The obvious cause of the increase was the pandemic job losses and general societal decay. Oh and the cops quiet quitting because they were upset people hate them.
Why would it be better if they were overtly fired?
When I drive I almost never see LEOs. I can go months on end without ever spotting a police car. Where are they? What are they doing? Evidently, they're not responding to crimes. And they're not on the roads. But their budget has increased quite a lot! Am I paying for people to sit on their asses and eat donuts? It kind of seems like it!
To me, it's very simple. If you want to avoid bad press you don't have to stop policing. You just have to stop executing innocent people in public. Seems easy, I do that every day and I don't even think about it.
It sort of gives me the impression the police are so morally bankrupt as a system that they just can't help themselves. So, they have to detach instead. Yikes... that's not good.
It turns out that simply patrolling the stations was enough to deter almost all crimes in the system, which makes everyone immediately wonder: WTF was LAPD during the last few decades?