LA Gave More Money to Cops While Cutting Fire Budgets. Now It’s Burning.
“Defunding of other city programs in order to give the LAPD billions a year has consequences,” according to a local activist.
Based on my own experience, this is how most cities handle their PD/FD funding, unfortunately. The fire department is just not important.. until it is.
Can confirm. source: Am Australian.
I suspect Scott being a doomsday death cult evangelical made those cuts deliberate instead of just being a standard short sighted git. Especially when he decided to take a vacation during your crises.
That's not really how it works in Australia though.
Every property owner pays an Emergency Services Levy which pays for the fireys. State governments pay for the police force. So there's no organisation that chooses whether police or fire gets whatever money - funding is procured separately.
That said, I take your point that the fireys don't get a lot of attention until there's a disaster. That's just human nature I guess.
In my area, if there's a bushfire that looks like destroying someone's house, the volunteers, fire service, and bombing planes are on to it in minutes.
I don't have "data" but from my anecdotal observations they don't seem to be hamstrung by a lack of funding.
That's karma. The longer we seek instant gratification, neglecting doing the hard, dirty necessary work that yields no immediate discernable benefits, the more severe the bite is, when it comes back around and bites us in the backside. As a collective, we stay on the wheel of suffering, figure out we need to do something differently, figure out necessary changes, then implement them... Then a few generations, the wealthy overlords convince us we're spending too much on very sensible investments that yield no immediate discernable benefits and we repeat the cycle. It's like Groundhog Day over centuries (which add up to millennia,), rather than days, weeks, years. Because they plan family fortunes for centuries, rather than days, weeks and years, because they can afford private communities, with private police and fire departments, and comprehensive health. The rest of us are means that justify their ends, and the sooner we, as a collective, wake up and smell the roses and love each other enough (which preserves our own arses) to figure out ways to fix this mess, for centuries that turn into millennia, the better off we and the rest of our ecoweb will be. Or not. 🤷♀️
This is incorrect.
the updated budget in November saw a $53 million increase over the previous year once the council took into account the department's unappropriated balance calculation, which provides funds after the budget is approved.
https://abcnews.go.com/US/los-angeles-mayor-karen-bass-pushes-back-criticism/story?id=117512817
"No they didn't, it was only a budget cut until the unions fought them and forced them to hand over more budget' isn't exactly the win you think it is here.
Even worse, despite call numbers increasing over 5x from 1960, the fire program has been completely unable to expand since 1960 and was basically completely at the mercy of people doing brutal amounts of overtime to keep things going... until they lost the ability to pay them overtime too! The fire department is absurdly understaffed and underfunded. Imagine still making the same salary as 65 years ago, while having to do 5x the work!
While the 53 million budget increase the unions managed to grab is a good improvement, along with the ~200 more trainee firefighters it allowed them to hire but aren't yet ready to deploy, it's the definition of too little and too late.
High winds preventing firefighting planes and copters, low water levels since the city has let nestle steal all of it for free, electrical problems to prevent pumps from sending water from afar, and not enough man hours to manage and prevent fire conditions in the first place- as it says in the article you posted, no amount of budget could have prevented this, because there was more to play here than just the budget. But enough people and man hours to properly manage things would have done a lot to limit the scope of the disaster.
Careful. I also said this and my post was removed for misinformation. Looks like musks crew are invading.
Screenshotting this because I don't know how to reliably link comments across instances.
From my understanding the water towers had completely ran out of water and pumps couldn't keep up. There's was no issue with volume through the existing water system, there's just no way to contain a fire that big. They should be taking preventative measures such as raking the forest.
Can't tell if this is idiocy or peak satire.
Well done.
Oh it's even better than that. They're referencing a direct quote from trump.
Where is Arial firefighting? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerial_firefighting.
How come I can find videos of Russian be 200 everywhere, but I've never seen anything similar in US?
I'm confident US has no such planes ( or no good ones) or they are too expensive in US or some bullshit issues like imminent domain preventing them refilling in lakes nearby.
The fire grew this big due to high winds from the giant winter storm earlier in the week. Winds were too high to use planes/helicopters.
I'm confident US has no such planes
This is just peak ignorance. A quick search says the US has 200-300 firefighting planes and even lists 6 different varieties.
