Anew movement arising out of the widespread protests in response to George Floyd’s murder is gaining strength across the country. The campaign to “defund the police” calls for the redistribution of America’s outsized law enforcement budgets into essential social services like housing, education and health care.
My local Black Lives Matter chapter in Los Angeles has been working to slash the Los Angeles Police Department budget for years. The group has recently joined with others to draft a proposal for Los Angeles city spending. “The People’s Budget,” as it is called, promises to divest the majority of the police and city attorney’s budgets and reinvest those funds into housing, public works, public health and a new sector of reimagined community safety.
The LAPD has one of the nation’s largest police budgets — more than 50% of the city’s “unrestricted” general fund, which isn’t earmarked for specific purposes, goes to the force. It has a $1.8 billion operating budget and spends $3.1 billion, out of the city’s total of $10.5 billion. In contrast, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s budget proposal for 2021 spends just $81 million on housing.
Los Angeles is not alone on this. Massive disparities between law enforcement and social services budgets exist in cities throughout the country. In Minneapolis, where George Floyd was killed, a recent budget passed in December increased the police department budget by $10 million to a total of $193 million. Meanwhile, the city’s budget proposed $31 million for affordable housing, $250,000 for community organizations working with at-risk youth, and $400,000 for the Office of Crime Prevention.
The result of these spending disparities is a massive, militaristic police force that leeches resources from every other city department while oppressing minority communities for mostly nonviolent crimes.
According to the Prison Policy Initiative, the vast majority of the roughly 10.5 million arrests made every year in America are for low-level offenses. Only 5% of all arrests are for violent crimes. Inflated police budgets help create this kind of uniquely American style of over-policing.
The protests against outsized police budgets in the wake of Floyd’s killing is starting to have an effect, but far from the scale that is needed.
A day after Black Lives Matter Los Angeles organized massive protests outside his Los Angeles mansion, Garcetti announced a $150 million cut to the LAPD budget, with promises to reinvest it into city programs to pay for jobs for youths, health initiatives and “peace centers.” But this cut is hardly a cut at all, and merely serves to reverse the planned budget increases for 2021.
“We have to meet the needs of our people, and you can’t meet the needs of our people by spending so much on police who don’t keep communities safe,” Melina Abdullah, co-founder of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles, told me recently.
The People’s Budget offers a sane alternative to the increasingly parasitic budgets of intolerably brutal police. It’s past time that cities everywhere look to adopt a people’s budget of their own.
Leland Nally is a writer and filmmaker living in Koreatown, Los Angeles.
