LA councilmembers approved a three-month hiring freeze Wednesday as part of a plan to address the city's budget issues.
Gerald Chaleff, a former police commissioner and now the department's special assistant for constitutional policing, said that police Chief Charlie Beck would not be happy with the decision but could live with the delay.
"It slows down putting more officers on the street," Chaleff said.
He told the council that Beck didn't want to see the ranks of the LAPD fall below 9,963, though some council members, such as Paul Koretz, suggested the number of officers might be able to drop to about 9,700 without the city seeing an increase in crime.
Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has said he wanted to maintain a force of 10,000 officers.
The decision was made after the city's Chief Administrative Officer told the City Council that he had found nearly $50 million in savings and whittled the budget deficit to $4.1 million.
As a result, CAO Miguel Santana said no more furloughs would be imposed this fiscal year but the city's reserve fund, now at $191 million, needed to be further beefed up, so Santana suggested the Council delay starting a final class of police recruits through the academy until after the start of the next fiscal year to reduce costs, as approved by voters in the form of reduced pension and health benefits.
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Santana said the savings realized by delaying the next class of recruits was minimal in the short-run but would save taxpayers at least $7 million per officer over the life of their policing career.
"The voters gave the city this tool to avoid ongoing (deficits)," he said, referring to the recent vote to offer new police hires a less expensive health and pension package.
Santana told the council that the city had reduced spending by about $1 billion over the past two years, but there was as "huge tidal wave coming" in the form of future deficits.
City Councilman Richard Alarcon told NBC LA Tuesday that he supported the temporary freeze in hiring. "I'm not going to say there are no sacred cows," he said. "But even the sacred cuts have to be cut."
More: LAPD Hiring Freeze Gains Traction
The City Council eventually approved the report 12-0, agreeing to shift $1.84 million from the city attorney's account for consumer protection to one that will cover the costs of going after unpaid debts.
He told the council that the city workforce has been reduced by about 4,000 over the past two year, but only about 500 people were laid off, he said, adding that the workforce was roughly the same size as during former Mayor Richard Riordan's second term in the mid-1990s.
