There’s an image I think about each spring when Los Angeles’s city budget cycle rolls around again. It’s a photo of about 25 LAPD officers, all clustered around two black vans in downtown L.A., waiting for something. Some of them are chatting and laughing; some are on their phones; one, hands clasped, seems almost to be meditating, though it’s hard to tell what’s going on behind those Oakleys. To mentally tabulate the overtime being accrued might provoke an aneurysm. Shade: The Promise of a