‘It’s a slap in the face’: LA activists protest mayor’s police budget increase
Los Angeles activists denounced a budget proposal by the mayor that includes increases to the law enforcement budget, one day after the conviction of Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis fueled renewed scrutiny of police across the US.
Protesters who gathered outside a local police union building near downtown LA on Wednesday celebrated the rare guilty verdict in a police murder case, but also called for systemic changes locally, including the defunding of the LA police department (LAPD).
“The people taking to the streets got us guilty verdicts yesterday … not the system. The system isn’t for us,” said Stephanie Luna, the aunt of Anthony Vargas, a 21-year-old killed by LA sheriff’s deputies in 2018. “[The verdict] gave us a lot of hope – we need to bring some of that down to California.”
Mothers in the crowd cheered while holding signs with the names of their children killed by LA police, as others waved “We keep us safe” flags and banners callingfor the dismantling of powerful law enforcement unions.
Since the mass protests sparked by George Floyd’s murder in May 2020, activists have been campaigning to cut the LAPD budget, arguing that the best way to prevent police violence is to reduce officers’ contact with the community and reinvest those funds into community programs and services.
Earlier this year, the group started hosting rallies every Wednesday as part of a campaign to remove police labor groups frompublic sector unions.
In the face of intense pressure, LA’s mayor, Eric Garcetti, last June agreed to some reductions in LAPD funding. But this week, Garcetti outraged advocates and civil rights groups with his proposed 2021-22 budget, which seeks to allocate $1.76bn for LAPD, a 3% increase.
The mayor’s office has cited an uptick in homicides and said the city needed to hire more officers to replace retirees. He has called his proposal a “justice budget” with a number of programs meant to address inequality and increased spending on gang intervention officers.
To Minerva García, however, the budget felt like “a slap in the face”. García on Wednesday gave an emotional speech about the police killing of her friend Vanessa Marquez, an actor who was on the TV show ER.
“The mayor says ‘Black Lives Matter’, but not in his own backyard … The city says it’s ‘reimagining public safety’, but to them, that means giving more money to the police.”
García explained she had tried to get help for Marquez, who was disabled and suffering from medical problems, but struggled to find available services. Police in South Pasadena, in LA county, shot Marquez during a welfare check at her home in 2018. The department settled a lawsuit with Marquez’s family for $450,000 earlier this year.
“That money could have been saved if they had given her services like I asked, if they had given that money to take care of her. It would’ve been so much fucking cheaper,” García said.
Advocates at the rally pointed at numerous reports of excessive force, policy violations and physical violence by LAPD officers at last year’s uprisings. The large police responses to demonstrations, including tactical bullets, caused serious injuries to protesters, in some cases requiring hospitalization, the LA Times has reported.
This week, the LAPD was also forced to issue a moratorium on deploying certain projectile weapons at demonstrations in response to a federal court ruling. The department said officers could no longer use 37-millimeter projectile launchers for crowd control at protests, a win for BLM LA, which had sued.
Dr Melina Abdullah, a BLM LA co-founder, said it was particularly disheartening to see the mayor increase police funding even after a judge issued a restraining order against the department over its protest response: “They are so terrible, so vicious, so brutal and so violent that we had to get court intervention to say you will not use ‘less lethal weapons’ on righteous protesters.
“We have to be unabashed and unafraid to say, ‘Abolish the police,’” she argued, adding that the first step would be LAPD cuts that remove police from traffic enforcement and calls related to mental health.
Some of the activist gathered on Wednesday had rallied the day before outside the mayor’s house against budget increase, prompting a large police response in the area, including numerous helicopters overhead.
“It angers me when I look at these cops and they are just standing around, and I just see dollars being thrown away that could be invested in our communities,” said Nicole Donanian-Blandón, a co-founder of People’s City Council Los Angeles, an activist group pushing to defund LAPD, and one of the people who had gathered at the mayor’s house.
“Nothing material has changed with policing in Los Angeles over the last 12 months,” added Kenneth Mejia, a housing justice activist and LA city controller candidate, who has published analyses of the mayor’s proposed budget. “Are we just going to keep throwing money at the LAPD and hoping that they’ll hold themselves accountable and not brutalize protesters or kill innocent civilians?”
Mejia calculated that the mayor’s budget allocates 46% of all unrestricted funds, meaning discretionary money, to LAPD: “These are funds that we can spend on anything … He should put more focus on the biggest issues affecting Angelenos, which is housing and homelessness.”
A spokesman for the mayor said the proposed LAPD budget was roughly 16% of the total $11.2bn budget, but declined to comment on criticisms from activists.
In a speech earlier this week, the mayor said the city was working to send clinicians instead of officers to “nonviolent mental health emergencies”, adding: “If you want to abolish the police, you’re talking to the wrong mayor.”