Los Angeles County has 88 incorporated cities. Forty-two contract with the Sheriff’s Department for patrol services. Of the other 46, 45 operate municipal police departments. Santa Fe Springs gets its policing from neighboring Whittier.
Lancaster complicates that otherwise clean split. The city launched its own police department in September 2023 but kept its Sheriff’s contract, so it appears in both categories. The other 41 contract cities have no police department of their own.
The county budgets the unit at zero net cost, meaning what the cities pay is meant to cover what it spends on them. Its final accounts for the past two years show a surplus. In the fiscal year that ended in June 2025, the most recent one for which the county has published actual figures, the Sheriff’s contract-patrol unit took in $2.67 million more from those cities than it spent policing them. It was the second consecutive year the unit finished in the black.
What a city gets
The contract is formally called a Municipal Law Enforcement Services Agreement. The current agreement runs from July 1, 2024, through June 30, 2029, and was approved by the Board of Supervisors on June 25, 2024.
Attachment B identifies the participating cities under the heading “Forty (42) Contract Cities”, a typo the county has left in the document. The list includes Agoura Hills, Artesia, Avalon, Bellflower, Bradbury, Calabasas, Carson, Cerritos, Commerce, Compton, Cudahy, Diamond Bar, Duarte, Hawaiian Gardens, Hidden Hills, Industry, La Cañada Flintridge, La Habra Heights, La Mirada, La Puente, Lakewood, Lancaster, Lawndale, Lomita, Lynwood, Malibu, Maywood, Norwalk, Palmdale, Paramount, Pico Rivera, Rancho Palos Verdes, Rolling Hills, Rolling Hills Estates, Rosemead, San Dimas, Santa Clarita, South El Monte, Temple City, Walnut, West Hollywood and Westlake Village.
Twenty-one stations, forty-two cities
Every city that contracts its patrol from the Sheriff, grouped by the station that answers the call. One square is one city.
Under section 2.1 of the agreement, the sheriff or a designee serves as the city’s chief of police.
Cities do not buy individual deputies. They buy service units. On the county’s 2024–25 rate sheet, the latest one published, a 56-hour deputy sheriff patrol unit costs $516,493 a year. A captain costs $457,914. The county adds a 12.5 percent liability charge.
Each city chooses how many units it wants and what combination of services to purchase. The local station commander decides how to deploy them.
The county tracks the entire operation under a separate budget unit called Sheriff Patrol Contract Cities. Its adopted 2025–26 budget is $378.97 million, up from the recommended $374.66 million. That amounts to 9 percent of the Sheriff’s Department’s $4.21 billion appropriation.
A break-even unit that closed in surplus
Every Los Angeles County budget unit has a figure called Net County Cost: the amount the county’s general fund contributes after revenue is counted. For most services, it is a positive number because the county spends more than the program brings in.
Patrol Contract Cities has recorded a negative Net County Cost in each of the past two closed fiscal years. In other words, it brought in more money than it spent.
The surplus was $4.98 million in 2023–24. In 2024–25, the most recent year for which the county has closed its books, it collected $374.60 million and spent $371.93 million, leaving $2.67 million. Neither sum is large against a unit of that size (together they run between 0.7 and 1.4 percent of it), but a unit built to break even is not supposed to produce either. A midyear estimate had projected a much larger $38.4 million surplus for 2024–25, and the final accounts did not support it.
The surplus the budget book estimates, and the surplus the closed books show
Net county cost on Sheriff – Patrol-Contract Cities, estimate against actual. The estimated column repeats the frozen appropriation while the revenue beside it is a live forecast, so an estimated surplus is a projection, not an observed result.
For 2025–26 and 2026–27, the county has budgeted the unit to break even.
Compare that with patrol in unincorporated Los Angeles County, where the Sheriff’s Department provides service because it is legally required to do so. That budget unit carries a positive Net County Cost of $22.41 million for 2025–26.
The county subsidizes patrol for residents of unincorporated areas. Its contracts with cities, at least in the past two closed years, have produced a surplus.
A unit built to break even, and what it actually did
Net county cost by budget unit and fiscal year. Right of zero is money the county cleared on patrol it sold to cities; left of zero is money it put into patrol it owes residents by law.
That does not necessarily mean the cities are being gouged. State law limits what the county can charge them.
Government Code section 51350, part of the 1973 Gonsalves Bill, prohibits counties from charging contract cities for countywide services or general overhead. The cities pay about 12 percent of the Sheriff’s allowable indirect costs; the county absorbs the remaining 88 percent.
