out, including '624 Target Violent Criminals', '625 SWAT ESU', '627 Emergency Communications', '632 Manage Police Records', '634 Crowd, Traffic, and Special Events Management', '637 Special Operations K 9 and Mounted', ...

'638 Marine Unit', and '640 Special Operations Aviation'. It seems that this is just moving things around, as they only call out a few million in cuts in their budget highlights. 14/16

They are also anticipating a reduction in legal settlements in the next year. Not a budget analyst. Not a lawyer. But this liability sunami seems to be coming.

baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-… 15/16

If you are concerned with how we are spending our money, send a letter to the city by June 12 at 4pm to [e-mail]. The following is my letter of support for #DefundBPD 16/16

docs.google.com/document/d/1b6…

H/T to @lizthornberry for finding that the 911 system did move to the Mayor's Office of IT.