Pay raises for Los Angeles police officers went into effect Sunday, despite threats from city officials that refusal to delay the pay spike could result in hundreds more layoffs for a department that already was downsized in 2020.
Rank-and-file LAPD officers will see a 3.25% pay increase starting with their next paychecks, according to their union, the Los Angeles Police Protective League. The increase this month stacks on top of 1.5% increase they received in July.
According to budget analysts, the pay raises could add more than $17 million to LAPD’s budget at a time when the city is staring at a $675 million deficit, the result of a shattered economy struggling amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the Daily News reports.
Some city officials took veiled shots at the union for holding out for months over the raises, including after Los Angeles’ other public employee unions hashed out deals to delay their own raises. On Thursday, the union representing the city’s firefighters agreed to put off a 4.5% pay raise for a year and a half.
Union officials said LAPD already made sacrifices in 2020 when the City Council approved a $150 million cut to its police budget after the George Floyd protests over the summer. That resulted in LAPD shuffling more than 300 positions, with some specialized detectives being reassigned to community stations and other neighborhood patrols being eliminated entirely. Roughly 30 officers were allowed to retire without their jobs being filled.
LAPD Chief Michel Moore and city budget officials have said that without delaying the pay raises, the department likely faces losing an additional 355 officers and around 270 civilian employees through layoffs.
