A new approach to public safety in LA

Since late May of this year, in what may be the largest movement in US history, millions of people have taken to the streets to resist police violence against Black Americans.

Here in Los Angeles, Black Lives Matter LA and a coalition of organizers have led and inspired hundreds of marches and protests, with actions still ongoing. This movement, in some ways, began in Los Angeles—some of the women who built #BlackLivesMatter live and organize here. 

The demands of this movement have been clear: systemic change, transformative reimagining of public safety, divestment from criminalization, and meaningful investment in our communities.

In response to the protests, City Hall has made efforts at change:

• First, they redirected nearly $150 million of funding from the police budget, marking a major departure from city precedent.

• Second, several councilmembers proposed two powerful motions that have the potential to transform policing in Los Angeles.

  • The first motion seeks to remove armed officers from responding to non-violent calls for service.

  • The second seeks to remove armed officers from traffic enforcement.  

These preliminary motions are significant, particularly in the context of LA’s history. But so far, we don’t know what their implementation will look like, and the motions don’t articulate in detail a new vision for public safety in Los Angeles.

In this document, we hope to establish why we need transformative change to policing in LA, and also present some ideas for what that new vision of public safety could look like. 

Our work is meant to provide a foundation of research for these promising initiatives at City Hall, to deepen and specify the ongoing policy discussions around public safety in Los Angeles, and to explore ideas for how public safety services could be delivered in LA in the future. 

In Part 1 of this policy, we present some of the existing problems with our current system of public safety: the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). We review how the LAPD operates, how its practices impact communities of color and marginalized Angelenos, what the department spends its money on, and the systems of accountability that are currently in place to address misconduct and abuse.

In Part 2, we present one vision of what a changed approach to public safety could look like. This vision is rooted in the belief that everyone deserves to feel safe, and that our city has many avenues it can pursue to increase public safety beyond armed enforcement. We explore a vision for a new public safety department—a department that invests in and uplifts communities, staffed with unarmed first responders trained in de-escalation, crisis intervention, and violence prevention, while maintaining the ability to respond to violent threats. We also lay out a proposal for neighborhood-level service via a network of Community Access Centers that provide space for Angelenos to receive support right where they live.

In Part 3, we highlight other investments Los Angeles could prioritize to improve public safety overall, including policies and programs that can empower resiliency and prosperity across the city.

The Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD) is, by far, our city’s primary solution for maintaining public safety—the department absorbs more than half of the city’s discretionary spending from its General Fund. It is the most well-funded department in Los Angeles, with an annual budget of over 3 billion dollars per year. But how are they keeping the public safe? 

To find out, let’s take a deep dive into the current state of the LAPD—how the department operates, the effects on our city, and how its budget is distributed. 

The majority of the LAPD’s resources are allocated to “field forces”—armed officers who patrol neighborhoods on foot and in squad cars. Field forces absorb more than 60% of the LAPD’s operating budget, including $800 million in officer salaries.

By the city’s own description, the Field Force “provides for the prevention, suppression, and investigation of crime through highly visible vehicular and foot patrol activities.” Field Forces are the officers who patrol neighborhoods and conduct the vast majority of stops and searches on LA’s streets. These forces also maintain a visible presence on our buses and trains, via a contract paid by Metro.

Field officers are the primary responders to crime in Los Angeles. But LAPD officers spend the vast majority of their time and resources responding to minor offenses—and far less on violent crime.

The LA Times and Crosstown have both recently released reports analyzing LAPD emergency call data. The LAPD are called out over a million times a year, and since 2010, have responded to about 18 million calls for service. The LA Times found that only 7.8% of those calls were in response to violent crimes.

Here are some of the other categories they responded to:

• Officer-initiated calls: 48.6%
  By far the largest category of situations handled by police were initiated by police themselves. The vast majority of these cases are stops of drivers and pedestrians. The LA Times found that, in each year of the past decade, LAPD officers have made between 550,000 and 950,000 such stops.

• Disturbances: 8.6%
  Disturbances mostly involve trespassing complaints or tripped alarms. Only about 17% of these calls (1.4% of all calls) were in response to violence.

• Disputes: 5.1%
  These are arguments between family members, landlords and tenants, strangers, or any other groups in verbal conflict that result in a police call.

• Minor disturbances: 4.3% 
  These are noise complaints, fireworks, and car alarms. Last year alone, the LAPD was called to respond to loud parties more than 26,000 times. It was the most common non-violent call the department received.

• Traffic collisions: 3.7% 
  Police are often involved after collisions to direct traffic and take reports.

• Mental health and suicide: 1.8%
  These are calls related to individuals who are experiencing mental health crises or are a threat to themselves. In about 9% of these calls (0.2% of all calls), the caller indicated that the individual was behaving violently.

Let’s talk about the kinds of crime the LAPD spends most of its time policing, and the choice by the department to prioritize minor crime enforcement using an approach known as “broken windows” policing.

“Broken windows” theory is a touchstone of modern law enforcement. The theory argues that aggressively policing and criminalizing minor offenses—such as vandalism, public intoxication, and loitering—can discourage more serious crimes.

“Broken windows” was first implemented at a large scale by NYPD Chief of Police William Bratton in the 1990s, under the supervision of NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani. Bratton then moved on to become the LAPD’s Chief of Police from 2002 to 2009, continuing his campaign against minor crimes.

After his selection as LAPD Chief, Bratton said he would “make graffiti a top priority for all officers,” and focused his effort to cite misdemeanor violations in Skid Row.

There is evidence that broken windows policing doesn’t work to reduce serious offenses. In fact, during a period when NYPD significantly reduced their broken windows-style proactive policing, the city actually saw a decline in major crimes. Nevertheless, the LAPD continues to pursue misdemeanor violations as a primary crime suppression strategy.

A significant amount of the LAPD’s activity involves responding to what could be classified as crimes of poverty. In the last five years, drinking in public (not while driving) accounted for the highest number of arrests by the LAPD—over 55,000 arrests in total and 10% of all arrests. In the last two years, it was the primary cause for arrests of Black Angelenos. 

The fifth most common justification for an arrest over the last five years was an individual sleeping or sitting on a "street, sidewalk or other public way.” There were more than 20,000 arrests for this offense over the same five-year period.

Below are the top ten reasons for arrest by the LAPD from 2015 to 2019:

1. Drinking in public - 55,730

   • Arrests citing LAMC 41.27  - 29,166 arrests

   • Arrests citing BPC 25620 - 26,564 arrests

2. Drunk driving (VC 23152) -  44,029 arrests

3. Assault and battery (PC 243) - 24,375 arrests

4. Domestic violence (PC 273.5) - 24,270 arrests

5. Sitting, sleeping, lying on the sidewalk (LAMC 41.18) -  20,249 arrests

6. Prostitution and disorderly conduct (PC 647) - 18,676 arrests 

7. Possession of a controlled substance (HSC 11377) - 17,820 arrests

8. Assault with a deadly weapon (PC 245) - 15,448 arrests

9. Shoplifting (PC 459.5) - 12,898 arrests

10. Failure to Appear (PC 853.7) - 11,122 arrests

Total arrests: 543,195

We found these numbers by going through the city’s own arrest data and identifying the top charges for which arrests were made.

Crimes like public intoxication and sleeping on the sidewalk are not only minor offenses, they are also crimes of poverty. Punishment for these crimes falls disproportionately on low-income communities in Los Angeles, and especially on our city’s vast and growing population of people experiencing homelessness.

Los Angeles has numerous laws that effectively criminalize homelessness itself. Municipal Codes 56.11, 41.18, and 85.02 form a body of legislation that makes it illegal for unhoused residents of our city to have “bulky” belongings, to sit, sleep, or lie on the sidewalk, or to sleep in their cars. These laws lead to unhoused residents enduring an extremely high level of punishment and incarceration through frequent interactions with LAPD.

The LAPD’s campaign of citing and arresting people who are unhoused has increased in recent years. In 2011, about one out of every ten of LAPD arrests were of unhoused people. In 2016, that number grew to one in six, mostly for minor offenses, and at a time when arrests overall were going down. Throughout this period, unhoused people made up only about 1% of the city’s total population.

Criminalization as a policy response to the homelessness crisis is not just ineffective—it’s actively counterproductive toward reducing homelessness.

Citations, arrests, and accrued fees can be impediments for obtaining employment, housing, and other necessary resources.

