In the weeks since the killing of George Floyd by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter protests have thrust the demand to defund the police into the national conversation.

Around the country, police budgets are so bloated as to be grotesque. New York City spends over $11 billion annually on its police force — more than the entire military budget of Colombia. While New York City’s police department is the most highly funded in the country, other cities also maintain exorbitant police budgets and allocate enormous percentages of their total public resources to do so. Los Angeles’s $1.8 billion police budget, for example, represents 17.5 percent of the city’s total annual spending.

As historian Stuart Schrader explains in the following interview, American police have been startlingly successful at claiming larger and larger pieces of the fiscal pie since the 1960s, even as nearly every other public agency has faced austerity.