Cut the Frills to Hire Police : City ballot: A tax increase via Measures M and N is a City Hall cop-out. Just give LAPD the budget share it used to have.

Los Angeles has a crisis of confidence in its Police Department; the city also has a new chief of police who deserves a chance to succeed. But Los Angeles is woefully under-policed; it needs not 1,000 new police officers but considerably more than that, as well as a new emergency communications system, to protect the citizens of this city.

Even so, on Tuesday the people of Los Angeles should vote no on Measure N, the $100-million-a-year special property tax to fund the hiring of 1,000 more police officers, and no on Measure M, which would upgrade the police communications system.

Why? Because in spite of the true need for more police, the city of Los Angeles has not kept faith with its citizen-taxpayers. It has, in effect, been playing a diabolical budget game of bait-and-switch with the voters, using money that should have gone toward expanding the police force to fund programs for which higher taxes were an impossible “sell.”

In fiscal 1977-78, when Proposition 13 went into effect, Los Angeles allocated 20.6% of its total budget to police. If police protection had been funded by the same percentage of the 1992-93 budget, there would be $257 million available this year to hire not 1,000 more police officers but 3,000. But for 1992-93, the city allocated only 13.9% of its budget to the police, a drop of 6.7%.

How is it that this decline in funding the police has gone unnoticed? How is it that no one at City Hall will report this fact? Because the City Council has been busy approving increased funding for departments and programs that the average citizen would find far less worthy than police protection, and hoping that no one would notice.

What are some of those departments and commissions and programs whose share of the budget has increased while the police department’s percentage has declined? Try the budget line item titled “Aging” (a city department!) for an increase of $2.4 million. Also look at Cultural Affairs, for an increase of $10.3 million, Environmental Affairs, up $1.2 million, the Ethics Commission, for $1.3 million. None of these were in the 1978-79 budget. Nor was Information Services at $34.1 million, or the Convention Center for $24.1 million, or General Services, a whopping $191 million.

On top of reorganized or reconfigured departments with much higher budgets than before, and new departments or commissions that didn’t exist in 1978-79, consider the line item for Personnel. In 1978-79, it took 4.3% of the budget. In 1992-93, it had increased to 6.3%.

The elected and appointed officials of Los Angeles have much to account for to the taxpayers. Understanding the fiscal details of the city’s budgets and appropriations is more difficult than navigating a maze with Alice in Wonderland. We cannot wonder if this undue complexity isn’t part of an intentional scheme.

But scheme or no scheme, no matter what else is said--no matter how complex the city’s budgeteers make the more than 8,000 pages and multivolume budget documents--the fact remains that this year they have managed to cut the police department by roughly 153% of the equivalent dollars spent in 1978-79, while allowing far less important departments, programs and commissions to suck up dollars that the public surely would prefer to be spent on protecting their lives and property.

If Los Angeles’ taxpayers want to stop this shell game and send a message to the City Council, they will vote no on Measure M and Measure N, and then go down to City Hall and demand that the city allocate at least the same percentage of its total budget on police in 1992-93 as it spent on police in 1978-79.

After all, it is your money that the budgeteers are spending.