The union that represents more than 9,800 Los Angeles police officers has rejected a request from the city’s labor negotiators to meet and discuss the city’s financial crisis, dealing a fresh setback to Mayor Eric Garcetti and the City Council as they struggle to close a looming budget deficit.

Craig Lally, president of the Los Angeles Police Protective League, said in a letter to the city’s chief employee relations officer that the LAPD had already received a $150-million budget cut this year, with some of the savings used to delay reductions at other city agencies.

Lally said in his three-page letter, which was distributed to the union’s members, that officers had spent months on the front lines of the city’s COVID-19 response while contending with “protests, riots and professional sports ‘celebrations’ that devolved into chaos.”

LAPD officers have been “hit in the head with bricks, had urine thrown at them, attacked with frozen water bottles and even injured with eye-damaging lasers,” Lally said in the letter, which was sent Friday and ended with the message “We wish you luck.”

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