Police didn't like the "defund the police" movement (which was most active in 2020, so there's your temporal coincidence). The theory is that they are deliberat

Police didn't like the "defund the police" movement (which was most active in 2020, so there's your temporal coincidence). The theory is that they are deliberately doing a bad job to make crime worse. Just be bad at your job and you'll get paid more because the low morale and understaffing means it's harder to hire and your overtime pay goes up so that's a win-win. In general no defunding actually happened anywhere. If you google around you'll find plenty of articles about that [0]. From the article: "local spending on police increased in 90 percent of locations since 2019." Anecdote, I've only talked to one former Oakland cop in person, but when he talked about his experience literally ALL he talked about was overtime and how to get more of it, and this was years before the pandemic. So it seems to be part of the institutional culture now. In Oakland, the police department is like 25% of the total city budget. Depending on the year and what you count as "budget" it can be closer to 40% of the general fund [1]. Either way, as a percentage their budget has actually gone UP significantly since 2019, mostly due to excessive overtime. It works "kind of" like a protection racket. Some back of the napkin math and the OPD budget is something like $500k per officer and $3.5 million per murder, which they don't prevent and barely bother trying to solve. I think a few million redirected to better mental health and homeless services would probably pay off. They have lots of new SUV's which they like to drive through residential neighborhoods really fast though. [0] https://abc7news.com/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12311750/ https://abc7news.com/defund-police-oakland-crime-shooting/12... [1] https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3Ou1LrUcAE67SZ?format=jpg&name=medium https://pbs.twimg.com/media/C3Ou1LrUcAE67SZ?format=jpg&name=...