Sacramento Bee: See how California cops are spending $50M on ‘wellness’: gyms, Himalayan salt, hormone therapy
The state legislature earmarked $50 million in the 2022 budget for “officer wellness” programs, with an eye toward improving the mental health of police, and documents show law enforcement has been spending that money on items that range from gym equipment to saunas and Himalayan salt.
Compared to any government contract. They have notoriously bad, for any state, since time began. I could go into federal military waste and contract abuse, but that is off topic.
For the rest of the conversation, I am just going to cap this off and say that budgeting at the scale we are taking about is going to hit mismanagement somewhere in the chain. If people are concerned that money going to a wellness program is bad, then there may be much bigger issues for them to find across the entire spectrum.
If the state allocates budget for a specific program and that money must be spent, it doesn’t make sense to me to turn this into a “cops bad” conversation. There are plenty of other reasons to dislike police, but this reasoning is a weird stretch. It’s like blaming the crowd for a bad movie.
On that point, audit the entire system and find all the bad spending. Hire an external audit firm to do it and it should only be a few hundred million dollars for the state.
Your ass is not a source. If you want to claim that something with workers as underpaid and overworked as social services have more waste on social worker wellness programs than cop wellness programs do, put up or shut up.
What I said is that large budgets will likely have points of waste and mismanagement across the board. It’s inevitable and when we are talking about a budget as large as California’s. We can keep my personal experience with government contracts as anecdotal; totally fair.
And sorry, I am not doing a full audit of California’s budget right now. Regardless, this would be a conversation that needs to happen face to face as too many points are getting lost or misinterpreted.