Pound Foolish: After Cutting Police, Overtime Costs Strain LA's Budget

With donuts now over $20 a dozen and a cup of coffee topping $3, working a shift for the Los Angeles Police Department isn’t what it once was.

But with overtime pay at 1.5 times the regular hourly rate,  LAPD officers aren’t having trouble footing the bill at Randy’s or Starbucks. Indeed, overtime pay has now grown so much that some detectives earn more money than the city’s mayor and the state’s governor. 

In 2023, the last year for which figures are available, Detective Robert Rand more than doubled his salary through overtime, earning $324,875, according to OpenGovPay.com. That easily topped the $224,020 salary of Gov. Gavin Newsom and the $301,000 paid to Mayor Karen Bass, records show.

Rand’s case isn’t unique. In 2024, the department spent an all-time high of $265.5 million on overtime alone, an increase of $100 million for that line item in the city’s budget since 2019.

Before last year, no LAPD officer had ever earned more than $235,000 in yearly overtime pay. In 2024, seven officers did, including Detective Nathan Kouri, whose combined compensation of $603,887 made him the highest-paid cop in the City of Angels, according to a report by OpentheBooks.com. All told, nearly three dozen LAPD officers made at least $400,000 in overall pay for the year. 

These whopping paychecks don’t appear to be a good deal for taxpayers or crime-fighting in the city. The spike in overtime stems from three main sources: a shortage of cops, the City Council’s continued embrace of the movement to defund the police, and general fiscal pressures. However, cutting the force is costing the city more, not less, while also hindering the LAPD’s ability to respond to calls for help. 

In 2020, a total of 14,902 LAPD employees (both sworn officers and civilian staff) made a total of $1.71 billion. Four years later, the department shrank to 12,617 employees but cost the city $1.73 billion – an increase due at least in part to the boost in costly overtime pay to cover for the shortage of sworn officers. 

But despite the thinner ranks and thicker payroll, local policymakers have opted for further cuts to the department’s manpower, which could drive up overtime pay even more.

A recent report by OpentheBooks.com found that it is not just police officers who are being asked to do more. “The top-paid lifeguard in LA county was compensated more than $500,000 in 2024; and over the past 5 years, a single lifeguard was able to pull down $702,000 – in overtime alone!” the report said.

Los Angeles spent $1.1 billion on overtime pay for public workers across all city departments in 2024, a figure higher than the city’s nearly billion-dollar budget deficit. 

Los Angeles is just one of many major cities struggling to provide basic services in the face of declining revenue stemming from shuttered downtown businesses, loss of federal funds, and sharply rising pension payments, among other reasons. 

The recent riots in Los Angeles – and President Trump’s decision to send 4,800 U.S. Marines and members of California’s National Guard to the city – have focused attention on its shrinking law enforcement capabilities. The LAPD, which was staffed with around 10,000 sworn officers at the start of 2020, argues that this is the minimum number of cops it needs to respond to 911 calls and address public safety concerns. But LAPD brass anticipates they will lose more than 150 additional officers over the next year, shrinking the force to around 8,620 by June 30, 2026. 

Making matters worse for the department, the City Council’s May 2025 vote in favor of additional LAPD cuts will leave the agency with just 8,400 cops, the lowest number since 1995. That would continue a long-term trend. In fiscal year 2020-2021, a total of 631 police officers from all ranks left the department or the profession, with many taking early retirement, according to a report by the Los Angeles Police Commission. 

The grim arithmetic means Los Angeles has far fewer police officers relative to its population than many other big U.S. cities. In 2022, for example, Washington, D.C., employed 543 officers per 100,000 residents while Los Angeles had just 237. Other cities that beat Los Angeles on this metric include Chicago, New York, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Miami.

“At the start of this budget process, we made a promise to maintain core services and minimize impacts to Angelenos,” City Councilmember Traci Park said during a budget meeting in late May. “But this budget doesn’t reflect those promises. We’re shrinking LAPD in favor of expanding other programs that haven’t been effective.”  

While Park didn’t single out programs she finds ineffective or undeserving of additional funding, the new budget adds $14 million in funding for a favored program of defund the police efforts: having unarmed teams, rather than cops, respond to non-violent calls. The teams are made up of mental health professionals who “respond to…individuals experiencing mental health crisis, substance abuse crisis, and homelessness,” according to the news site LAist. 

A social worker who spoke to RealClearInvestigations on the condition of anonymity due to fear of retaliation says the city’s unarmed response teams usually end up calling for LAPD backup anyway. 

“Oftentimes we encounter people who are having mental health emergencies and we can help by trying to deescalate the situation,” she said. “But to say that we only respond to nonviolent calls isn’t true,” she continued. “A lot of times, the person suffering from an episode is physically threatening us, or they have weapons and we don’t feel safe.” She says a better system is having mental health professionals accompany sworn officers rather than cut police out of the equation entirely. 

Less than two months after the City Council passed a new budget with cuts to the LAPD, aggressive immigration raids carried out by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) sparked massive demonstrations and unrest in downtown Los Angeles. In response, officers clocked in so many overtime hours that the city has had to borrow $17.3 million in loans to cover police compensation in 2025.

More overtime is likely on the horizon as Los Angeles gears up for high-profile global events, including the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Summer Olympics.

BLM and Defunding the Police

More than a decade ago, in 2013, then-Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa announced that the LAPD would receive the necessary funds to exceed 10,000 sworn officers, marking the highest number in the department’s history. The local government viewed the promise as fulfilling a longtime goal for the city. 

