Los Angeles is one of America’s largest cities, home to nearly four million people, and it is trying to keep the peace with a police force that would look understaffed in a mid-sized suburb. LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell just laid out the numbers in stark terms, and they are ugly.
The department currently fields about 8,551 sworn officers. That is down roughly 200 from February. McDonnell says the force needs 12,500 to deliver real coverage, especially with the 2028 Olympics bearing down. The gap sits at nearly 4,000 cops. The department bleeds 500 to 600 officers every year through attrition, and the June academy class graduated a pathetic 26. A senior source inside the department called the City Council’s plan to hire up to 410 this year “a drop in the bucket.”
This is not a sudden accident. It is the predictable result of years of progressive hostility toward the men and women who actually stand between order and chaos.
McDonnell did not soft-pedal it. “We would be able to provide the best coverage possible with 12,500 officers. We’re not even in that ballpark,” he told the New York Post.
He noted that lateral hires from other departments are stunned by how much the LAPD gets done with so few people. When you stack it against New York or Chicago, both running four to four-and-a-half officers per thousand residents, Los Angeles limps along at 2.2. The chief called the force “exceptionally lean.” That is polite language for dangerously thin.
Mayor Karen Bass once promised to rebuild toward 9,500 officers. In April she admitted the goal had changed. “My goal changed, unfortunately,” she said. “I do hope that one day we get to the expansion, but we are not there now.”
Stop the bleeding is the new ambition. Meanwhile a bloc of Democratic Socialists of America councilmembers, including mayoral candidate Nithya Raman, has spent years treating the police budget like an enemy. Raman previously declared “defund the police” and has voted against hiring increases.
Tom Saggau of the Los Angeles Police Protective League put it plainly: the city is fortunate it is not dealing with a Mayor Raman, who has repeatedly voted to cut funding and offers no serious plan to keep Angelenos safe.
The largest the LAPD ever got was just over 10,000 officers back in 2013. Those days feel like ancient history. What replaced them was the post-2020 moral panic, the organized campaigns to paint every officer as a villain, the catch-and-release policies, and the relentless media drumbeat that made policing look like a shameful career.
George Francisco, a longtime member of the LAPD Pacific Community-Police Advisory Board, said it out loud: young people do not want the job because the profession has been relentlessly criticized. Organized, well-funded anti-law enforcement campaigns and years of negative coverage created a stigma that keeps the best candidates away.
California gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton called the situation “shocking and scandalous.” He is right. “This is what happens with years of a far left ideology that tries to systematically undermine law enforcement in the name of ‘criminal justice reform’ — defund the police, close the prisons, catch and release. It all adds up to massive demoralization of the brave men and women who put themselves at risk to keep us safe.”
Crime is down 8 percent year over year in personal and property offenses, and that is a credit to the remaining officers working overtime and improvising with technology. The department is expanding its drone program as a “force multiplier.”
Drones answered more than 3,000 calls last year and canceled officer dispatches 11 percent of the time when the threat turned out to be nothing. That is clever. It is also a band-aid on a gaping wound. You cannot drone your way out of a 4,000-officer shortage when the Olympics arrive and the world is watching.
Earlier this year McDonnell warned the city was not prepared to secure the 2028 Games. The department needs thousands of additional officers for the venues alone, plus hundreds of extra patrol vehicles. Funding remains inadequate.
Overtime is already projected to run into the millions of hours and leave the department in the red. Fox News reported the chief’s blunt assessment that LA28 has zero dedicated police budget and that existing security money is mostly restricted to overtime across agencies.
Scripture is not ambiguous about the role of civil authority. Romans 13:4 declares that the ruler “is the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he beareth not the sword in vain: for he is the minister of God, a revenger to execute wrath upon him that doeth evil.”
When a city deliberately starves the people who bear that sword, it is not progressive. It is reckless. It is a failure of moral duty to the weak, the elderly, the business owners, and the families who simply want to walk their streets without fear.
Los Angeles has chosen ideology over competence for years. The result is a police department that is smaller, more exhausted, and less able to answer the call. McDonnell is telling the truth. The question is whether anyone in City Hall still cares enough to listen before the next crisis arrives and the thin blue line finally snaps.