Presumably the city employs 80 police officers because they's how many they think they need?

If the voters are happy with 16 less police officers then why not fire them right now?

Government agencies don’t willingly cut headcount because it looks like they’re overstaffed. What a quaint notion.

If the job is getting done and you have 500 employees and the budget for 500 employees, there is literally no incentive to even determine if it could be done with 400. Leaders don’t get a portion of money saved or anything like that. They just lose the budget that was for the extra employees and get a bunch of pissed off employees that now have to work harder for the same pay.

The police don't set their own budget, if that's how you're imagining things.

They get given money by government, representing the voters.

If the voters think they're happy with less police of course they can drop 100 employees worth of budget. The police can't stop that.

The voters don’t know when police are overstaffed, that’s the problem. Only police management understand how over-subscribed officers are and they have no incentives to fix it when there are too many officers for what’s really needed.

You live in a fantasy if you think voters make rational decisions about policing based on police-load.