But seven years later, public perception swung wildly in the other direction. In the wake of 2020’s nationwide protests against police violence, spurred by the killing of George Floyd while being arrested by Minneapolis police, local policymakers heeded calls to “defund the police” and moved to slash the LAPD’s 2021 budget by $150 million. Anti-police activists hailed the move as a first step toward “reimagining” public safety; others warned it could leave the city vulnerable to crime and disorder. 

Nearly five years later, the city’s actual spending on the LAPD has surged due to ballooning overtime costs. In fact, taxpayers are shelling out tens of millions more in overtime pay than they would have if the police force were fully staffed. 

LAPD officers have seen a substantial year-over-year increase in overtime. By 2022, when the department had 9,496 sworn officers, nearly $214 million of the LAPD’s payroll was spent on overtime. By fiscal year 2024, overtime pay ballooned to $265.5 million as the force shrank to 8,688 officers. 

The exploding overtime costs have outrun any savings the city aimed to achieve through trimming the police budget, and fiscal year 2025 is on track to exceed last year’s record total. As of April 17, months before the anti-ICE demonstrations broke out, overtime pay already accounted for 17% of the department’s payroll. As anti-ICE demonstrations continue, that number is expected to grow exponentially. 

Mayor Bass, who was a vocal supporter of “defund the police” initiatives in 2020, has since reversed course, and her recent budget proposals recommend more funds be devoted to the LAPD. “Public safety and public trust are not mutually exclusive,” she said. “We cannot afford to leave our communities under-protected while we figure it out.” 

The City Council’s majority disagreed and voted 12-3 to slash funding for LAPD recruitment. The new budget also rejected Bass’ proposal for 480 new police hires, cutting that down to just 240. “That reduction would leave the LAPD with about 8,400 officers in June 2026, down from about 8,700 this year,” according to the Los Angeles Times.  

Councilmember Park was one of the three “no” votes. “All of our residents and taxpayers, all they want is a fully funded police and fire department,” she said in a fiery speech prior to the body’s vote. “We are down rabbit holes of spending on things that no one cares about.”

Park finds herself in an increasingly dwindling minority of council members who see the value in a well-staffed police department. In Los Angeles, her approach has been drowned out by radical newcomers like Democratic freshman councilwoman Ysabel Jurado, who responded to a campaign question about public safety by saying,  “f*** the police”.

Jurado’s campaign was backed by council members Nithya Raman, Eunisses Hernandez, and Hugo Soto-Martinez, all of whom also won seats with their calls to defund the police. Even though the City Council had already trimmed the police budget by some $150 million a year prior to Soto-Martinez and Hernandez’s decision to run, Soto-Martinez still promised constituents that “we’re not going to stop until we defund the police.” Hernandez went further, promising to abolish the police altogether. 

Neither Soto-Martinez nor Hernandez responded to a request for comment.

On many occasions, their anti-police sentiment has been expressed by Councilwoman Raman, including in 2023 when the city had experienced three consecutive years of rising catalytic converter thefts. LAPD data showed that while there were only 1,200 such thefts in 2019, the number rose to 8,322 by 2022. The car part, which contains precious metals, can cost up to $2,000 to replace, a steep sum for working-class families in expensive Los Angeles. 

Nevertheless, Councilwoman Raman minimized the rash of thefts and instead blamed auto manufacturers for making the car part easy to steal. Raman also voted against a measure that would have targeted thieves in possession of catalytic converters.

Despite Raman’s objection, the 2023 motion passed 8-4. The new law seems to have had an impact. Last year, LAPD Interim Chief Dominic Choi said that there were 2,313 catalytic converter thefts citywide from Jan. 1 to June 4, 2024, down from the 3,857 thefts over the same time frame a year earlier. The decline represented a roughly 45% decrease year over year.

Burnout, Diminished Morale, Longer Response Times

The heavy reliance on overtime doesn’t just hurt LA’s budget – it also affects officer morale and performance. Extended shifts lead to fatigue, stress, and diminished effectiveness, all of which can contribute to mistakes, misconduct, or slow response times.

Critics argue that overworked officers are more likely to engage in negative interactions with the public, undermining the very goal of police reform. “You can’t reform a system by overburdening it to the point of dysfunction,” said Rev. James Hartley, a community organizer in South Los Angeles. “What we have now is the worst of both worlds: overworked police and underserved neighborhoods.”

Add civil unrest to the mix, and the scene looks much like June 2025, when daytime anti-ICE demonstrations devolved into riots at night. LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell conceded that his understaffed department was “overwhelmed [with the] number of people” engaged in looting and disorder. 

“They’ll take backpacks filled with cinder blocks and hammers, break the blocks, and pass the pieces around to throw at officers and cars, and even at other people,” McDonnell said. “We’ve had unknown liquids – who knows what – thrown at officers. There’s no limit to what they’re doing to our officers.”

But even when there are no riots or mass protests, former Interim LAPD Chief Dominic Choi argued during an interview with local radio station KNX last year that understaffing was impacting “our ability to prevent crimes from happening. There’s less time to do community engagement, there’s less time to build resiliency in communities and establish those relationships. So ultimately, if that diminishes, I can promise you crime will go up.”

Staff shortages have contributed to longer police response times, with non-emergency callers now waiting anywhere from 40 minutes to an hour for police to arrive, according to Choi.

“We absolutely need more officers so we can continue to respond to emergency calls in under seven minutes, and our non-emergency calls need to get back to roughly 15-20 minutes,” he said.