Encampment sweeps by police and sanitation can often result in the loss of important possessions: documents, items of personal value, even medication. Additionally, displacement by sweeps creates disconnection between unhoused people and their case managers, making it harder for them to get off the street. 

When documents are confiscated, people applying for housing and other services are set back—ID cards and certain forms are often needed to obtain assistance.

When medications are confiscated or thrown out by police, the consequences can be even more dire. 

Additionally, police encounters with unhoused people frequently result in conflict, arrests, and violence.

• In 2019, according to LAPD data, over a third of the department’s non-lethal uses of force were against someone experiencing homelessness.

• About 25% of lethal force incidents were against someone experiencing homelessness.

• Unhoused people in Los Angeles absorb these massive shares of overall police violence despite making up about 1% of the city’s overall population.

For several decades, the criminalization of homelessness has been particularly felt in LA’s Skid Row. In September 2006, Los Angeles launched the Safer Cities Initiative (“SCI”) which “sought to reduce the density of homeless encampments using fines and citations.” SCI followed “broken windows” policing theory and deployed 50 additional officers in downtown Los Angeles, promoting aggressive policing of targeted crimes and infractions in the Skid Row area.

According to the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority, “despite the new efforts to restructure the face of Skid Row, the number of homeless people there actually increased from 2005 to 2007.” The population rose from 3,668 individuals to 5,131 in that time.

In a 2010 assessment of SCI, the Los Angeles Community Action Network conducted a survey of over 200 Skid Row residents and found that 78% of respondents did “not feel safe from police violence and harassment” and a similar percentage (74%) of residents reported that they had been profiled by police “due to race, economic status, or residence in the Skid Row area.”

In 2015, officers assigned to SCI shot and killed Charly Leundeu Keunang, an unhoused, unarmed man. The LA Police Commision and District Attorney Jackie Lacey cleared the officers in 2016. However, after police body camera footage of the shooting was released in January 2017, a civil jury found two of the three officers involved liable in 2018.

The SCI initiative continued under this name until 2016, when it was rebranded as RESET (Resources Enhancement Services Enforcement Team). As of the LAPD’s 2019 Use of Force Year-End Review, RESET is still an active program focused on Skid Row.

LAPD has created a system where the more poverty is widespread in a community, the more it will be targeted for enforcement. And in Los Angeles, high-poverty communities are predominantly communities of color.

According to a joint study published in 2016:

• The median wealth of a white household in the LA metro area is $355,000.

• The median wealth of a Black household is $4,000. That’s 1.1% of the median wealth of a white household.

• The median wealth of a Mexican American household is $3,500, less than 1% of the median white household wealth.

• The median value of the liquid assets—assets which can be quickly converted into cash—held by Black households are $200 and between $0-$7 for Latinx households, compared to $110,000 for white households. 

The criminalization of homelessness also disproportionately impacts Black residents: Black Angelenos make up 38% of LA’s unhoused population, but only 9% of the population overall.

Policing in Los Angeles has undergone some reforms since the LAPD became nationally known for its racist culture and widespread brutality in the 20th century—but there is significant evidence of continued racial discrimination in its law enforcement operations.

In Los Angeles, Black residents are profiled, arrested, and brutalized by law enforcement at an alarmingly disproportionate rate.

Black Angelenos are searched and arrested far more often than whites:

• The incarceration rate of Black people of Los Angeles County is thirteen times that of whites.

• An LA Times analysis found that, over a recent ten-month period, Black drivers were almost five times as likely to be searched by LAPD than white drivers during traffic stops—even though white drivers were more likely to be carrying illegal items.

• From 2015 to 2018, the LA Times found that 65% of the drivers stopped by LAPD’s Metro division in South LA were Black—more than double the share of the Black population in the area.

These same racial disparities are visible in law enforcement operations on buses, trains and subways. Black transit riders on LA County’s Metro system are three times more likely than other races to come into documented contact with law enforcement, and receive more than half of fare evasion citations issued on the transit system.

The LAPD also continues to use violence at much higher rates than other American police departments.

According to Campaign Zero’s data, between 2016 and 2018:

• LAPD officers use more deadly force per arrest than 72% of police departments in the United States.

• In 83% of LAPD killings, officers did not attempt non-lethal force before shooting.

• LAPD officers kill almost 20% more people per capita than Chicago Police, and 300% more than the NYPD.

In 2019, according to the LAPD’s own data and accounting for population size, Black and Latinx Angelenos were:

• 5.5 times more likely to be shot at by an officer than whites. 

• 6.1 times more likely to be the victim of “categorical use of force”: defined as force that results in serious bodily injury, hospitalization, or death, or that makes use of a chokehold that cuts off circulation to the brain.

• 2.5 times as likely to be the victim of all other uses of force.

For Black Angelenos alone, the numbers were even more dire:

• Black Angelenos were shot at by LAPD 12.4 times as often as whites.

• Black Angelenos were 13.7 times as likely to be victims of categorical uses of force as whites.

• Black Angelenos were 7.1 times as likely to be the victim of all other uses of force as whites.

Campaign Zero found that 28% of people killed or seriously injured by LAPD officers were Black—despite Black Angelenos making up only 9% of the city’s population. 

The study also found that LAPD demonstrated more racial bias in arrests and deadly force than 77% of departments in the country.

These numbers are backed up by numerous stories of racial discrimination by police in LA that have been revealed through reporting and internal investigations in the last decade. For example, more than 20 officers in LAPD’s specialized Metro division are currently under investigation for falsifying evidence on interview cards filled out during traffic stops. One officer entered 43 people he had pulled over in traffic stops into a state database of gang members, filing false reports saying that they had admitted to gang membership. That officer and two others have been criminally charged.

Later, a whistleblower within the Metro division sued the LAPD and claimed, according to the LA Times, that “commanders have for years enforced a de facto quota system that rewarded officers who identified and arrested a lot of alleged gang members and punished those who didn’t.” Quotas for gang arrests and entering individuals into gang databases are targeted at Black and Latinx Angelenos.

There is demonstrable evidence, both statistic and anecdotal, of racial discrimination in LAPD’s methods. But while 541 racial profiling complaints were filed against LAPD between 2016 and 2018, only two of those complaints were sustained.

Over the last decade, the LAPD’s increased use of “intelligence gathering” and “predictive policing” algorithmic software has heightened the over-policing of low-income communities of color. One such program, known as PredPol, used past crime data to predict future crime “hotspots”—places the software considered crime to be more likely to happen. Of course, because LAPD has historically placed more patrols and made more arrests in low-income communities of color, most of the “hotspots” were located in those neighborhoods—creating a cycle of racially-biased criminalization reinforced by compromised data. 

Tools ostensibly designed to track crime statistics have also led to enhanced criminalization of communities of color. A prime example is the state CalGang database, a list of individuals claimed by law enforcement to have gang affiliations based on meeting criteria that has been criticized as “overbroad and vague.” People can be entered into the database based solely on the color of their clothing or the neighborhoods they live in. The database unsurprisingly disproportionately targets youth of color. By 2003—only six years after the database was introduced—47% of all Black men in Los Angeles County between the ages of 21 and 24 had been logged into the database. State audits have found the database to be riddled with inaccuracies, with countless Black and Latinx included based on no evidence whatsoever—including 42 babies. 

CalGang has been used to enforce local gang injunctions, which effectively banished people from simply existing in certain parts of the city—exacerbating gentrification. This relationship between policing and gentrification has a long, ugly history in Los Angeles: for decades, LAPD officers were used to enforce segregation, wielding brutal tactics to keep Black residents out of white neighborhoods.

Recently, after years of advocacy from organizers and anti-surveillance groups like Stop LAPD Spying, the LAPD ended its use of multiple predictive policing algorithms, including PredPol. Just this summer, the California Attorney General revoked the LAPD’s access to the CalGang database—into which LAPD officers were found falsifying evidence to accuse people of gang membership.

Despite ending the use of certain programs, the LAPD continues to deploy a massive architecture of surveillance that primarily polices people of color and communities in poverty. This includes the use of Suspicious Activity Reports (SARs), enabled by LAPD’s Special Order 1, to monitor and gather information on largely non-white Angelenos in the name of counterterrorism. Many people written up in these reports end up in federal databases, making their data available to tens of thousands of law enforcement agencies across the country. The LAPD SAR policy allows the collection of data related to any behavior deemed suspicious by LAPD, as documented either through police contact or by community members, who can report online or via a telephone hotline.

