The City Already Has the Money. It Is Spending It on the Wrong Thing.
Fifty-three.
That is the number of street food vendors in Los Angeles County who hold a health permit, against roughly 50,000 vendors on the sidewalks. The county logged close to 10,000 complaints in three years and about 3,000 food poisoning reports in 2025 alone. Last fall the county stopped inspecting. Last month the Mayor told the LAPD to stop writing citations.
That is a city deciding the rules on the books are optional. The reason is not ideology. It is arithmetic. There is nobody left to enforce them, and every budget year the city spends the money that would fix that on something else.
The number people actually live with
City Hall reaches for the homicide count whenever safety comes up, and 230 homicides in 2025 was the lowest since 1966. The department earned that. But almost nobody's experience of Los Angeles runs through the homicide count.
The number people live with is 336. That is how many property crimes the LAPD recorded every day last year, about 122,000 in all. Car break-ins top 30,000 a year. Burglaries ran about 11,000. Only about three in ten property crimes are ever reported, so 122,000 is the floor, and of those reported here, fewer than one in ten produce an arrest.
Those are the crimes that decide whether a block works. Nobody dies. It shows up in the vacancy. The private sector already paid for it: about 83,000 security guards work in the Los Angeles metro, second only to New York, nearly ten for every LAPD officer. Nobody hired them as an amenity. That is the sidewalk tax, paid by every owner who decided to stay.
The number the Chief already gave us
In July, Chief Jim McDonnell said the department has about 8,550 sworn officers and needs 12,500. He loses 500 to 600 a year to attrition, and the academy class that graduated in June had 26 people in it. He called the force exceptionally lean.
Los Angeles has 3.8 million people, so 8,550 officers is about 2.2 per thousand. New York runs about four. Chicago runs about 4.3. Those figures come from the Mayor's own executive directive. The Chief's 12,500 would still leave the city at 3.3 per thousand. He is not asking for parity. He is asking for enough. A department at 2.2 triages: homicide gets a detective, the burglary gets a report number, the break-in gets a link to file online, and the vending complaint gets nothing.
Which $790 million?
From 8,550 to 12,500 is about 3,950 officers. At a fully loaded cost of roughly $200,000 each, that is about $790 million a year once the force is built.
The city's homelessness budget this year is $788 million.
Those two numbers are the same number. Every officer the Chief says the city needs costs what the city already spends on a system a federal judge cannot audit. In March 2025, auditors reviewing $2.3 billion routed through the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority could not follow the money or confirm that invoiced services were delivered. About 48% of participants went back to the street. The Mayor called the system broken. This summer's count showed street homelessness up almost 8%, and homeless-related homicides rose 20% last year, the one category that went up.
Measure ULA has collected about $1.2 billion in three years; the city has spent about $120 million of it. The county has left LAHSA, built its own homeless services department, and funds it with a sales tax raising about a billion dollars a year. The case for a parallel $788 million city operation on top of that is hard to make.
Nobody serious is arguing for zero. But the priority question has an answer. Hold LAHSA-routed dollars flat until the forensic audit clears and move the growth to sworn hiring. Let the county carry the service load it taxed itself to carry. Ramp the police budget about $150 million a year for six years, under 1% of the city budget in year one and under 6% at full build, and fill academy classes to the thousand a year the city managed under Villaraigosa on half the budget. No new tax. A decision about which line item comes first.
What it is worth
The research is settled. Each additional officer is associated with about three fewer violent crimes and four fewer property crimes a year, and each dollar spent on police returns about $1.63 in avoided costs to victims. On 3,950 officers, that is roughly 16,000 fewer property crimes a year and about $1.3 billion in avoided harm against $790 million of payroll. Then count the property value. More than 80% of published studies find crime reduces it, and consumers react to street and property crime more than to violence when deciding where to shop. The City of Los Angeles carries about $926 billion in assessed value. One percent of that is $9 billion, eleven times the annual cost of the full force, and it comes back in rents, occupancy, tax receipts, and whether the tenant on the corner renews.
The first amenity
Rising Realty Partners has operated buildings in Los Angeles for a long time, and the first question a prospective tenant asks has never once been about the cap rate. It is whether their employees can walk to the car after dark.
The city spends $788 million a year on a system it cannot audit. It would cost $790 million to give the Chief every officer he asked for. Public safety is the infrastructure that economic growth runs on, the same as the roads and the water, and it is the precondition for everything else the city says it wants, including getting people off the street. The money is there. What is missing is the decision to put it first.