“You’ve got to figure out within the new rules of the game how to do it better,” he said.

But he is not blind to the effects of paring down a police force to its core.

In 2011, Chief Braziel said, the cuts, in his opinion, went past the tipping point. While homicides have remained steady, shootings — a more reliable indicator of gun violence — are up 48 percent this year. Rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, burglaries and vehicle thefts have also increased, though in smaller increments.

Complicating matters, the cutbacks have coincided with a flow of convicted offenders back into the city as California, heeding a Supreme Court ruling, has reduced its prison population. Once released, former inmates have less supervision — the county’s probation department also suffered cuts.

Chief Braziel, an optimist by nature, said the reductions have in fact had some benefits — more experienced officers on street patrols, for example. But the gaps are increasingly evident.

When a patrol officer stopped a car a few weeks ago and found the driver in possession of half a pound of recently cooked methamphetamine, worth $20,000 on the street, there was no one to spend the 10 hours it would take to write up and execute a search warrant for the man’s residence, despite the suspicion that a meth laboratory would be found there.

“It’s frustrating,” said the officer, Darrald Bryan, who had worked his way up to an investigative job in the robbery unit but was sent back to patrol last year along with 24 other detectives, a demotion that involved a 5 percent pay cut, a switch to the graveyard shift in order to keep his weekends off and the loss of his take-home car.