Looks like the population of LA is about 3.8M people. So if you had 2.4 cops for every 1000 people, that’s about 9,100 cops.

Let’s assume each one makes $80,000 a year. You still have to include insurance, taxes, and stuff like that. So let’s round up to $110K/year.

Employees generally get uniforms and tools provided by the business, and cops have a lot of tools. If we’re gonna have police, their gear should be provided, so that they don’t and shouldn’t use random other stuff. Let’s say, including basic gun and vest and tools and other wearable gear like jackets and hivis, that’s another $3K/year.

If you start adding in vehicles and the pure mileage cops have to drive around, it gets pretty funky pretty quick, so let’s just say they each drive 150K miles a year, and a lot of it at high speed, which increases insurance and wear and tear quite fast. So let’s say a new car’s worth of cost every two years for every two cops. Which is about 60M/year.

So, salary, toolset, personal gear, and basic cars is just over $1B/year.

When you start adding things like pension, police violence insurance, militarized vehicles, administration, and support cops and mechanics and stuff, it gets pretty big pretty quick…

So, while 2B/year is a lot, especially since each cop probably makes more than 80k, and admins probably make more, it really isn’t THAT outlandish. There’s heavy handed “sprinklings” of corruption all over, too. And along with waste and turnover and lawsuits and shit… It seems pretty spot on.

Now, what to do about widespread and normalized fascism is a totally different discussion.

I bet Palantir is working on it. Oh, wait.