L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has asked the City Council to increase the Los Angeles Police Department\u2019s budget by $4.4 million to hire 410 more officers before July.<\/p>\n
In a letter to council members yesterday, Bass wrote that the city needs to have enough officers to keep Angelenos safe in coming years, including during major events like the 2026 FIFA World Cup and the 2028 Olympic Games.<\/p>\n
LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell made a similar argument at a Budget and Finance Commission meeting Tuesday, where he said that despite the city\u2019s budget problems, he worries about whether L.A. will be prepared for the Olympics in 2028 under currently approved staffing.<\/p>\n
Several City Council members have already been pushing back against the proposal, arguing that the budget for those positions was negotiated and signed by Bass in June.<\/p>\n
Keep up with LAist.<\/p>\n
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\u201cThe council and the mayor signed a budget that included 240 new hires,\u201d Councilmember Katy Yaroslavsky said at the Budget and Finance Commission meeting on Tuesday. \u201cThe department chose to hire that full 240 in the first six months of this year.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur job is to keep the city safe. We also have a responsibility to keep it solvent,\u201d Yaroslavsky told LAist in an emailed statement. \u201cI want to grow the police department, but I have yet to see a proposal that identifies an ongoing funding source to pay for more officers.\u201d<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
LAPD Officers line up in preparation to form a skirmish line in front of protesters near the federal detention facility in downtown L.A. on June 7, 2025.<\/p>\n
LAPD hiring goals twice as high as current budget<\/p>\n
Mayor Bass initially proposed a budget back in April recommending funding to support 480 new LAPD officers.<\/p>\n
The final budget was a compromise reached by the City Council that approved hiring 240 new recruits in the midst of a budget crisis and attempts to reduce layoffs across the city. According to a press release on June 7, the day after she signed the final budget, Bass announced a plan to find additional funding within 90 days to bring the total LAPD hires to 480.<\/p>\n
The funding never materialized and no additional positions have yet been approved.<\/p>\n
LAPD has already hit its hiring cap of 240 new officers, according to a letter from the city personnel department.<\/p>\n
The city\u2019s most recent financial status report filed on Dec. 5 by City Administrative Officer Matt Szabo says if LAPD continues hiring at its current pace, the department would add 410 new sworn officers and exceed the plan previously budgeted.<\/p>\n
The report shows that costs of the additional 410 officers would be expected to exceed $4.4 million through June, then about $23.7 million in the next fiscal year.<\/p>\n
Chief McDonnell spoke to council members at the Budget and Finance Committee about the pace of hiring, and said that the department did what it was \u201ctold to do.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cOur understanding was . . . that we would be able to hire an additional 240 if we hired 240 in the first six months,\u201d McDonnell said, \u201cwe did that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The department cannot continue hiring without the additional positions requested by Bass.<\/p>\n
Show me the money<\/p>\n
At Tuesday\u2019s Budget and Finance meeting, Councilmember Tim McOsker asked Szabo whether any funds had ever been identified to fill those positions.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere has not been a formal report issued to this body identifying funds for additional hiring above what is in the budget,\u201d Szabo replied.<\/p>\n
\u201cIs there any proposal \u2014 any sort of competent, grown up, adult proposal \u2014 for how we pay for this?\u201d McOsker, who also chairs the Personnel and Hiring Committee, asked in a follow up question to Szabo.<\/p>\n
\u201cNot that I’m aware of,\u201d Szabo replied. He said his office would be happy to identify reductions to fund additional hiring, but had not been instructed to do so.<\/p>\n
That means the proposed hires would need to come from the city\u2019s reserve funds, which Szabo\u2019s office cautioned against.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe impact of this overspending in 2025-26 and 2026-27 cannot be overlooked,\u201d his office\u2019s financial status report states, \u201cas it represents a departure from the approved plan with likely repercussions to the City\u2019s Reserve Fund.\u201d<\/p>\n
The reserve fund currently sits at 5.06 percent of the total general fund budget, according to the report, but overspending \u2014 primarily driven by LAPD and liability payments \u2014 could bring the reserve fund below emergency levels of 5 percent.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe should never, as a practice, assume the use of the reserve fund for hiring police officers,\u201d Szabo told the Budget and Finance Committee. \u201cThe reserve fund is there for unexpected circumstances.\u201d<\/p>\n
In an emailed statement provided to LAist, McOsker said he agrees with the mayor that public safety is the highest priority.<\/p>\n
\u201cI agreed with the Mayor six months ago when she originally proposed this saying she would work with Council Leadership to find the money to fund more officers.\u201d McOsker said, \u201cBut six months later, this remains a proposal with no funding identification.\u201d<\/p>\n
How to reach me<\/p>\n
If you have a tip, you can reach me on Signal. My username is \u00a0jrynning.56.<\/p>\n
Bass told Larry Mantle on AirTalk that the city is looking at \u201cevery account possible\u201d to find money for more officers, and that not approving more hiring will also have a financial cost.<\/p>\n
\u201c\u200aEither we hire new officers or we continue to spend millions and millions of dollars in overtime,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Listen to the interview<\/p>\n
LA Mayor Karen Bass calls for allocating more money to police department hiring<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"L.A. Mayor Karen Bass has asked the City Council to increase the Los Angeles Police Department\u2019s budget by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":91772,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[2076,50663,1610,48,52,51,5015,47,50,49,17708],"class_list":{"0":"post-91771","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-los-angeles","8":"tag-budget","9":"tag-chief-mcdonnell","10":"tag-city-council","11":"tag-la","12":"tag-la-headlines","13":"tag-la-news","14":"tag-lapd","15":"tag-los-angeles","16":"tag-los-angeles-headlines","17":"tag-los-angeles-news","18":"tag-mayor-bass"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91771","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=91771"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/91771\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/91772"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=91771"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=91771"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=91771"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}