LAPD also permanently added drones to their arsenal in September of 2019. While there are currently tight restrictions around the approved use of drones by LAPD, their expanded use could fundamentally change the landscape of how LAPD monitors private citizens, especially in areas that have typically been targeted for surveillance—historically, Black and Latinx communities. Advocates have called for an end to this program to prevent “mission creep,” anticipating the list of deployment situations to increase and the restrictions around such deployment to be reduced.

LAPD leadership celebrate the department's data-driven approach, arguing its intelligence-gathering programs are utilized in crime-fighting strategies. There is, however, substantial evidence that predictive policing is ineffective at reducing crime, prejudiced in its application, and generates substantial false positives.

Crime-predicting algorithms are defended as simply leveraging “colorblind” data, yet hundreds of mathematicians recently signed a letter boycotting the practice, calling predictive policing “a scientific veneer for racism.”

Out of the entire LAPD operating budget, about 13% is actually spent on “specialized investigation” to solve crimes. Despite being a small percentage of their spending, the resulting amount spent on this program is still more than the budgets for Economic Development, Housing and Community Investment, and Emergency Management combined.

So how effective is our police force at solving serious crimes?

Police departments report crime-solving success based on “clearance rates.” For example, in 2017, LAPD reported that 282 murders took place, and that it cleared 207 murders for a clearance rate of 73%. Based on that figure, it would be natural to assume that 73% of murders in 2017 were solved, with suspects apprehended. But that isn’t what the clearance rate means.

First, clearance rates are calculated by dividing the number of cases “cleared” in a certain year by the number of overall cases that year—regardless of when those crimes that were cleared occurred.

In those 2017 numbers, only 139 of the 207 cleared murders actually occurred in 2017. The others occurred in previous years. That means that only 49% of murders committed in 2017 were cleared that same year.

Secondly, “clearing” a case does not necessarily mean that a suspect was apprehended and charged with a crime.

Cases can also be cleared by “exceptional means” even if charges are not filed. The reasons can range from a number of technicalities—the death of a suspect or even a refusal to testify by a witness can lead to a murder being cleared by exceptional means. Under these circumstances, the case would not be considered “solved” in the traditional sense; the department simply found reason to stop trying to solve it.

The LAPD has a unique tendency to clear murders by exceptional means, without an arrest or conviction. According to a 2015 investigation by the LA Daily News, LAPD detectives closed cases by exceptional means at “a rate more than double that of the national average.”

Based on the vague nature of clearance rates, it’s impossible to say exactly what percentage of murders are solved by LAPD—but it’s lower than the stated clearance rate of 73%.

More than just murder cases can be cleared by exceptional means. ProPublica has conducted extensive research on rape clearance rates across the country and analyzed how many of these cases were cleared through “exceptional means.” In Los Angeles, in 2016, the LAPD reported clearing 51% of rape cases. A majority of these, however, were cleared through exceptional means, meaning no suspect was arrested and no charges were filed. Only 14% of rape cases led to an arrest.

Like their application of lethal force, the LAPD’s investigation of crimes can also be skewed across racial lines. 

In her book Ghettoside, LA Times reporter Jill Leovy embedded herself in the LAPD’s 77th Street Division in South Central. Through her time at the station and in researching homicide cases nationally, she found that homicide cases were—in keeping with a national trend—less likely to be solved if the victims were Black. From 1994 to 2006, a suspect was arrested in only 38% of 2,677 killings of Black men. This trend has continued in recent years: in the LAPD’s 2017 data, only 53% of murders in the 77th Street Division were cleared, compared to 73% citywide.

Racial disparities in murder clearances are common in other major cities, as well. In New York City, 86 percent of 2013 homicides involving a white victim were solved, compared to 45 percent of those involving a Black victim, according to an analysis by the New York Daily News. In Chicago, 47% of murders with white victims were solved, compared to 22% for Black victims.

Leovy theorized that, by over-policing minor crimes (“broken windows”-style policing) and under-policing murders, LAPD and other police forces had communicated a disinterest in solving crimes that led to the loss of a Black life.

As we mentioned earlier, LAPD is the single largest line item in the city budget of Los Angeles.

For the 2010-2011 fiscal year, the LAPD’s budget was $2.08 billion. If the budget had simply grown with inflation, we would expect it to be about $2.46 billion today. Instead, it is more than $3 billion.

Salaries and overtime

The largest portion of the LAPD budget is salaries for sworn officers (not including civilian employees).

For the 2020-2021 budget year, the city’s approximately 10,000 sworn officers will receive $1.276 billion in salary, not including pensions and benefits. This figure was raised by $110 million from the previous year in a new labor deal, though the number of officers did not increase meaningfully.

Most of the increases in the LAPD's budget over the last decade have come from increases in salary and overtime, which their department has received above and beyond other city employees in LA.

• In 2010, the starting salary for an LAPD officer while in the Police Academy was $45,226.

• In 2015, that starting salary was $59,717.

• In 2019, it was $67,546.

An LAPD officer’s starting salary has increased by 49% since 2010—far beyond the 17.2% rate of inflation in that time period.

Based on analysis of city salaries in 2010 and 2019, the median salaries for assorted other city positions have seen lower rates of increase since 2010:

• Building Inspector: 9%

• Maintenance Laborer: 15%

• Library Assistant : 20%

• LA Zoo Animal Keeper: 25%

LAPD officers also receive large guaranteed increases to their salaries shortly after starting their careers. According to the LAPD, after six months in the Academy, officers receive a raise to a base salary of $71,242. One year later, they received a promotion to Police Officer II and a base salary of $76,379.

These LAPD officer salary figures do not include benefits or overtime—overtime in particular can dramatically increase an officer’s take-home pay.

The LAPD’s budgeted overtime for sworn officers in 2020 was $200 million, a $35 million increase from the previous year and far and away the largest amount ever allotted. As far back as 2008, the city was deliberating on how to rein in excessive overtime—instead, the budgeted figure has doubled since then.

Expensive equipment

Like many big-city police departments, LAPD allocates significant spending to its equipment and vehicle budget. But LAPD’s spending is notable in certain categories. The Air Support Division, for example, is equipped with 19 helicopters—more than any other American police department.

The black-and-white helicopters have become symbols of LA’s looming presence in low-income communities of color. According to City Hall representatives, at least two LAPD helicopters are in the air at all times.  The LAPD spends over $2 million dollars annually on helicopter fuel alone. These helicopters have also been increasingly wielded as a tool of predictive policing, circling over “high crime hotspots”—especially in communities of color.

Armed officers doing civilian jobs

We’ve outlined how LAPD spends much of its time responding to matters that don’t require an armed police officer (like traffic violations, noise complaints, and so on). But the call to remove police from tasks that could be handled by civilians is nothing new.

Los Angeles’s own City Controller (basically the city’s internal auditor) has been requesting for over 12 years that the Mayor and City Council divert resources for certain roles from sworn officers to civilians who could more “appropriately and less expensively” do the jobs. 

In 2008, Controller Laura Chick issued a report identifying “over 500 positions that could potentially be filled by civilians” that would free “sworn personnel to perform more traditional policing functions.”  She provided a three-year plan that would redeploy 400 officers from administrative roles to active duty, and chastised the city for employing armed officers who on average cost $30,000 more than civilians performing equivalent functions. The savings would have amounted to approximately $11.8 million a year.

In response, Mayor Villaraigosa acknowledged that “civilianization is a growing national best practice” but explained that growing the department by “1,000 officers” remained his administration’s top budgetary priority. At the time, the LAPD numbered between 9,533 to 9,751 sworn officers, but the city had set a goal of 10,000—for purely political reasons.

A former councilmember spoke on the subject to the LA Times:

“The 10,000 figure lacked any analytical underpinning but was “a nice round number,” Yaroslavsky chuckled in an interview. It also “takes the force from four digits to five digits.”

Later, in an audit from 2016, the City Controller Ron Galperin identified 460 jobs occupied by sworn officers that could be performed by civilians. The report notes that the problem had increased from the last such report from the City Controller in 2008, which identified over 400 such roles. The Controller went on to point out that this problem had been increasing for decades: “The LAPD has been grappling with the problem of using too many officers for civilian work since at least 1993, when the Police Commission and then Chief Willie Williams acknowledged that officers were being used to fill more than 300 jobs that could have been done by civilians.”

