Okay. So brief recap on what happened. The city of Austin proposed, like, a 30% cut to their police department. Some of those were reducing future fire or police academies and things like that for the upcoming year that were already planned. Um, a- about 17 percentage points of the cut, l- I don't know, 17 percentage points of 30, uh, so a little over half, was reallocating operations outside of the police department. So moving dispatch, uh, moving internal investigations and things like that, a- and a handful of other services that the police department was providing. Still doing those things, but not in the police department. So it's a net reduction to the police budget, but not to the operations. And then about a third of those cuts were legitimate cuts to, uh, you know, we're not gonna be doing these particular services anymore. We're gonna reallocate that money to a different social service. And so the governor came out and said that any... He's gonna propose a plan where any city who defunds the police is going to have their property taxes capped. So it's- So there's all kinds of local control issues and things like that that we talked about in our newsletter. Um, you know, not evaluating on the merits the actual cuts that the city of Austin made because that's, that's their decision to make, right? They get to live with the ramifications of it. But, uh, CityLab looked at 34 of the top 50 largest cities across the country, uh, looked at their FY21 budgets, which in most cases, uh, have just recently now been approved, and kind of evaluated how they handled their police funding, because obviously with, with the COVID, uh, the e- economic impacts of COVID, uh, strapping cities across the country and with the, the protests and the discussions of policing, uh, you know, if a city was ever going to take advantage of an opportunity to reevaluate their police budget, this is going to be one of the best that they'll have. So CityLab kind of looked at what are cities actually doing? And again, they looked at 34 of the top 50 cities. They found that 14 had net decreases in their police budgets. Obviously, Austin led the way with their 30% reduction. Uh, you had New York City, you had Vegas, Arlington, Virginia, Portland, DC, et cetera. You can... We'll link to the article in the show notes so you can look at the full list. Um, Tulsa was pretty much flat, so it was, uh, it may have actually been 13. There were two cities that had a net reduction in police while their general budgets increased, and those were Boston and LA. But one thing I found interesting was that there were actually nine cities on this group that had, uh, increases in their police department budgets, but a net decrease in their general budget as a whole. Uh, cities like Atlanta, Memphis, Houston, Charlotte, Raleigh, Albuquerque, uh, and Oakland, just as a few examples. They re- they increased their police budgets this year, but reduced general fund as a whole. Uh, I, I just kind of found that interesting that, you know, it's, it's not uncommon. We're-- I did budget for over a decade. You know, you've worked in city management. It's not uncommon during economic, economically difficult times to see the general fund budget contract, but the police and fire budgets either stay flat or, or grow.
