[TRU Research] Cutting the cops

[Katie Wilson]

Interesting, thank you. I will add this to our questions. I’ll work on getting answers tomorrow.

> On Jun 7, 2020, at 11:07 AM, Stephen DeSanto <rachidian at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Looking just now, very slight discrepancies for housing (few $100k) and human services ($4M), pretty big difference for police ($398M 2019 in the PDF <https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/FinanceDepartment/19adoptedbudget/SPD.pdf> vs $363M 2019 in OpenData <https://data.seattle.gov/Finance/Approved-Budget-by-Department-over-Time/453y-h2ti>). Maybe there's some budgeting nuance I just don't understand -- definitely not a municipal finance expert -- but, like, the 2018 numbers match exactly between sources.
> 
> On Sun, Jun 7, 2020 at 10:59 AM Katie Wilson <katie at transitriders.org <mailto:katie at transitriders.org>> wrote:
> You are probably correct, but I don’t understand why they would have “old” or otherwise incorrect data in there. I have emailed Open.Data at seattle.gov <mailto:Open.Data at seattle.gov> to ask for a clarification, and I’m asking a couple of councilmembers too. Hopefully we can get an answer Monday or Tuesday. It’s annoying because the graphs are great for telling stories but we need correct numbers, too! Did you happen to check whether the 2019 numbers match between the pdf and the opendata site? If it’s all good up to 2019, in a pinch we can just make graphs that end in that year and tell a fine story.
> 
>> On Jun 7, 2020, at 10:55 AM, Stephen DeSanto <rachidian at gmail.com <mailto:rachidian at gmail.com>> wrote:
>> 
>> That's a very good question. Now that you mention it, there's discrepancies between the "adopted budget" for the Office of Housing, too: The OpenBudget <https://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2020/operating/0/department/Housing/0/service?vis=lineChart> data (the cool charts) put 2020's "approved budget" at $69M, but looking at the PDF for the "adopted" budget <https://www.seattle.gov/Documents/Departments/FinanceDepartment/20adoptedbudget/OH.pdf>, that might not include over $70m in proceeds from the Mercer sale and has the budget at $130M for 2020. When I looked at some of the data for past years, OpenBudget numbers match the PDF versions exactly. So, my assumption here is that OpenBudget's data for 2020 might be a little old, and the PDF versions are more likely to be correct?
> 

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