The Controller’s report found that there are tens of millions of dollars per year in inefficiencies due to using sworn officers to fill the 460 jobs that “should be done by civilians.” For example, the report notes that sworn officers, armed with guns, occupy positions including:

• public front desks

• equipment room management

• community/media relations

• consent decree auditing

• time keeping and sick duty coordination

• training coordination

• social media management: the Controller reports that the LAPD’s “Digital Media Unit” is made up of 13 officers who are assigned to operating the LAPD’s various social media accounts

Despite knowing for years that LAPD officers were being assigned to positions that could have been filled by civilians at a much lower cost, city elected officials did nothing about it. 

Rapidly increasing police budgets in LA are the product of a complex network of factors. But a major element driving these budget hikes is the LAPD’s union and political arm: the Los Angeles Police Protective League (LAPPL).

The LAPPL employs massive campaign spending and other tactics to lobby on behalf of the LAPD and protect its members against accountability. According to former City Controller Laura Chick, the LAPPL’s primary mandate is “to deliver lucrative contracts to their members and also to protect them when they do something wrong.”

The LAPPL spends big on city campaigns

Much of the LAPPL’s lobbying efforts are concentrated around elections for the offices of City Council, Mayor, and District Attorney.

Recently, the LAPPL has spent more than $1 million against District Attorney candidate George Gascon, who is challenging incumbent Jackie Lacey. There’s a lot at stake for police officers in District Attorney elections: the District Attorney’s Office is the primary agency that decides whether offices are charged with crimes in misconduct cases. Lacey has been under scrutiny for her track record of leniency toward officers: though law enforcement have killed more than 600 people during her tenure, many of them unarmed, she has not brought charges against an officer in a single one of these cases.

Using the power of unlimited PAC spending, the LAPPL has also spent $400,000 in support of City Council campaigns since 2017. So far, every Councilmember it backed during that time period has ended up winning. 

Legislative lobbying

LAPPL actively engages in local lawmaking: the organization spends significant resources lobbying elected officials and advocating for or against new legislation. One notable LAPPL legislative effort was 2017’s Charter Amendment C: a ballot initiative to change the LAPD’s disciplinary process. The change would allow officers accused of misconduct to choose an all-civilian Board of Rights (a three-person panel) to judge whether they should be fired or suspended, instead of a Board with two officers and one civilian.

Why would the LAPPL push for this change?

Because there is vast evidence that civilian members serving on Board of Rights panels are much more lenient toward officers than other officers in disciplinary matters. In an analysis of misconduct cases between 2011 and 2016, LA’s own Chief Legislative Analyst found that the civilian members of the Board of Rights had an overwhelming tendency to vote for more lenient outcomes for officers. 

Charter Amendment C was opposed by the ACLU, Black Lives Matter LA, the LA Times, the League of Women Voters, and many criminal justice reform organizations. Even the Chief of Police at the time, Charlie Beck, said that civilian panels hold officers less accountable and “the changes proposed in C would exacerbate that.” The LA Times Editorial Board referred to it as a “noxious sleight of hand.”

Nevertheless, the LAPPL managed to get the Mayor and every sitting Councilmember but one to endorse the amendment. The group also spent heavily to persuade voters. Charter Amendment C passed by ten points.

Recently, Chief Michel Moore said that an officer who he had recommended to be fired for a shooting had been allowed by a civilian Board of Rights to keep his job—a decision he implied would have been less likely to happen before Charter Amendment C.

Now, amidst widespread calls for transformative changes to public safety, the LAPPL has escalated their lobbying strategy to the federal level. According to congressional lobbying disclosure records filed in late June and early July of this year, the LAPPL has retained the services of the lobbying firm Vectis DC in order to influence Congress on the issue of police reform legislation.

The end result of the LAPPL’s aggressive lobbying is a culture of impunity for officers.

Between 2016 and 2018, only 4.5% of civilian complaints against officers were ruled in favor of civilians. And as we mentioned above, no officer has been charged with any crime for shooting and killing an unarmed person since District Attorney Jackie Lacey has been in office.

In just the last few years, there are a number of instances where officers appeared to have committed dangerous and fatal actions in the field but were not punished in any way, nor were any reforms implemented in the wake of the incidents.

• In 2015, Brendon Glenn, an unhoused, unarmed Black man, was shot and killed while lying on his stomach by an LAPD officer near the Venice boardwalk. The officer claimed he saw Glenn’s hand on another officer’s holster—but the killing was recorded on security video, which showed no such thing. In a virtually unprecedented move, Chief of Police Charlie Beck recommended that the officer be criminally charged. But after sitting on the case for three years, DA Jackie Lacey announced in 2018 that her office would not bring any charges. The officer resigned from the department in 2017. In explaining her decision, Lacey said that it was reasonable for the officer to have believed Glenn was reaching for his partner’s gun, and even if the officer made that judgment in error, “such a mistake would not be unreasonable under the law.”

• In 2015, Jamar Nicholson, a Black 15-year-old, was shot in the back by an LAPD officer while Nicholson was on his way to school with friends in Hyde Park. The officer said that he opened fire because one of the teens was holding what he believed to be a gun—it turned out to be a toy, and Nicholson was not holding it. The officers said they ordered the teens to drop the gun, which none of the teens claimed to have heard—and because the officers were in plainclothes, the teens didn’t understand them to be LAPD. In 2016, the LA Police Commission found the shooting to be “in policy.”

• In 2017, 20-year-old Eric Rivera was killed by two LAPD officers, who shot him 11 times and ran him over with their uncontrolled police cruiser. The officers said they believed Rivera was holding a gun—it turned out to be a water pistol. The officers claimed Rivera raised the gun in their direction, but their body-worn cameras were blocked and they did not turn on their cruiser’s dash camera, so no footage of Rivera was recorded before he was shot. The Los Angeles Board of Police Commissioners, the civilian oversight body of the department, unanimously found Rivera’s killing to have been “in policy.” Both officers are still employed by the LAPD.

• In 2018, while pursuing an armed suspect, two LAPD officers shot multiple rounds into the windows of a crowded Trader Joe’s in Silver Lake—killing Mely Corado, a store manager. At the time, Chief Michel Moore said that he saw nothing wrong with the tactics employed by the officers, and that they did “what they needed to do in order to defend the people of Los Angeles and defend the people in that store and defend themselves”—a striking statement given that the only person killed in the store that day was shot by an LAPD officer. No tactical reforms have been instituted in response to Mely Corado’s death, and the officers’ decisions were found to be “in policy.”

• In 2018, an off-duty LAPD officer was struck in the head by Kenneth French, a man with severe autism, while shopping at Costco in Corona. The officer shot and killed French, and also shot both of French’s parents. French’s mother went into a coma. His father lost a kidney. No charges were brought against the officer by the Riverside County DA, and while the shooting was found “out of policy” by LAPD, the officer remains employed by the department.

• In 2019, Victor Valencia, an unhoused Latinx man in Palms, was shot and killed by a team of LAPD officers while experiencing a mental health crisis. In their report, the officers said they observed Valencia holding what looked like a gun—it was later revealed to have been a bicycle part. No officers were reprimanded or held accountable in any way for Valencia’s death, and no policy has been changed in response.

This culture of impunity is encouraged, both tacitly and overtly, by LAPPL leadership. Craig Lally, the organization’s president, was one of 44 “problem officers” named by the Christopher Commission, a panel formed after the Rodney King beating in 1991. As of 2014, he kept an article referencing this fact framed in his office. Jamie McBride, a board member and frequent spokesperson for the LAPPL, has been involved in six shootings as an officer. After the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis, McBride made an approving post on Facebook about Daryl Gates, the LAPD Chief of Police who condoned police violence preceding and during the 1992 LA uprising. “The CHIEF!” he wrote. “Never sell out and back the troops!”

Seeming misconduct also goes unpunished at the LAPD because of entities with the department. The LAPD’s Public Relations division—a unit of 25 sworn officers that costs $3.29 million annually—has been accused of releasing inaccurate reports and biased information designed to justify police shootings and defame victims of police violence.

The lack of accountability within the LAPD also leads to the continuation of police tactics that have long been known to be extremely dangerous for residents—like high-speed pursuits. In 2015, an LA Times investigation found that LAPD pursuits between 2006 and 2014 resulted in 334 injuries to bystanders: one injury for every ten pursuits initiated by LAPD.

