Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti addressed the reallocation of funds from the Los Angeles Police Department and the city’s handling of COVID-19 at the Aug. 1 meeting of the Los Angeles Neighborhood Council Coalition, which was held via Zoom.
“This is the toughest budget year, obviously, in all of our collective history,” Garcetti said.
The city has a $10.53 billion budget, but it will need to make more than a billion dollars in cuts. The budget increased from last year by 1.7%, but in a typical year, the budget increases by 5 to 6%, he said.
The city has built up a reserve fund twice as big as it was before the 2008 recession; because of this, the city won’t cut any services. Instead, employees will be offered early retirement incentives.
A few months ago, the city’s budget process was widely expected to provide increased funding to the Los Angeles Police Department. But that changed on May 25, when a Minneapolis police officer killed a black man named George Floyd by kneeling on his neck for almost nine minutes. During the worldwide demonstrations that followed — including many in Southern California — many protesters found common ground in a call to “defund the police.” The slogan means different things to different people, but the short-term upshot is that LAPD is facing a $150 million reduction in its budget. That money, plus money from other areas of the city budget totaling between $350 million to $500 million, will be redistributed to communities of people of color, crime prevention and intervention programs and addressing racial injustice, Garcetti said, adding that this redistribution of funds will reduce the workload of police. The mayor emphasized that this will be done “intelligently.”
“I’m not a ‘defund the police.’” Garcetti said. “I don’t know what that means. Three people probably will give you three answers. To me, as a budget guy, that means get rid of budget allocation 100%. And I don’t think that that’s a responsible way forward, nor a good model to keep our community safe.”
However, Garcetti mentioned that the city recently passed reforms to the Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, without opposition from the Los Angeles Police Protective League.
He also said that the city has reduced police fatalities by 45% in the past four years and is 82nd out of a hundred per capita in terms of police killings.
“I want to keep driving that number even further down while helping our police officers, who right now, quite frankly, their morale is low,” Garcetti said. “We need to find ways to re-humanize each other.”
This includes the way police treat communities of color.
“It doesn’t matter, as [Councilman] Marqueece Harris-Dawson and others have said, what rank you have or title you have, you experience what still is wrong with policing, with traffic stops and other things that still have a bias,” Garcetti said.
Garcetti pointed to the killing of Floyd by Minneapolis police as one of the extreme cases of police misuse of power. However, Garcetti also said there are police who are heroes and used the example of Juan Diaz, an off-duty police officer who was shot by a tagger.
“People who want to say that there’s no agenda for police reform are wrong,” Garcetti said. “And anybody who would say that our police officers are across-the-board bad people and that everywhere there’s a culture only of oppression and not of help, they’re wrong as well.”
Changes to be implemented in the LAPD include de-escalation training and implicit bias training, as well as crowd control training.
On the topic of COVID-19 testing, Garcetti reported that the city has invested money but said he does not believe people will be able to fully go back to school or work without a different testing paradigm. Because of this, he is looking into paper strip testing with the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Conference of Mayors and the National Governors Association.
“It’s very early,” Garcetti said. “We’ll see what happens. But this is an example of LA leading and trying to kind of fail forward and hopefully succeed forward.”
The paper strip tests are significantly cheaper, as they are $1 to $5, as opposed to the $100 to $200 the city is paying for the current tests. However, they are only 50% as sensitive.
“They don’t catch as much as the tests we do every day,” Garcetti said. “But the places we catch those people are usually after they’re infectious and they still have some viral load in them, but not an infectious one. So, I think even though this is 50% as sensitive, it’s probably 80 to 90% of what we need.”
Garcetti said that because these strips are cheaper, they could be used on students every day. He also suggested using them on important populations and potentially lowering the curve of COVID-19 within two or three days instead of three or four weeks. He did not explain how testing itself would lower the curve.
Garcetti also acknowledged that this is brand new technology and that the United States did not have the manufacturing capability for it yet — but he was planning to speak with other cities and co-finance it with them.
Garcetti said that this plan was not public and it is still probably a couple months away.
Garcetti said that one of the frustrations with COVID-19 was that it was a novel coronavirus — meaning that there is no clear roadmap to deal with it.
“We are seeing it act in ways that no coronavirus has before,” Garcetti said. “As such, we’re having to learn how to respond to it each day.”