Advocate for LA City budget resources for unarmed response resources and community safety!
It’s budget time! Every year around this time, the LA Mayor is required to share a draft of the upcoming year’s City budget – and advocates have the opportunity to push for changes before the final budget is adopted. The draft budget has been released – and now it’s time for us to make our voices heard in the budget process.
Use our social media toolkit to advocate now — and use the form below to send a one-click email to your City Councilmember!
At LA Forward, we’ve been organizing for the last year around comprehensive and accessible unarmed crisis response for LA City residents across the city. While our city budget infamously invests in LAPD, it’s abundantly clear that Angelenos are seeking alternatives to armed policing as forms of creating and maintaining public safety. As such, LA Forward’s Unarmed Crisis Response working group is interested in:
Who residents can call when they are experiencing or witnessing immediate crisis
What unarmed people/services are deployed as a result of that call, and
The quality of those unarmed people/services in addressing the impetus for the call
In Mayor Bass’ proposed 2024-2025 budget, the Mayor does not increase funds to expand, evaluate, or centralize dispatch for the city’s emerging set of unarmed crisis response services. The budget proposes to carry over remaining unappropriated funds from last budget year ($13.2 million) into this upcoming budget year. Some of this can be used to ensure that current programs – CIRCLE and UMCR most notable among them – continue their work this upcoming year.
At this juncture in its commitment to unarmed crisis response, we believe that the City of LA needs to:
Fund the capacity to draft plans and infrastructure changes for centralizing dispatch for emergency management/crisis service, so that unarmed crisis response services might be leveraged by call operators and emergency responders with more frequency and regularity WHILE creating efficiencies for a city currently running multiple types of services, including different dispatch protocol for each
Evaluate all current unarmed crisis response services, which (at the moment) serve different needs, populations, and geographies, and operate with different practices and systems; data is currently not being collected across these services in a way that would help the city make decisions about the quality and efficacy of services being offered
From conversations with several council offices and city agencies, we believe that an evaluation could cost about $2 million and first steps toward the centralizing of dispatch could cost an initial $1 million at the research and planning stage.
While we appreciate $13.2 million in roll-overs from 2023-2024 budget, we need to see this growth of our city’s commitment to comprehensive and accessible unarmed crisis response – not stagnation. We seek an additional $3+ million in city funds as a down payment toward building a comprehensive unarmed crisis response system for our city — a system that centralizes dispatch so that residents can get the help they need as quickly as possible, and a system that is grounded in quality services that we know through evaluation really helps people.
Public comment for the budget is May 1st. Let’s urge City Council to add this increase into the Mayor’s budget. Fill out (or customize) the form below to send a one-quick email to your councilmember.
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