In 2017, a county-impaneled grand jury found these pursuits to be of questionable value in comparison to their cost: 67% of pursuits resulted in suspect apprehension, while 17% resulted in a “crash that could have resulted in injury or death.”

A local culture of police impunity isn’t the only thing helping officers avoid punishment for misconduct—federal law also plays a role. Civil suits against police officers and other government officials are subject to the “qualified immunity” defense—this means that even if a police officer violates someone’s rights, the case can be thrown out unless precedent can be drawn from a previous case that closely resembles the one being considered. Police officers can only be held accountable if they violate rights that are “clearly established” in light of existing case law.

For example, the officer who shot 15-year-old Jamar Nicholson in 2015 was sued in civil court by Nicholson’s family, but was found not guilty by an appeals court on the basis of qualified immunity, because there was not an analogous case that “clearly established” the plaintiff’s right.

LAPD misconduct and its disciplinary process will continue to be an issue of focus in the coming weeks—the LAPD is investigating 56 allegations of misconduct stemming from the Black Lives Matter protests alone. Half of those allegations involve improper use of force.

Beyond the violence, injury, and death that often results from police misconduct, there is also an enormous financial cost for Angelenos.

Despite how difficult it is to actually bring a civil suit against police officers and the qualified immunity defense, the sheer volume of misconduct incidents still leads to millions of dollars of damages being awarded to victims of LAPD violence, usually through settlements.

Though these liabilities are held against the police department or specific officers, misconduct settlements are paid out by the city and its taxpayers—they are not taken from the LAPD’s budget. The city generates funds to pay settlements through municipal bonds, which are loans taken out with interest to cover the legal payments. There’s even a specific city fund for this purpose: the Judgment Obligation Bonds Debt Service Fund.

From 2005 to 2018, the city paid out more than $190 million in police misconduct cases. A total of $50.9 million in bonds were issued to settle a federal case arising from uses of force against protesters on May 1, 2007. Payments continued until the 2019-20 fiscal year. An additional $20.5 million in bonds were issued as a result of several cases stemming from the Rampart scandal in the 1990s. The city’s “blue book” (p. 432) shows that between 2014 and 2019, LAPD’s overall liability claims amounted to over $218 million.

The scope of the problem is large enough to get discouraged. But our analysis of the many problems associated with LAPD—criminalization of poverty, racial discrimination, overspending city funds, unaccountability for misconduct, buying political influence, and more—also presents us with a roadmap for what needs to change and how to go about fundamentally reenvisioning public safety.

As activists, organizers, and victims of police violence and discrimination have been telling us for years, it’s not enough to pursue minor, piecemeal reforms of our current system. We need a truly transformed vision of public safety.

Two motions in front of the Council right now—exploring the removal of armed officers from nonviolent calls and from traffic enforcement, offer us a jumping-off point to bring us closer to that vision in Los Angeles. 

We often hear the term “public safety” used with regard to police work. But what does public safety really mean?

We asked community members, experts, and our own team members. Here’s what they said:

Public safety means:

• Everyone has access to real support in an emergency, whether it’s a domestic disturbance or a mental health crisis.

• People have stable housing.

• People have access to adequate physical and mental healthcare.

• People have a secure and consistent supply of food.

• Less crime, and crimes that are committed are solved at a high rate.

• Nobody is victimized for their age, color, ability, gender, or sexuality.

• Freedom from police brutality and killings.

• Feeling at peace in your city.

Police departments cannot meet these needs. They cannot solve social issues like mental health, food insecurity, or poverty. Our entire policing system is centered around fines, incarceration, and violence: all LAPD officers are trained in deadly force, even though over 90% of all Los Angeles police calls are for nonviolent situations. The vast majority of officers in America never even fire their weapons.

Today, residents are faced with an almost impossible choice: ignore any concerns they have for their safety, or call in a lethally-armed unit that can easily exacerbate an already bad situation into one that ends with incarceration, violence, or death.

What if we transformed our approach to public safety? What if we reallocated our resources away from a system that centers violence and criminalization, and toward a new kind of department?

Let’s talk about how LA could develop a new kind of public safety department to make all of our residents safer.

A department centered around addressing the day-to-day safety concerns of Angelenos—providing an unarmed, service-oriented response to the vast majority of issues Angelenos face, while also being equipped to respond to more serious crises.

A department with care and restorative justice rather than punishment and violence at its core.

A department that operates locally in neighborhoods, solicits constant input and hires from the community, while investing heavily in partnerships with individuals and organizations in the neighborhood.

By directly addressing physical and mental health, homelessness, and access to social services at the neighborhood level, the department can work to alleviate root causes of both suffering and crime. We can make Los Angeles safer by uplifting communities and by providing everyone with the resources they need to lead healthy and fulfilling lives.

Let’s start by talking about the kind of the city employees we want to be interfacing with the community, and the kind of work they could be doing.

As we hope we’ve established above, LAPD officers currently spend the majority of their time dealing with issues for which armed officers aren’t the solution. Things like:

• Homelessness

• Mental health crises

• Non-criminal complaints

• Interpersonal disputes

• Traffic enforcement and collisions

• Minor quality-of-life violations

• Clerical and managerial work

If we were to remove armed law enforcement from these and other non-violent situations, what kind of team would be best equipped to respond to them?

A public safety department could employ a large team of unarmed community safety advocates (CSAs), distributed around the city at the neighborhood level.

All CSAs would be trained in de-escalation, harm reduction, and trauma-informed care. They would be a visible presence in neighborhoods—and with an emphasis on hiring locally, advocates could serve the communities where they’re from.

While all would receive general training, groups of advocates would be tasked with specific areas of operation. When a call for services reaches a dispatcher, any complaint not involving an immediate threat of violence could be directed to a nearby community safety advocate for response. CSA teams would handle general concerns such as noise complaints, disturbances of the peace, and issues related to homelessness, as well as de-escalating more serious crises.

As members of the communities they serve, CSAs would be educated on and connected to the resources available in their neighborhoods. When they encounter someone in need of services, or are simply asked by someone for help, they would be well equipped to connect the person in need with the appropriate resource.

This strategy of employing unarmed civilian workers to respond to such situations is common around the world, including the U.K., Belgium, France, and the Netherlands.

The CSAs not assigned to outreach or service provision could also be able to issue official warnings and fines when appropriate. Rather than fixed fines that disproportionately punish low-income Angelenos—for whom a parking ticket can lead to a vehicle impounding or even arrest—Angelenos who are unable to pay could redeem fines through community service and restorative justice models.

Advocates could also be trained specifically to mediate threatening situations, such as intimate partner and interpersonal violence cases, through violence interruption, prevention and de-escalation—while connecting survivors with the appropriate resources in the neighborhood. 

How would these CSAs be deployed? Here are a few examples:

Neighborhood outreach and homelessness response

It’s of vital importance that public safety workers be embedded in neighborhoods—conducting outreach on regular routes in their area, while also being available to answer concerns of residents at a central location in the community.

At these hub locations, CSAs could both provide services and go out into neighborhoods, engaging with residents—including unhoused neighbors, for whom consistent outreach is one of the most effective paths into housing, treatment, and other forms of care.

As we’ve written about in our Housing and Homelessness Platform, a network of neighborhood-based Community Access Centers across Los Angeles could function as these hubs for services, focused on meeting the fundamental needs of residents and providing a variety of drop-in offerings.

In our vision for homelessness response, access centers could be a home base for homeless outreach workers in each neighborhood, giving workers an opportunity to respond to the specific needs of unhoused or housing insecure residents of each area. Running these centers through a public safety department would be a natural means to connect communities with needed resources, and allow CSAs a space in which to operate and meet with Angelenos.

These access centers could also partner with other organizations and levels of government to provide service programs at their location, addressing a wide range of needs to help communities feel safer:

• Physical health

• Mental health and wellbeing

• Violence survivor support 

• Drug treatment and harm reduction

• After school programming 

• Food security

• Legal assistance

• Disaster preparedness and response 

In partnership with nonprofits and County agencies, Community Access Center programs could include meal services and distribution to those experiencing food insecurity, legal assistance for those navigating destabilizing situations such as evictions and criminalization, and case management for those with housing and resource needs.

