> The City Council responded by cutting $15 million. An additional $12 million was cut due to pandemic-caused economic shortfalls. As a result, school resource officers, transit police and a gun violence reduction team — which was found to disproportionately target Black Portland residents during traffic stops, according to an audit in March 2018 — were disbanded.
So we've established the council cut enough funds that several major teams were defunded, including the gun violence team, the transit police, and school resource officers. This is not a nominal reduction, but an actual elimination.
Secondly, we establish that they refunded the departments:
> Now, a year and a half later, officials partially restored the cut funds. On Wednesday, the Portland City Council unanimously passed a fall budget bump that included increasing the current $230 million police budget by an additional $5.2 million.
Similar things happened in other communities:
> In the wake of protests, the Los Angeles City Council cut $150 million from the police budget, promising to put that money into other social services. Likewise, in New York City lawmakers approved a shift of $1 billion from policing to education and social services. At the time the NYPD budget was around $6 billion, with several billion dollars more in shared city expenses such as pensions. However, since the cut, concerns about crime led to about $200 million in restored funding.
PBS: https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/portland-among-u-s-citie...
First the reporting on the defunding:
> The City Council responded by cutting $15 million. An additional $12 million was cut due to pandemic-caused economic shortfalls. As a result, school resource officers, transit police and a gun violence reduction team — which was found to disproportionately target Black Portland residents during traffic stops, according to an audit in March 2018 — were disbanded.
So we've established the council cut enough funds that several major teams were defunded, including the gun violence team, the transit police, and school resource officers. This is not a nominal reduction, but an actual elimination.
Secondly, we establish that they refunded the departments:
> Now, a year and a half later, officials partially restored the cut funds. On Wednesday, the Portland City Council unanimously passed a fall budget bump that included increasing the current $230 million police budget by an additional $5.2 million.
Similar things happened in other communities:
> In the wake of protests, the Los Angeles City Council cut $150 million from the police budget, promising to put that money into other social services. Likewise, in New York City lawmakers approved a shift of $1 billion from policing to education and social services. At the time the NYPD budget was around $6 billion, with several billion dollars more in shared city expenses such as pensions. However, since the cut, concerns about crime led to about $200 million in restored funding.
Stop repeating the big lie.