8 charts that show how major US cities spend taxpayer dollars on police versus social programs

"Defund the police" painted on a street near the White House in Washington, DC, on June 7, 2020.Joshua Roberts/Reuters

• Elected officials are beginning to address growing calls for police reform.
• Some Americans want cities to cut police budgets and use the money for social programs.
• Using standardized data from the The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, Business Insider looked at eight different categories on which cities spend taxpayer money.
• We found that fire protection, parks and recreation, and health programs typically had the lowest spending per person in major cities like San Francisco and Boston.

The recent killings of Black Americans at the hands of police officers have increased the calls to reform or outright defund police departments.

As part of the ongoing conversation, some have asked that taxpayer money be funneled away from police and into underfunded areas. For instance, activist and Black Lives Matter cofounder Alicia Garza told NBC that there needs to be more funding for housing, education, and "quality of life of communities who are over-policed and over-surveilled."

Because of the calls to defund the police and redistribute the cash to other programs, Business Insider looked at how eight major cities spend taxpayer money and which areas seem to be underfunded.

To do this, we used a database developed by the research nonprofit Lincoln Institute of Land Policy that has revenue and expenditure figures of 150 major cities. Researchers used local government figures from the US Census Bureau's Annual Survey of State and Local Government Finances to create the database. The institution standardized the metropolitan centers into what they call "Fiscally Standardized Cities" so that those with different government structures and funding from independent governments can be easily compared to one another.

Read on to see how much cities spent per resident on eight different expenses in 2017, the most recent fiscal year for which data available. It is important to note for education spending, we focused on just elementary and secondary school and excluded higher education.