The New York Times reports:

In Boston, Los Angeles and Milwaukee, about one in every 10 dollars of local government spending goes to the police. In Minneapolis, it’s about one in every 20 dollars.

American society has not settled on what that number should be — how much of a priority the police ought to have, alongside schools and parks and housing and health care. But the police share of spending has grown over the past 40 years, even as cities have become far safer. And the protesters who are now calling to defund the police, all or in part, are fundamentally questioning what these numbers have become:

Across these 150 large cities, the average share of general expenditures devoted to the police has gradually increased by about 1.2 percentage points since the late 1970s, to 7.8 percent. That change is relatively modest. But it means that residents have watched city police budgets rise by millions of dollars annually — even during lean years for city finances, and through a steep nationwide decline in violent crime that began in the early 1990s.

For comparison, this same set of cities now devotes on average about 5 percent of spending to housing, and 3 percent to parks. [Continue reading…]