Indeed, these centers would provide a doorway to services provided by the County, many of which are currently very challenging to obtain. There could be mental health workers from the Department of Mental Health available, as well as medical staff to provide first aid to those who might not otherwise be able to afford it. Centers could also serve neighbors struggling with addiction issues, treating drug use as a health issue rather than a criminal one and focusing efforts on harm reduction and education – an approach which has been proven to decrease drug usage, the spread of disease, and drug overdoses.

Community Access Centers could also serve as hubs for community resilience and disaster preparedness. These centers can work with the Department of Emergency Management to prepare for disasters by engaging in outreach, as well as by providing supply storage and distribution. The Access Centers could offer space for RYLAN workshops and other emergency preparedness programs.

Violence interruption and gang intervention 

While our current system emphasizes a response to violence, CSAs could be responsible for implementing evidence-based approaches that can actually prevent violence from happening in the first place.

The department could follow in the footsteps of initiatives like Chicago’s Cure Violence program, an example of a demonstrably effective violence and homicide prevention strategy. The program was also effective at gang reduction and intervention. Developed by an epidemiologist, the program approaches violence similar to how doctors approach a contagious disease: interrupting the spread of violence through social networks.

Cure Violence trains outreach workers to be violence interrupters and gang interventionists who identify those most likely to be involved in violence and redirect them to nonviolent options. Most violent crime occurs within narrow social networks, so engaging with a few people can have an impact on many. The program has been proven effective and replicated nationally and internationally. 

The Cure Violence model also functions on its ability to reduce violent crime by investing in a specific group of community members, trusted community members, potentially former gang members themselves, who counsel individuals directly, both in group programs and on a one-on-one basis. Investing in this model could both create job opportunities for Angelenos and reduce crime simultaneously.

In Los Angeles, we already have similar programs like the H.E.L.P.E.R. Foundation, a community intervention aimed to combat gang-related violence. Others, like Aquil Basheer and his Professional Community Intervention Training Institute, train new gang interventionists to work in their own communities. But these programs are persistently underfunded, and rely on a handful of extraordinary outreach workers that are often working around the clock to meet the needs of the community, including helping people access their basic needs during COVID and keeping residents safe from infection during the pandemic.

By bringing these initiatives under a city public safety department, these programs could finally have the support, staffing, and funding needed to effectively serve the communities of Los Angeles. 

Mobile Crisis Intervention Services

CSAs could also staff Mobile Crisis Intervention Services (MCIS) Teams, addressing crisis calls for service  physical, behavioral, and mental health issues.

These teams can be deployed across the city adopting and expanding upon the effective models of Eugene Oregon’s CAHOOTS and Denver Colorado’s STAR program. Crisis vans staffed by emergency medical technicians and experienced crisis responders have proven to be extremely effective at responding to crises related to behavioral health, intimate partner violence, sexual assault, suicide risk, drug overdose, and mental health.

MCIS teams cost fractions compared to police teams and respond to a significant number of calls previously handled by law enforcement. In Eugene, CAHOOTS costs approximately 1% of the police budget but responds to around 17% of the emergency calls received. 

It's also important to note that MCIS teams, without armed law enforcement, can be more efficient at responding to community problems. In 2018, while operating in the town of Springfield, Oregon, a single CAHOOTS MCIS Unit responded to over 5,000 calls for a population of 63,000. Compare this to the LAPD SMART program in which mental health professionals are dispatched alongside police officers: in 2015, 16 SMART units responded to a total of 4,700 calls for a population of 4 million.

Not only did the single CAHOOTS unit respond to more calls than all 16 of the LAPD teams combined, they actually received significantly more requests per capita than the police—67 times more. This disparity is likely due to the fact that people are often afraid or hesitant to bring police and lethal force into a crisis situation. For example, one study found that the greatest barriers for Latinx communities in calling 911 when someone was experiencing a heart attack was “fear of becoming involved because of law enforcement.”

MCIS teams also help to respond to the occurrence and impact of intimate partner and sexual violence. LAPD’s existing response to these crimes most often occurs after the incident has taken place—leaving survivors with LAPD officers as a primary resource for support. 

Armed police officers are not usually well-equipped to support survivors, and can even put them at risk for arrest or further retaliatory consequence by way of removing a survivor's choice of whether or not to press charges on an abuser, without affording them future protections. LAPD also currently relies on partnership with skilled professionals to provide trauma-informed, culturally appropriate support—however, these partnerships can fall short, as many survivors avoid reporting incidents to authorities and 80% of survivors report being afraid to contact the police.

Unarmed traffic enforcement

Community Safety Advocates would be deployed for traffic enforcement in lieu of armed officers. 

Across the country, traffic stops are the most frequent contacts between residents and the police. As discussed in the introduction to this document, the City Council is already considering a motion that would remove armed officers from traffic enforcement. According to the motion currently in front of the City Council, law enforcement agencies have “long used minor traffic infractions as a pretext for harassing vulnerable road users and profiling people of color.” Minor traffic violations can also sometimes end in violence and death at the hands of police. 

Most of the work police officers handle with regards to traffic management and traffic collisions can and should be handled by civilians not wielding lethal force.

Divorcing traffic enforcement and safety work from policing already exists on highways in the United Kingdom and closer to home in New Orleans. In the former, unarmed Highways England responders handle all road safety and traffic responsibilities on many of the nations’ highways while leaving any citation-writing to unarmed law enforcement. In the latter, the New Orleans Police Department hires independent report takers to handle the post-accident work we currently leave to armed LAPD officers.

After-school and summer programming

One positive way a public safety department could reduce crime in neighborhoods would be to invest in youth programming and development—creating safe and stable environments for young Angelenos to grow, learn, and connect with others. Such programming and community support has also been shown to reduce youth involvement in gangs.

These programs, operating out of community access centers, could provide opportunities for the youth of Los Angeles to receive homework help, receive tutoring outside of the classroom, connect with others from their community, and participate in outdoor sports and activities.

Beyond the immediate benefit these programs would provide to young people, they would also support the vast number of parents who struggle to balance work-life and childcare, as well as those who simply cannot afford to pay for supplemental educational programming.

Services like these would also create opportunities for trained counselors, teachers, and volunteers to engage with young Angelenos and provide the emotional and developmental support that is so necessary at transitional ages. 

Beyond the implementation of community safety advocates, there are other methods we can pursue to funnel resources from criminalization to systems of care:

Here’s an important question when thinking about the need for reimagining community safety: do we need to be classifying everything as a crime?

There are several city codes and rules that target disenfranchised groups for arrest. As described earlier, a body of laws criminalizes many aspects of being homeless, such as codes that prohibit sitting or sleeping on the street or sleeping in your car across most of the city. Still more laws have criminalized street vending, a form of economic activity primarily practiced by older, immigrant women. 

Decriminalization is the process of lessening criminal penalties related to certain acts, and is often aimed at removing laws used to unjustly target specific groups. Decriminalization is not a radical or new idea. In our lifetimes, many things have been decriminalized and eventually legalized—including marijuana possesion, abortion, and homosexuality.

One straightforward policy that would dramatically reduce arrests would be for the city of LA to decriminalize open containers. Historically, open container laws disproportionately target Black and Latinx communities as well as the unhoused. It’s well known that people from all backgrounds drink outdoors, whether it be groups of young people picnicking with rosé or unhoused people drinking beer at a park. Both are illegal, but the latter case is far more strictly enforced.

As we mentioned earlier, drinking in public is the single highest category of arrests by the LAPD in recent years, and our city has at least 29,000 people living outdoors on any given night. In cities like New York, instead of being arrested for public intoxication, individuals are cited and sent off with a warning.

Advocates like the Sex Workers Outreach Project have also been calling for the decriminalization of sex work. In Los Angeles, crimininlization of sex work disproportionately impacts women of color, with Black women accounting for 65% of arrests despite representing 9% of the population.

These criminalization efforts often can lead to incarcerating survivors or independent sex workers, while making litte progress in reducing human trafficking. According to a study by Sex Workers Project, women and transgender women experience high rates of violence while working, yet are criminalized and can actually experience violence and sexual assault at the hands of police.

Portugal is a significant case study for how decriminalization actually increased public safety. In 2001, the country decriminalized all drug use and began treating the subject as a health issue, not a criminal one. In doing so, the government’s focus shifted from law enforcement to harm reduction. Needle exchanges, which are persistently underfunded in the U.S., significantly reduced the spread of infectious diseases such as HIV, and addiction services offering safer alternatives to dangerous opioids led to dramatic decreases in heroin addiction and overdoses. 

