Long before last weekend’s riots against immigration enforcement began, the Democratic-led city of Los Angeles spent years defunding its police department. Federal immigration authorities say LA’s shrunken police force is now struggling to help control the large-scale riots rocking the city.

ICE acting Director Todd Lyons claimed LAPD took over two hours to respond to Friday night’s rioting despite multiple calls for help from federal authorities. According to Lyons, ICE agents were vastly outnumbered by 1,000 activists swarming the streets.

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In a public reply, LAPD said the department’s response time was affected by “significant traffic congestion,” the presence of protesters, and the fact that federal agencies sprayed irritants into the crowd prior to LAPD’s arrival.

“This created a hazardous environment for responding officers,” LAPD said. The department also faulted federal officials for not coordinating with local law enforcement in advance, thus delaying deployment and affecting LAPD’s ability to proactivity plan crowd-control operations. By the time LAPD arrived on the unfolding scene, the mob size already swelled to several hundred protesters, “making it very dangerous for individual officers to respond into a hostile environment,” LAPD added.

The episode is perhaps a feature of de-policing efforts, not a bug, however. LAPD has suffered a years-long exodus of officers, losing a total of approximately 1,000 cops since 2020, driven largely by the defund the police movement.

In July 2020, the Los Angeles City Council cut LAPD’s budget by $150 million following widespread riots over the death of George Floyd and calls to “reimagine public safety.” City Council members pledged to pour the proceeds into racial justice initiatives and “uplifting the disenfranchised.” On the one-year anniversary of Floyd’s death, city councilors put $32 million, moved out of the LAPD budget, toward policing alternatives and reinvestments in “communities of color.”

However, for fiscal 2024, amid abysmal police deployment levels, Democratic Mayor Karen Bass did suggest increasing LAPD’s budget in order to reach a targeted year-end staffing size of at least 9,500 officers. “I believe that living in a safe neighborhood is the right of every Angeleno,” Bass said.

Following weeks of deliberations, the City Council greenlit an amended version of Bass’s budget, which decreased direct funding to the LAPD by $21.6 million and allocated $8 million for an alternative “community-led” crisis response program, a pilot initiative that deploys mental health counselors in the place of armed LAPD officers.

This year, Bass signed a revised $13.9 billion spending agenda for fiscal 2026 on Friday, the last day she could do so under a City Charter deadline, and announced plans to restore LAPD hiring rates after initially threatening to lay off scores of civilian LAPD personnel. According to Bass’s announcement of the arrangement, the Los Angeles City Council, which wanted to decelerate LAPD recruitment, will instead identify funds for an additional 240 police recruits within 90 days.

KAREN BASS WANTS TO WEAKEN LAPD TO FIX A SELF-INFLICTED BUDGET CRISIS

“This budget has been delivered under extremely difficult conditions — uncertainty from Washington, the explosion of liability payments, unexpected rising costs and lower than expected revenues,” Bass said in a statement.

Faced with a $1 billion deficit, Bass previously proposed that the 2026 budget eliminate more than 400 civilian positions within the LAPD, a reduction representing 15% of LAPD’s civilian workforce currently standing at 2,650.

The layoffs would have included a 43% reduction in crime scene photographers; a 22% cut to forensic scientists, slowing down DNA processing, stalling sexual assault and cold case work, and delaying ballistic analysis that aid homicide investigations; and a 13% reduction in forensic print specialists. LAPD leadership warned that fingerprint processing would thereby be limited to serious and violent crimes because of this staffing shortage, meaning fingerprinting for burglaries and other lower-priority offenses would no longer be processed.

In response to the proposed cuts to LAPD’s civilian ranks, Chief Jim McDonnell told the City Council’s Budget and Finance Committee: “These members are integral to our mission and our culture, and we do not take these potential losses lightly.” Civilian layoffs would hinder critical administrative support to sworn personnel and harm essential services citywide, McDonnell stressed.

McDonnell has cited lower morale within the police profession nationally and a lengthy hiring process internally as the reasons why his department is experiencing employment shortfalls.

MORALE LOW INSIDE LAPD’S FAMED ROBBERY-HOMICIDE DIVISION AS STAFF NUMBERS SLASHED

As of November 2024, the LAPD employed 8,802 sworn officers and 2,795 civilian staff, according to a personnel report, still hundreds of officers below Bass’s stated goal of 9,500 city police officers. As is, LAPD is projected to lose 150 more officers by mid-2026, marking the lowest deployment in a generation.

During the height of the Black Lives Matter riots in 2020, the department had nearly 9,900 sworn officers deployed and 3,030 or so civilian postings, statistics show.

In 2023, LAPD’s police force fell under 9,000 officers for the first time in decades. At the time, LAPD had only 8,940 sworn officers and approximately 2,800 civilian workers serving a population of 4 million people, who make up the country’s second-largest city. With a ratio of 445 residents for every 1 officer, the historically low LAPD staffing level was not seen since the 1990s.

That summer, over the objections of BLM activists, the Los Angeles City Council approved a four-year contract with LAPD’s union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League, ensuring considerable pay increases, patrol incentives, and better healthcare benefits in hopes of boosting recruitment and retention numbers.

Currently, LAPD’s enlistment page says the starting salary for new recruits training at the academy is about $88,700. Full-time police officers earn at least $97,300 annually upon completion of one year in sworn service, with an annual raise of $4,409 on average plus a yearly cost of living allowance to adjust for inflation.