Recent discussions on re-imagining public safety have touched on three issues: improving local parks and finding positive things for young people to do; providing intervention by community members instead of police; and training intervention workers to assist the homeless and mentally challenged.
In July, as the Los Angeles City Council modified the Mayor’s $10.5 billion budget, they took steps toward ensuring the LAPD shared, along with other city departments, in dealing with the COVID-19 economic crisis, while reimaging public safety for L.A. neighborhoods and reinvesting $100 million in Black and Brown communities.
The council also voted to approve a slate of public safety, LAPD, and racial equity reforms, including a motion by Council President Nury Martinez, co-authored by Councilmembers Herb Wesson, Marqueece Harris-Dawson, Curren Price and Bob Blumenfield to divert non-violent services (mental health crisis, substance abuse, neighbor disputes etc.) away from the LAPD to appropriate non-law enforcement agencies and professionals.
“This country is having a reckoning on racism,” said Martinez. “We have to acknowledge we have issues. There need to be changes.”
“We just have a different feel of leverage that I’ve never seen before,” said Wesson.
“We want to make sure this discussion leads to real change,” Blumenfield said. “We have realigned public safety in the past. Not too long ago, police were writing parking tickets and directing traffic. We realigned that. We’re not reinventing the wheel. We see some of this is happening in other parts of the country.”
“There are a lot of places, and at the Community Coalition, we used to call them ‘crime magnets,’” Harris-Dawson said, referring to the alley areas, store parking lots and vacant lots where police have been called to break up gatherings. “That’s for code enforcement, that’s not a criminal matter.”
Unfortunately, he added, there are so few code enforcement people to stop things from happening before you need police enforcement.
“Intervention work doesn’t just lie in an office it starts in the streets,” said Pierre Arreola, a lifelong resident of Pacoima and intervention worker. “Reform shouldn’t be just community informed, it should be community driven.”
Arreola complained that some of his work had been met with red tape “because of the way youth are criminalized in our community.”
Some intervention workers used to be involved in the streets, but have changed their lives around and become cease-fire creators, fathers and big brothers in the community, said Leon Gullette.
“I’m able to pull some folks out of gangs, take them in there and get case management, anger management and take these folks to the next level, get them employment, housing,” Gullette said. “Making them feel like they’re somebody. We’ve been pretty successful in putting a lot of young people to work and getting rid of some of the violence.”
He pointed out the dramatic drop in homicides since the riots of 1992.
“With some more help, we can do a lot more” Gullette said. “With some additional help we can get further ahead with these communities.”