When we talk about transforming our public safety system, many people ask about violent crime response: “What if someone breaks into my house with a gun? Who shows up when I call 911?”

As we established in Part I, police officers spend only a small fraction of their time responding to violent crime. It is the exception, not the norm. But violent crime does exist, and Angelenos need a unit of the public safety department that can keep them safe in situations where they’re faced with an immediate threat.

Members of a violent crime response unit, a team of specialist firearms officers, would not be assigned to active patrol but would be stationed around the city, and only called to action in case of calls for service which involve violence – much like how the fire department operates today.

By maintaining a smaller force of specialist firearms officers who only respond to violent threats, we can actually reduce response times for violent crime and enhance training. Right now, officers are stretched thin across hundreds of daily responsibilities, and their preparation for violent crises is muddled by the many other tasks they’re assigned to every day. A much smaller, specialized armed force would keep officers better rested and more attentive to the unique task of violent crisis response.

Some of the LAPD’s current specialized armed units, like SWAT, have been accused of encouraging excessive and lethal force instead of de-escalation. Violent crime response units within a public safety department must face significantly greater oversight and accountability to ensure that such issues are not recreated. But embedding such a unit within a department predicated on conflict mediation and service provision could also help lead a cultural shift among armed officers.

Community Safety Advocates could play a significant role in reducing violence before it happens in the first place, but could also support firearms teams by sharing their community knowledge and insight on situations.

Investigative units for homicides, sex trafficking, and other crimes would play an important role in any public safety department. By shifting resources away from broken windows policing, we could better prioritize effective investigations and work to improve crime solving rates overall—especially in communities of color, where clearance rates have been reported to be far lower than in other neighborhoods. 

Even if we significantly decrease the number of armed officers in LA, we’ll still need to dramatically change the culture of impunity under which public safety officers of the city currently operate.

Some possible measures to increase accountability include:

• Altering the disciplinary system for public safety officers—both armed and unarmed—by removing the disciplinary lenience that currently exists institutionally, such as the effects of Charter Amendment C, which favor LAPD officers in misconduct investigations.

• Establishing a culture at City Hall where independent spending from law enforcement unions is denounced.

• Taking settlements arising from public safety misconduct out of the department's budget rather than the city’s discretionary fund.

Here are a few guiding principles for a new public safety department, and the work of all the city employees who serve it:

Hiring from the community

For all of the neighborhood programs listed above, the public safety department would seek to hire as much as possible from within the community being served.

From after-school tutors to CSAs to mental health responders, each of these jobs would pay a fair, living wage with all of the union protection and benefits that come with city jobs—providing stability and economic opportunity for residents and a much-needed source of new jobs to help us navigate our way out of our unemployment crisis.

For the roles that require additional training or education, the city could provide scholarships or grants so Angelenos could have an opportunity to improve both themselves and their community.

Partnering with the community

For each area of focus within a city public safety department, the department would always seek to empower and partner with existing organizations and nonprofits before creating new programs.

Community members know their neighborhood better than anyone else, and the department should work to incorporate this base of knowledge whenever possible. Beyond simply understanding the needs of the community, established programs also often already benefit from the participation and trust of their communities—a dynamic that could otherwise take years to develop. 

There are many incredible coalitions, nonprofits, and individuals across LA who work tirelessly to meet the needs of their neighbors. A public safety department could provide resources, staffing, and investment to help support and expand these grassroots initiatives. In Part III, we highlight just a handful of organizations that should be uplifted. 

Connecting with the community

The direction of influence for a public safety department’s neighborhood programming would always be from the ground up. The department would hold regular open meetings to discuss the programs available, and solicit feedback for the best allocation of resources. This process could also promote a culture of accountability within the department.

Individuals and organizations would be encouraged to identify opportunities and develop ideas for new and additional programming.

It’s not always easy for the city of LA to connect with its own neighborhoods. Many Los Angeles residents don’t have access to the Internet, and we’re home to over 180 different languages. 

Despite this challenge, it is imperative that any public safety department work actively and constantly to conduct outreach to the communities it serves—both to encourage and solicit input as well as to share what resources are available.

Outreach would be one of the primary functions of the public safety department, and is an additional opportunity for hiring residents from the community to act as representatives and liaisons. 

Services first, always

The fundamental role of a public safety department would always be to serve and uplift our local communities. These neighborhoods are the foundation for our city as a whole, and the department would strive to provide local, community-informed care in a way that is both representative of and responsive to those neighborhoods.

Instead of attempting to maximize the number of tickets issued or arrests made, the department would work to maximize the number of resident issues addressed, the number of treatments and services delivered, and the number of Angelenos connected to resources and opportunities.

Public safety is about much more than just transforming our policing system.

Neighborhoods with more concentrated disadvantage tend to experience higher levels of violent crime. Crime, therefore, is largely the result of a deep and perpetual divide in access and resources—a divide that is extremely profound in Los Angeles, one of the most economically segregated places in the country.

Any true transformation of public safety in LA must consider the roots of these inequities, and make major investments in resources outside of traditional public safety programs that can be even more effective at reducing crime.

Our city has a large menu of evidence-based practices, innovative policies, and community-integrated programs at its disposal. We can look both outward to other cities for solutions, uplift and invest in local programs that have been working towards these goals for years, and foster the creation of new organizations—research shows that each new nonprofit added in a community has an effect on reducing crime.

In this section, we’ll go through some of the things outside that LA could invest in that would promote equity, resilience and safety all at once.

We’ll also list some of the organizations that are doing this work in LA right now.

Physical, mental, and behavioral health are, of course, essential to the well-being of any individual. Unfortunately, in Los Angeles—like in many parts of the country—access to such resources is heavily tied to income.

Low-income residents in Los Angeles face a devastating lack of health resources. A study of LA County health services highlights the disparity between low-income regions such as South LA and high income regions like West LA.

Compared to West LA and adjusting for population size, the study found that South LA has:

• 5.6% the number of pediatricians per child

• More than double the rate of uninsured individuals

• About one third the number of acute care hospitals per capita

• One fifth the number of school-based health centers per capita

In addition to being fundamental to individual and community safety, access to healthcare can also dramatically reduce both violent and financially-motivated crime.

Beyond physical health, investing in mental and behavioral health has a direct impact on a communities’ experience of crime. For example, a study published in the Journal of Urban Economics found that for each additional drug treatment center in a given county, the social costs of crime were reduced by $4.2 million a year, with the treatment services costing only about $1.1 million a year. Embracing a health-focused approach to substance abuse could provide immense social and fiscal benefit.

Mental health treatment further offsets crime and increases public safety. People with untreated mental health issues are consistently at a greater risk of involvement in the criminal justice system than the general population. The three largest psychiatric facilities in the U.S. are jails. LA’s jail is one of them. 

Generally, public health and mental health care in LA is overseen by the County’s Department of Health and Department of Mental Health, but the city can help fund and uplift the many great nonprofit organizations that provide affordable health care locally. 

Here are some organizations that address physical, mental, and behavioral health in LA:

• Venice Family Clinic

• Saban Medical Center

• Los Angeles LGBT Center

• Alcott Center

• Step Up on Second

Investing in an effective Mobile Crisis Intervention Service that responds to occurences of intimate partner, gendered and sexual violence would be a staggering improvement to the system that currently exists. In addition, we must invest in programs and models that provide specialized resources to survivors, interrupt the cycles of violence, and push for systemic policy change.

While providing counseling and support to survivors is incredibly important, recent research has pointed to the facts that resources like housing, employment, and cash are also critical in supporting survivors in exiting violent relationships and other exploitative situations like sex trafficking. 

The work of breaking the cycle of interpersonal violence must also happen upstream: 

• Providing survivors of childhood violence with counseling. 

• Teaching conflict resolution and healthy relationship skills within schools and youth programming. 

• Assisting communities to build out culturally responsive tools that help individuals regulate emotions and diffuse anger. 

• Breaking social and behavioral norms through awareness and policy advocacy.

Here are some organizations that are leaders in the work of ending intimate partner, gendered, and sexual violence in LA:

• Peace Over Violence

• East Los Angeles Women’s Center

• Jenesse Center

• Downtown Women’s Center

One of the most important ways to reduce crime and victimization—as well as to promote mental health and overall well being—is to ensure that all Angelenos have safe and stable housing. 

