Port Police Offer Little Transparency, Lots of Numbers on military equipment spending

By Rosie Knight, Community Reporter

PORT OF LOS ANGELES — In the second floor Board of Harbor Commissioners meeting room, behind a security desk, metal detectors, an x-ray machine, and a flight of stairs in the Port of LA Harbor Department Administration building, the LA port police held a public meeting about their annual military equipment spending.

The meeting happened thanks to AB 481, a bill which requires the port police to hold a public meeting whenever they publish the department’s annual report for military usage. This was the first year that they were mandated to make a public report. That report is now live for anyone to read. But the meeting led by Lt. Ryan Powley offered little extra context around the findings of the report, nor what has been historically spent on military weapons. 

One of the biggest issues is that AB 481 is limited in its scope, meaning that the budgetary reporting is limited to what military equipment the port police wanted to acquire for that fiscal year rather than the cost of the equipment that they already have. For example, the port police have 13 drones, but couldn’t tell the sole attendees — this writer and Random Lengths News publisher James Preston Allen — how much those drones had cost the city, only how much two restored drones that they had wanted to purchase in 2022/23 would cost: $8,056 each.

When questioned on how much of the port police’s budget goes to military equipment, there were no answers. But adding up the available numbers from the report (which did not include prices for some items) the bill for 2022/23 comes to around $480,666. Nearly $300,000 of that is designated solely to ammunition for port police training. That seems to be but a drip in the ocean of the port police operating budget for 23/24 which was stated as $51 million in the recent Harbor Department adopted budget but does account for over 10% of their adopted capital equipment budget of $4.7 million. It would have been useful for the public meeting to have made that context available to those in attendance. Though that number was small this time around — largely due to the lack of information about the meeting — for future public meetings such context would be useful and well received. But Random Lengths News was told that as it’s not part of the AB 481 remit, it is not covered by these meetings and won’t be included. But San Pedro residents can be reassured that the port police don’t own a bazooka or an F-14 jet.

The only means of public notification was via email to neighborhood councils and other community groups as well as posting on the POLA website — but not through any public notice advertising, which is mandated for other legal notices like environmental impact reports and notice of bids on public projects