Politicians reconsider public safety budgets
Cities look at shifting resources
MINNEAPOLIS — In an abrupt change of course, the mayor of New York vowed to cut the budget of the nation’s largest police force.
In Los Angeles, the mayor called for redirecting millions of dollars from policing after protesters gathered outside his home.
And in Minneapolis, City Council members pledged to dismantle their police force and completely reinvent how public safety is handled.
As tens of thousands of people
have demonstrated against police violence over the past two weeks, calls have emerged in cities across the country for fundamental changes to American policing.
The pleas for change have taken a variety of forms — including measures to restrict police use of military-style equipment and efforts to require officers to face strict discipline in cases of misconduct.
Parks, universities and schools have distanced themselves from local police departments, severing contracts. In some places, the calls for change have gone still further, aiming to abolish police departments, shift police funds into social services, or defund police departments partly or entirely.
“It is a critical time that we can see concrete change,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton, who last week addressed the crowd gathered for a memorial service for George Floyd, the black man from Houston who died after a white police officer pressed his knee into his neck for nearly nine minutes in Minneapolis last month. “The legislation and the policy changes will be the ones that determine the victory of this movement.”
For his part, President Donald Trump on Monday discarded proposals to remove funds from police departments.
“We won’t be defunding our police,” he said. “We won’t be dismantling our police.”
Attorney General William Barr said that it would be wrong to reduce police budgets in part because he felt the country needed more policing to preserve public safety and warned that the nation would see “chaos” and “more killings” should any major city disband its department.
Former Vice President Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, “does not believe that police should be defunded,” a campaign spokesman said Monday, adding that Biden “supports the urgent need for reform” as well as financial support for community policing programs.
Around the country, city and state leaders were weighing overhauls of their policing policies, aware of the delicate balance of voters’ concerns about crime versus their repulsion at police brutality.
In Albany, New York state lawmakers Monday began passing a wide-ranging package of bills targeting police misconduct, overcoming deep-seated opposition from law enforcement unions.
The measures, many of which have languished for years, include a ban on the use of chokeholds as well as the repeal of a decades-old statute that has effectively hidden the disciplinary records of police officers from public view.
Last week, a City Council budget meeting in Nashville, Tenn., stretched on for more than eight hours, coming to a close well after midnight as residents organized by a coalition of community groups lined up to demand that the police budget be cut.
The idea of removing money from police forces, once largely put forth for years by academics and advocacy groups, appeared to be shifting into the spotlight as activists and elected officials across the country weighed the possibility.
“This is totally new,” said Stacie Gilmore, a City Council member for a largely Latino and African American district in Denver who had received 2,500 emails in the past three days demanding the city defund the police. “We’re always scrambling to get enough resources. Our police department by default serves as social worker, therapist, family counselor, career counselor. We don’t need the police to do that job anymore. It’s not working for communities of color.”
The end goal, advocates say, is to put an end to horrific scenes such as Floyd’s death.
In Minneapolis, council members took a first major step toward dismantling its police force Sunday when nine of them, a vetoproof majority, pledged to revamp policing. Specifics were uncertain, but council members promised to listen to concerns from community groups and cautioned changes would take time.
“We’re reclaiming the conversation of public safety, and we’re saying, ‘It doesn’t have to be fearbased; it doesn’t have to be punishment-based,’ ” said Alondra Cano, a council member.
Other lawmakers and leaders say defunding police departments could have unintended consequences. Some people worry about safety if fewer armed officers are on patrol, especially in summer months when crime rates tend to spike.
In Los Angeles, Mayor Eric Garcetti last week agreed to redirect $150 million from the Police Department’s nearly $2 billion budget and other city programs to health and education programs among others. The move came after calls from members of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and the City Council.
Officials from police unions have pushed back against the idea with sharp rebukes in some cases.
In Los Angeles, the union issued a statement saying that a crisis response team should be sent to the mayor “because Eric has apparently lost his damn mind.” Union members warned that spending cuts would lead to more crime.
There’s a difference between defunding the police and abolishing the police, said Arianna Nason, a member of the MPD150 Collective, a coalition of community activists in Minneapolis.
She envisions a city where community watch groups or appbased safety groups could respond to crimes.
The prospect that neighborhood watch groups could stereotype and endanger people of color is also a concern among some people. Nason said she understood that, but she said that danger already existed in the current system.
“A lot of it is a leap of faith,” she said. “I want to choose to believe in humanity. I want to choose to believe that this moment feels different because it is different.”