I'm a Houston resident. In a recent election there was a ballot measure which would affect the pay of Houston firefighters. In particular our firefighters were getting paid less than our police. The ballot measure was supposed to increase firefighters' pay to match. It was accomplished... but didn't meet the budget I guess. So firefighters were laid off instead. Here's [0] a related news article about it.

[0] https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/houston-texas/houston/...

Also Houston resident. That whole thing was ridiculous. The problem goes back many years. Municipal and Police blew up the pension budget to something unsustainable through a variety of tactics, and firefighters got nowhere near the amount of cash that those two departments got. Then like 20 years ago when all of the cities in America started defunding pensions and then the chickens came to roost, Houston started issuing crazy bonds to keep up with the police and municipal workers, and firefighters actually had a decent fund that was mostly self sustaining and didn't require external funding as far as I know. Something super high like 90% of their pensions were fully funded.

Then when Houston made budget cuts recently, they disproportionately cut firefighter pensions even though they were mostly responsible and funded, but I guess it looked like a stash of cash to the city. Keep in mind firefighters had previously made pay raise sacrifices to ensure their pension benefits continued. So they wanted the pay raises back since the pensions got cut, and they got laid off (and also some raise was given).

It's because of what "police" means in the US compared to other countries. In the US, police are the backstop for every social ill and woe. Homeless and housing problems? Police. Mental illness? Police. Communities in poverty? Police.

So the budget is huge because the scope of their organization is huge. They are a band-aid for a myriad of political failures.

One of the big ideas of the "defund" movement isn't to pocket the money but direct those funding streams into other places. For example, instead of having police tackle homelessness, why shouldn't some of that budget go to affordable housing?

Except that there's a complex system or corruption that got things into that state. Moving money from the police will probably not be spent on anything beneficial, but instead into what ever political agenda comes up next.

If, as you're saying, a complex system of corruption has affected where public money is spent, isn't that actually a great reason to question the legitimacy of police budgets and consider pushing for that money to be spent elsewhere?

I'd rather have it earmarked for something else then. The police can apply for more funding if and when they can justify it with facts and figures instead of feels over reals.

I mean but they have the money now, they applied for it surely. They must have convinced a city council at least that it was justified. I'm certainly seeing a lot of feels in this thread.

I'm not American, so forgive my ignorance, but what are the budget responsibilities by level of Government? In Australia, there are really clear divides.

Country -> defence, welfare. State -> Education, roads, public transport County (council) -> parks, local infrastructure, approvals (for building).

Same with taxes, where the federal government is the only body allowed to apply most taxes (like income tax), which they then pass through to the states. In Australia, the Federal government raises the money, and the states spend it.

Without having any idea how the US system works, what are the budgetary responsibilities of the City of Orlando vs the state of Florida vs the federal government of the USA? It seems weird to an Australian that the police are funded at such a low level. Is that in addition to state spending? Is there no state spending on police?

Without knowing what the budgetary responsibilities are, I have no idea how to contextualise "31.6% of its budget", and I wonder if many Americans could either, as knowledge of this level of government funding arcana would be, well I'd think pretty rare.

The short answer is that it's a huge mess and very different everywhere. Any gov layer could be collecting taxes or not. You could have sales tax, or not. You could have property tax, or not. You could have excise tax, or not.

You won't even have consistent definitions for boundaries. In other parts of the country, you won't find much in the way of towns/cities and the county is a very important government function. In Massachusetts every bit of land belongs to a town and "counties" are really only there to define court districts, nothing more.

NY is a really weird nesting doll of bureaucracy. You'll have state > counties > cities/towns > villages. All with their own leadership, boundaries, tax structure, etc. Speaking as a Bostonian, New York looks insane ;)