Of course, you can and in our view should also wear it if you attend City Council meetings (whether you speak or not.)

If you wear it at any of these public events, please take a "selfie" (photo of yourself) wearing the label and email it to us at mail@LBReport.com. If you attend with your friends and neighbors, ask them to wear the label too and take a photo of your entire group.

Spread the word about the label via Facebook. "Like" this page. Remind your Facebook friends to join you in wearing the label at upcoming public civic events. Use the label as an avatar image for your Facebook page. Download it and use it on your Facebook page.

If any elected official comments on your label (pro or con), good! Let us know what they told you (pro or con) and we may publish it.

Remember: police officers and firefighters don't decide how many police and firefighters or paramedics Long Beach has. The elected City Council decides that when they budget sums for police and fire services. (The Mayor has no vote in this, only a veto that six Councilmembers can override.)

In the coming weeks, a new City Council majority will vote on a new City Hall budget. That's when the Council can and should begin restoring police, fire and paramedic levels for taxpayers.

Los Angeles (L.A. County's largest city) and Signal Hill (one of its smallest) both provide their taxpayers with higher levels of police than Long Beach does (and we are L.A. County's second largest city.) Other cities don't erase roughly 20% of their budgeted police officers for taxpayers and (in a city with too many gangmembers) leave their police department with barely 1/3 of an anti-gang field unit. On a recent holiday weekend, LBPD ran out of available deployable cops to provide timely service.

Long Beach taxpayers currently experience a budgeted sworn police level for citywide deployment roughly equivalent per capita to what L.A. would have if it cut roughly 30% of LAPD's police officers. L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti would be laughed out of town if he proposed that and then boasted that he'd produced a "surplus."

Other cities don't leave fire stations without fire engines. They don't shrug when a home burns across the street from a fire station until an engine came from further away. No other city in L.A. or OC has made their residents guinea pigs for a cheaper paramedic system as Long Beach is currently doing.

And other cities didn't do all this while their now-former City Council handed out unbudgeted raises to city managers and has pursued a lavish Taj Mahal Civic Center without first seeking bids for an economical seismic City Hall retrofit. (In our opinion, the Civic Center project should be halted and management positions should be among the first reduced.)

We don't believe the status quo is acceptable. We believe it is dangerous denial to pretend that it is.

It's time to change Long Beach from a "can't do" city to a place that can and does provide public safety services for taxpayers that will make our neighborhoods more desirable for families, more competitive for businesses and more prosperous for all of us.

Speaking politely but firmly, plainly and consistently, can change the status quo.

If you'd like to be part of that change, we invite you to print out the label above, wear it at civic events and send us photos of you and your friends doing so. Your actions will inspire and empower others to say and do what needs to be said and done