Oakland spent 41 percent of the city's general fund on policing in Fiscal Year 2017. Chicago spent nearly 39 percent, Minneapolis almost 36 percent, Houston 35 percent.

The figures reflect an accelerating trend in the past 30 years, as city governments have forked over larger and larger shares of their budgets toward law enforcement at the expense of social services, health care, infrastructure and other types of spending, according to a new report from a network of civil rights groups.

The report, released Wednesday and spearheaded by The Center for Popular Democracy, Law for Black Lives and the Black Youth Project 100, is far from comprehensive, focusing on only a dozen localities. Its conclusions similarly are not universally accepted.

But in looking at trends from Atlanta to Los Angeles and St. Louis County to New York City, the report's authors and editors say they're presenting a cross-section of a trend: one they say has failed to improve safety for either communities of color or the officers who patrol them, even as spending on policing ranged from $381 per person in Los Angeles to as much $772 per person in Baltimore in the past fiscal year.

"If our goals are to ensure that young people have access to quality education, to ensure that every family has a home and is able to feed themselves, to ensure that everybody who is willing and able to work has an opportunity to find a job, if those are our goals and create safety, why do our budget priorities misalign so dramatically with those stated goals?" says Jennifer Epps-Addison, president and co-executive director of the Center for Popular Democracy. "Place after place, no matter what part of the country they're in, we're finding the same stories, and it speaks to the need to re-envision and reimagine public safety."

The analysis comes as homicides in the U.S. are on the rise and violent crime has taken an outsize profile, fueling calls by the Trump administration for a return to the old-school law-and-order tactics of tough policing, no-nonsense drug enforcement and stiff sentencing, and undercutting what had been rare but growing bipartisan agreement aimed at criminal justice reform.

Indeed, in the 30 years that spending on police has been on the rise, crime fell dramatically across the nation.

The report's authors, however, maintain that the drop in crime largely occurred in spite of – not because of – increased spending on police instead of other initiatives. And as the Trump administration routinely refers to American cities as gripped by crime, the authors insist throwing more money at policing and incarceration is the wrong answer.

"There is a body of evidence, a number of studies that show that investment in things like mental health, housing, youth development, living wages – these are the things that stabilize and make communities healthy and full and in some cases are arguably more effective than policing and jail," says Kate Hamaji, one of the report's authors and a research analyst at the Center for Popular Democracy. "There is a definite need for safety measures, but we want to redefine what safety looks like in our communities."

The argument isn't new: President Lyndon Johnson's crime commission declared in 1967 that "crime cannot be controlled without the interest and participation of schools, businesses, social agencies, private groups and individual citizens."

Fifty years later, on issues from mental health to homelessness, it remains just as "unfair to expect police agencies to be able to do all the things that we expect them to do, " says Seth Stoughton, assistant professor at University of South Carolina School of Law and a former police officer. "Just throwing more officers and more resources at police agencies isn't going to make them more effective at doing some of these things."

However, the report's conclusions that increased spending on policing is inherently misguided is also far from clear.

The 10 cities included in the analysis, for example, together saw a 30 percent jump in their average homicide rate between 2014 and 2016; Chicago alone saw a nearly 80 percent spike.

The increase in violence "is huge, it's unprecedented over the last two years, and the social conditions haven't gotten worse in the past two years: 2014-2015, poverty was reduced nationwide – which is great – but at the same time homicide went up," says Peter Moskos, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice and a former Baltimore police officer. "The answer to bad policing isn't less policing, it's better policing."

The police departments in many of those same cities have historically gone without the budgets to adequately patrol the streets, leading to long response times or, for some crimes, no on-site response at all. Hence, it could be argued that some of the increases in spending on police in recent years may reflect an attempt by cities to hire and deploy the number of officers they've long needed but sorely lacked.

It's one example, experts say, of how focusing on police spending at large can obscure exactly how that money is being spent. Shifting more money to policing, for instance, could include steps toward improving police oversight, such as by purchasing body cameras or hiring more officers for internal affairs divisions.

"Police accountability is expensive, and if you're going to be serious about police oversight, you've got to be willing to invest significant amounts of money, and that's often going to take away from other worthy causes – schools and roads and parks," says Stephen Rushin, an assistant professor at the Loyola University Chicago School of Law.

Spending more on police might capture other factors, too: The report notes that "budgets are moral documents," an "articulation of what – and whom – our cities, counties, states and country deem worthy of investment." But they are also invariably political products, reflecting not only a community's priorities but which groups have the most sway in city hall.

"It speaks in part to the strength of police unions as advocates who have been able to acquire more money for the police department," Rushin says. "You don't really always have a politically powerful constituency that's negotiating on the side of social services or infrastructure projects in the way that police unions are strong advocates for spending on police departments."

The number of crimes that are on the books has also vastly expanded in recent decades, a trend some on the left and the right have dubbed "overcriminalization." That, too, may have fueled a rise in spending on police.

"Police agencies do not create the laws that they enforce," Stoughton, of the University of South Carolina, says. Not only are "there way more crimes now than there were 30, 40, 50 years ago," lobbying by the privatized prison industry and certain types of federal funding "promote a particular type of policing."

"That's not a local policing question and how a police department is allocating its resources, it's a question of how state or federal policy is influencing those decisions," Stoughton says.

Even so, he notes, the findings are "not particularly surprising." Faced with entrenched and complex challenges from homelessness to mental health, heavy pressure from police unions, and the constant threat of being branded "soft on crime," politicians face big disincentives to oppose increased spending on police.

"One of the things the studies consistently show is that policing can't do it alone," Stoughton says. "Policing in certain ways can reduce certain crimes in certain areas – hot-spot policing has been shown to be pretty effective. But that's generally a short-term effect, not a long-term one, which means policing may be dealing with the symptoms but not resolving some of the underlying causes."