Los Angeles spent months debating how to close a billion dollar budget gap without gutting the workers who keep the city running. The Council made a clear decision in May to limit the LAPD to hiring 240 new officers this year, half of what Mayor Karen Bass wanted, in order to avoid massive layoffs across the city. That vote mattered. It saved jobs in sanitation, libraries, parks, and even within LAPD itself. It was supposed to set a boundary.

But a Budget and Finance Committee meeting on November 4th showed the department has simply decided to ignore that boundary. Budget staff confirmed that LAPD has already structured a hiring plan that would add 410 officers by summer. When asked to explain why the department is preparing to hire 170 officers above the level that was authorized in the adopted budget, LAPD fiscal staff calmly stated that the department “would hire 410 through the end of the year” even though the budget “assumed hiring 240.” Councilmembers responded with disbelief. At one point, a visibly frustrated Councilmember Yaroslavsky said the situation “feels like a game of chicken.”

Then came the real reveal. According to the Financial Status Report, the projected overspending tied to this unapproved hiring surge is $3.56 million just for this year. As CAO Szabo explained, the impact balloons dramatically after that. If LAPD hires up to 410 officers, the cost in fiscal 27 would be “significantly higher,” compounding an already massive deficit. When asked bluntly whether any new funding had been identified, Szabo answered, “my office has not identified additional funds for that purpose.”

The most striking exchange came when the committee pulled up the mayor’s own budget press release from the spring. It promised that within 90 days of signing the budget, Bass and Council leadership would identify the additional money to restore full LAPD hiring. “Ninety days have come and gone,” Councilmember McOsker said, reading directly from the release. Then he asked what should have been an obvious question. “What money is it? And if it hasn’t been identified, who are we firing?” No one had an answer.

Meanwhile, the department’s internal cost-cutting commitments are stalled or ignored. The voluntary overtime bank, one of the few tools designed to reduce LAPD’s runaway overtime spending, still has not been implemented. LAPD told the Council they do not even have a timeline for activating it. The same goes for sworn-to-civilian reassignments. The department has 205 civilian positions at risk of loss, but they are still using sworn officers in administrative roles that could free up resources and reduce pressure on overtime if they shifted the work to civilians. That failure became so pronounced that Councilmember Yaroslavsky asked, “At what point do we say this is not what we budgeted for and we can’t afford it?”

The answer right now appears to be never. LAPD continues hiring as if it has a blank check. The mayor has not produced the promised funding plan. And the Council has not forced the department to stop.

All of this is happening at the exact moment when the city is getting clear evidence that safety does not depend on swelling the ranks of armed officers. Los Angeles’ unarmed crisis response programs are resolving calls without violence, without escalation, and without the massive overtime costs that have become standard in LAPD’s budget. Teams trained in de-escalation, housing navigation, mental health support, and harm reduction are doing work sworn officers have never been designed to do, and they are doing it at a fraction of the cost. They are reducing repeat calls because they follow up. They stabilize crises without criminalization. They build trust instead of fear.

The contrast could not be more glaring. On one side, you have community-based responders showing what care looks like when it is not backed by a gun. On the other side, you have LAPD blowing past hiring caps, ignoring fiscal limits, and consuming money the city does not have, all while other departments are starved for resources. The department claims it will still face a net loss of officers this year due to attrition, but that only underscores how futile and expensive it is to keep pouring money into the same model instead of expanding what is actually working.

This fight is not about preserving LAPD or making it more “functional.” It is about whether an armed department that already consumes the largest share of the city’s budget can operate outside democratic control. The Council voted publicly to limit hiring to protect the rest of the city workforce. LAPD chose to ignore that vote. Now the question is whether elected officials will enforce the budget they passed, or once again allow the most politically powerful department in Los Angeles to write its own rules while communities continue building real safety without them.