The published accounts do not explain what produced the surplus or how it was treated afterward.
The surplus also runs against the last audit of the billing, which found the cities undercharged. In March 2005, the county Auditor-Controller reviewed the Sheriff’s billing practices at the Board of Supervisors’ direction. Auditors found that eight of 14 unbilled internal support units could legally have been charged to the cities. Their conclusion was that the cities had been undercharged by $10.1 million.
How Lakewood started it
Lakewood was built between 1950 and 1953 on 3,375 acres of former sugar-beet fields. Developers Louis Boyar, Mark Taper and Ben Weingart put up 17,500 houses.
As Long Beach considered annexing the area, Lakewood residents pursued cityhood. The city attorney proposed a novel arrangement: Lakewood could incorporate, then pay the county to continue providing the services residents already received.
Voters approved incorporation on March 9, 1954, by a margin of 2,600 votes. Lakewood became a city on April 16. Sheriff’s Department records give the same date for the start of its law-enforcement contract.
The original payment system was closer to a trade than a conventional contract. As the Sheriff’s Contract Law Enforcement Bureau later explained, cities turned over their annual fines and forfeitures in exchange for general law-enforcement and traffic services.
That arrangement lasted until 1957–58, when the county first put a price on a round-the-clock general-law unit: $74,005 a year. The rate stayed there through 1961–62.
Other cities quickly followed Lakewood. Norwalk, Santa Fe Springs and Paramount signed contracts in 1957, Pico Rivera in 1958 and Rosemead in 1959. Eight cities formed the California Contract Cities Association on November 20, 1957.
A 2009 Sheriff’s Department brochure said that all but one of the Los Angeles County cities incorporated since 1954 had adopted what became known as the Lakewood Plan.
It took another two decades to settle how those cities should be charged. A 1964 grand jury pushed the county toward full-cost accounting. In 1971, the contract cities hired Booz Allen Hamilton to audit the county’s figures, helping drive rates up by more than 65 percent. The Legislature passed the Gonsalves Bill two years later, setting limits on what counties could include in their bills.
Cities rarely switch
The number of contract cities has barely changed in more than a quarter-century: 41 in 2000, 40 in 2009 and 42 today.
Cities sometimes dissolve their own police departments and turn to the Sheriff. Maywood did so on June 30, 2010, after its insurance pool canceled coverage. The city had faced about $18.8 million in general-liability claims between 2005 and 2010, roughly 92 percent of them related to its police department.
Maywood had provided police services to Cudahy since 2003. When Maywood’s 60-officer department shut down, both cities began receiving service from the Sheriff’s East Los Angeles station.
Compton had made the same move a decade earlier, disbanding its police department in 2000.
Movement in the other direction is much rarer. Santa Fe Springs, one of the eight cities that founded the contract-cities association in 1957, has bought police services from Whittier for more than 30 years. It is now building a department of its own, scheduled to begin full operations on March 1, 2028.
The Whittier agreement costs Santa Fe Springs $18.12 million for 34 sworn officers. The price is set to rise 9 percent this year and 8 percent in each of the following two years, reaching roughly $23 million. The city estimates that establishing its own department will cost $5 million.
For Santa Fe Springs, the calculation is straightforward: keep paying for a contract whose price is rising faster than the city wants, or spend the money to build a department it controls.
Why the usual comparisons do not work
We started looking at contract policing while comparing the costs of 15 law-enforcement agencies. The Sheriff’s model makes some of the most obvious comparisons misleading.
Five cities in that group operate their own departments. Based on their published department budgets, they spend between $225,279 and $687,816 per employee, with Los Angeles at the low end and Glendale at the high end.
Those figures may look comparable to the Sheriff’s $516,493 patrol unit, but they measure different things. The city figures are calculated per employee. A Sheriff’s service unit represents a set amount of patrol coverage, which can require the working time of more than one deputy.
Putting the numbers side by side would mean comparing a person with a schedule.
The county does not publish the per-city split
The county does not publish a document showing how the program’s $379 million budget is divided among the 42 cities.
The rate sheet lists the price of each service unit, and the county budget gives the total. But the bill for each city appears only in that city’s adopted budget or in the files of the Sheriff’s Contract Law Enforcement Bureau. We are filing a records request for those figures.
We also could not find a rate sheet more recent than 2024–25. Nor does any single official document explain the increase from 40 contract cities in 2009 to 42 today.
Our reconstruction, that Cudahy and Maywood joined together in 2010, is based on the Sheriff’s 2009 brochure, current station rosters and contemporaneous reporting on the collapse of Maywood’s department.