The Community grants charade is a campaign ploy
To anyone who is naïve or just not paying attention, the recent Joe Buscaino Community Grants initiative that was launched recently would not seem like an obvious campaign ploy charading as a community engagement. What is getting lost in his rather self-serving ploy in branding it with his own name is that this $3 million grant comes directly from the $150 million “defund the police” budget realignment approved by LA City Council last year in the wake of the protests against police abuse. The original idea was to address underlying social and economic injustice issues that cause crime and to invest in non-police solutions, like responding to mental health crises or domestic abuse calls, a responsibility of which the police themselves would just as soon shed themselves. Clearly, Joe’s community grants don’t address much of this. And the $3 million isn’t even the lion’s share of the $12.5 million proportioned to the 15th Council District.
Now I’m not saying that there isn’t a need amongst the numerous nonprofits vying for their share of this largess from the city’s police budget, but the idea of making it a social media popularity contest does really annoy me. If there was any real justice in the city’s $10.53 billion budget, (two-thirds of which, $6.68 billion, goes to General Fund revenues) a significant portion — probably double the current $12.5 million — would be spent annually for all the viable charities and community programs in each council district annually. You might also ask what’s up with the rest of the budget? There’s some $3.85 billion, which goes into a few hundred special purpose funds. You can see more of the LA Controller’s dashboard at lacontroller.org/financial-reports. The special funds are yet another matter that should be addressed and/or reallocated.
Clearly there is a growing need to deter crime in the Harbor Division, as there has been an upswing in the number of shootings and homicides in the past few months involving young men of color. The hotspots appear to be located in the low-income areas of San Pedro, Harbor City and Wilmington, with no known connection between them that the Los Angeles Police Department will admit. And yet there is no clear evidence that the rise in violent crime is connected in any way whatsoever to the size of the LAPD budget. Some would even argue that if we relieved the police from enforcement on homeless, mentally ill and addicted populations that we would get more crimes solved and possibly fewer officer involved shootings. See the current crime stats for your area here www.lapdonline.org/crime_mapping_and_compstat.
All of this discussion of what the intent of the transfer of money was for has become moot in that it ended up in Buscaino’s community grants pocket and is now conveniently ignored by the majority of the charities competing to curry votes. This, while the soon-departing councilman merrily goes about capturing voters’ email addresses to potentially be used for his mayoral campaign. That clearly would seem like an ethics violation — using public monies to create a database of emails for a political campaign?
This gives a kind of Trumpian flavor to a seemingly innocent giveaway.
So I’d just like to engage all of these charities, community programs and civic organizations at this point in a different challenge. What if all of this money, $12.5 million annually, had to be spent on programs that addressed social injustice issues? What if you actually had to come up with community based solutions to reimagine the LAPD budget that took some burden off of the police and then cured some part of the systemic injustices of our city? Just what would your non- profit do for that allotment?
Clearly some of our most successful non-profits do this now, but are often stretched to their limits by budgets and facilities. They spend precious resources holding fundraisers to bolster their finances and often many hours of volunteer time chasing large donors.
The answer to this question deserves a town hall meeting, not a social media footrace to be first with the most “stakeholder” followers voting. We don’t need a community grants charade and a campaign ploy. What is needed is a sustainable source of funding for our most engaged nonprofits who are actually doing some heroic work in our communities. Turning this into a competition is demeaning and trivializing in a very deceitful way.
And my last complaint about the Buscaino competition is that he never once consulted with any of the seven neighborhood councils in his district for any advice on what priorities they might have for these public monies. It’s all too obvious that if it were left to him, the $150 million would never have been transferred out of the LAPD budget in the first place as he was one of two votes on the city council opposing it.