Meh, same thing with healthcare. Who needs a medical professional to help a person with a mental health crisis when you can have a guy with highschool and six months of "training" put a few bullets in em?
America: Funding cops to shoot black people, defunding actual helpful social needs since 1864.
LAPD cops can shout and order the fires to freeze!
They could also shoot it if it does not obey!
I have to do other people's jobs. Slap some tin foil on em and throw them in to help.
Maybe if they all shoot the fire in the back when it's sleeping?!
They cut ~2% of the budget. Anyone spewing this funding cut bullshit is a partisan hack.
Quit being reactionary.
that’s not what reactionary means
$17.5 million, or around 2 percent of the previous year’s budget of $837 million. It was the second-largest departmental operating cut to come out of the city’s 2024-25 fiscal year budget, which shaved funding from the majority of city departments — but not the police.
the article does say the percentage… and maybe it’s insane to cut their budget at all, given california’s recent fire problems, and they should’ve increased it by about 100%….
so, given the difference between -2% and +100%, and half the city burning down, it’s a pretty big deal.
Why do you think it's okay to cut funding to the fire department while keeping the police(gang) force that is notorious for not actually doing anything to help it's citizens?
Think about the priority of the community wealthy community members.
Fires cause insurance payouts. This means big paydays when those 'priceless' works of art go up in smoke. You sell the land and buy somewhere without the insurance hikes. Win-win-win for the wealthy.
Crime causes property values to decline. A break in is harder to deal with. Rabble protesting for fair treatment can get violent. The homeless need to be driven from the wealthy areas so the wealthy can enjoy their champagne and caviar in peace after snorting coke off of a trafficked sex slave's tits. Police are so very valuable for keeping the wealthy safe.
They know exactly what the right priority is... for the people who actually matter (not us.)
I suspect they could have doubled the budget and they still wouldn't be able to control those fires.
Still it looks like it's affecting rich people, so something will probably get done about it.
Fires are increasing every year. It's the lady thing that should be cut. It should've been the other way around.
Just give firefighting responsibility to the cops! Then they can show up to your kitchen fire, put it out, shoot your dog, and arrest you for complaining all in one trip!
Given the history of wildfires in California, someone has anti-survival traits.
Fire is a natural part of the ecological system. You can by time, but eventually, it will happen. Building in wildlands is a recipe for disaster, if you don't create breaks, or defencable zones. It's not a simple problem, with a simple solution. A big part of the problem, is building all those homes there, but if you're gonna build, then you should protect. A lot of people build in forested areas and don't create defensible zones, because, that's why they move there, for pretty trees.
True, it's a multi-level fuck-up, which nature is showing us quite clearly. Solutions would not need to be that difficult, just gradually stop burning fossil fuels, stop eating meat, build responsibly and spread money evenly. Too bad that all the people getting rich from these things have a succesful propaganda campaign going on. Nature will not be tamed however, not in the foreseeable future.
Building houses without concrete and bricks and then located in the woods - what can go wrong.
What I don't understand- most countries have fire fighting airplanes for these things.
How in a world US being a country with such a mighty economy - doesn't have them or doesn't want to use them. Pathetic
The US absolutely does have those planes. (That’s 1 example, here are others) But high winds are keeping most of them from operating (the winds are what is spreading the fires).
They are using helicopters, but those can’t carry as much.
California didn’t used to burn like this. Yeah, there were fires, but they were far more rare and didn’t affect as many people because the state wasn’t as populous and nowhere near as short of water.
As to your second statement, it’s bullshit. Wth the “mighty economy” statement has to do with anything. There’s a huge firefighting industry on the west coast and in California, both ground and air. They are using aircraft, even with a temporary stop due to high winds.
Can't target properly with 100MPH winds
Bricks and mortar houses would burn, too under these circumstances.
I don't think you have any concept of the size of the burning area or the intense weather conditions in the western US. Months of drought conditions then 90mph wind gusts. Once a blaze is going it will jump all over the place due to the wind, making it virtually impossible to contain until the winds start to subside. Cleaning out underbrush can help, but with winds that high fires will jump directly from tree to tree. Some of these fires only took one spark to start. And the conditions will only grow more intense as climate change continues. This is not a problem that's easy to solve.