Although overall crime in Los Angeles continues to drop, the number of reported crimes where people experiencing homelessness were victims increased 26% from 2018 to 2019. Over 44% of women experiencing homelessness in Skid Row had experienced violence in the last year.

As the rest of our city becomes safer, it becomes less safe for the most vulnerable. 

Providing safe and stable housing to persons experiencing homelessness will drastically increase community safety. Research shows that transitioning from homelessness into stable housing has an immense impact on an individual’s increased sense of safety and control in their lives, and simply the expectation of transitioning from homelessness to Permanent Supportive Housing can increase sense of security.

The simple provision of housing serves as a form of protection from violent victimization, experiences of partner violence, and even violence perpetration. Stable housing also reduces drug use, promotes mental health, and community integration. The philosophy behind “housing first”, which our state has adopted as a requirement for addressing homelessness, is based on these connections.

Investing in housing is investing in safety. 

Despite some investments brought by Measure HHH and hard work on the ground, our current homelessness response cannot keep up with the current and ongoing needs. Reallocating funding that would be spent on criminalization towards housing solutions, direct services, prevention (such as rent forgiveness), and a robust system response would immensely contribute to a safer Los Angeles.

We lay out a number of strategies toward expanding housing for people experiencing homelessness in my Housing and Homelessness platform here.

Here are some local organizations working to build and manage deeply affordable housing for people who are homeless:

• Los Angeles Family Housing

• People Assisting the Homeless (PATH)

• Venice Community Housing

• Flyaway Homes

• A Community of Friends

• Esperanza Community Housing

• LISC LA

Food insecurity is rampant in Los Angeles. An estimated 2 million people in Los Angeles County live with food insecurity—that means 1 in 5 people in this community may not know where their next meal is coming from.

Hunger greatly damages physical and mental health, as well as school performance. From Feeding America: “Mothers with school-aged children who face severe hunger are 56.2% more likely to have PTSD and 53.1% more likely to have severe depression.”

Food insecurity also leads to crimes of desperation, as people are forced into the horrible position of choosing between stealing or starving. It’s impossible to be safe if you don’t have food to eat. A public safety department working as a clearinghouse could connect people with available food resources and supplement those resources if needed.

Here are some local organizations working to feed food-insecure Angelenos:

• Polo’s Pantry

• LA Regional Food Bank

• Hollywood Food Coalition

• LA Food Policy Council

• Food On Foot

In Los Angeles, despite having higher minimum wages than other cities, a person has to work 79 hours a week at minimum wage to afford the median listed apartment.

Job opportunity is closely linked to neighborhood-level property crime. These factors are further compounded by the structural racism that has existed in our city for far too long.

Another product of low economic opportunity in neighborhoods is increased gang violence. Gangs have frequently been documented as an economic entity in low-income communities, and most frequently emerge in neighborhoods that are lacking or are limited in supportive services.

We don’t have to look far to find solutions for this issue: there are several models that already exist in Los Angeles. One of the most prominent is Homeboy Industries, founded as a nonprofit employment referral center in 1988. Its founder, Father Greg Boyle, believes that to eliminate gang violence, organizations need to address the root cause of gangs—the lack of economic opportunities.

Homeboy’s slogan is “nothing stops a bullet like a job.” In over 30 years of operation, they’ve employed formerly gang involved and incarcerated Angelenos and provided additional supports like counseling, case management, education, substance use support, legal services and more. Homeboy is known as a leader in gang violence intervention, rehabilitation, and reentry—their most recent reports show a 64% reduction in recidivism and 22% reduction in substance use.

In 2011, Homeboy Electronics Recycling was launched, an award-winning social enterprise. Their mission is to provide customers with the highest quality electronics reuse and recycling solutions while employing people who face systemic barriers to work. Homeboy successfully combines green workforce and environmental justice while providing quality job opportunities to those that are formerly incarcerated.

Here are some other local organizations working in restorative employment and job training:

• Coalition for Responsible Community Development

• Two Wings

• Chrysalis

• YouthBuild

Another way for cities to directly address issues of poverty is through cash transfer programs (CTP)—programs where cash is directly provided to program participants.

Cash transfer programs have been implemented across the world to promote community wellbeing, creating positive outcomes in areas such as poverty, education, health, and nutrition. They also can have effects on reducing minor crimes and drug dealing activities among youth—even relatively small cash infusions of $1000 can prevent homelessness for up to two years. Access to flexible cash has the capability to reduce the occurrence of intimate partner violence. A recent report found almost all survivors of violence experience economic exploitation and economic restriction. On average, only $730 was necessary for them to reach immediate safety.  

Cash transfer programs are a flexible, timely, and cost-effective form of assistance that value a participant’s freedom to define what they need the most. Advocates for CTPs highlight that the programs utilize an anti-oppressive lens rooted in autonomy, voice and trust. 

Despite success internationally, America has been hesitant to implement CTPs domestically, though programs are starting to gain traction. In 2019, the City of Stockton, CA, launched the Stockton Economic Empowerment Demonstration (SEED) program—the country’s first municipally endorsed CTP to address poverty and inequality. The program provides a select group of residents (at or below a household median income of $46,000) with $500 a month for up to 18 months, with no other requirements for participation.

Since the COVID-19 pandemic, cash transfer programs have developed even more momentum nationwide—including in Los Angeles. Last month, LA’s Mayor joined 17 other cities led by Stockton’s Mayor Tubbs in coalition to bring cash transfer pilot programs to their communities.

It is critical to invest in the next generation of residents through meeting their need for education and social development. Better educational programs for youth, especially in early childhood, have been proven to reduce crime both at young ages and later in life.

Though the Los Angeles Unified School District oversees education for young Angelenos, the City can supplement its programs and increase flexibility for working parents by investing in afterschool activities, tutoring opportunities, and affordable daycare/preschool options. 

The city can also uplift and invest in community models that address the needs of young people. One great example is the Garage Board Shop in Boyle Heights—a nonprofit community youth center within a skateboard shop. The program aims to support youth in the neighborhood by creating a safe, fun space for school-age youth to come and do homework. Completed homework and report cards can then be traded for skateboards. 

Programs that equip teachers and administrators with the ability to identify and respond to students suffering from trauma can also significantly decrease disciplinary incidents and boost academic performance. Examples of these models in action include the New Orleans Trauma-Informed Schools Learning Collaborative and the UCSF Hearts program in San Francisco.

Chicago’s Safe Passage programs have been shown to be effective in reducing violence amongst school-aged children. Enlisting community members rather than police, Safe Passage stations paid workers along routes to and from school to de-escalate conflict and provide security for kids. Safe Passage workers are sometimes even asked to visit schools to help mediate conflicts.

Following the successes in Chicago, cities such as Newark and Seattle have implemented programs of their own. Several communities in Los Angeles have piloted Safe Passages programs, though most aren’t adequately funded. Investment from the city would go a very long way toward building out safe routes to school for kids.

While the city of Los Angeles has immense power in contributing to a reimagined public safety, collaboration with other government structures—especially LA County—is an essential part of improving public safety and building resilient communities.

As a city, we can support, pressure, and hold accountable our County partners to:

• Decarcerate and invest in restorative justice systems

• Reform juvenile systems, including child welfare and juvenile justice

• Expand and eliminate barriers to benefits (through the Department of Public Social Services)

• Increase health (through the Department of Public Health) and wellness (through the Department of Mental Health and the Department of Health Services)

Some of this work would be addressed with the successful passage of the Reimagine LA County initiative on the November ballot, which would permanently shift 10% of County unrestricted funding away from law enforcement and toward social services.

We realize that transformative change to public safety—in Los Angeles and across the country—is difficult to imagine for many. We’ve spent more than a century with armed police patrols as the most visible manifestation of our city governments. None of us who are alive today know a Los Angeles where police aren’t our primary solution to public safety. And as with any movement for change, there are people afraid of what we could lose in the process.

But let’s imagine what we could build.

• We can address poverty with services instead of criminalization.

• We can reduce homelessness with more outreach and expanded services.

• We can respond to nonviolent crises with civilians trained in mediation, de-escalation, and mental health.

• We can retain and improve our ability to respond to violent threats.

• We can spend our city budget more efficiently.

• We can invest in systems of care and compassion for every aspect of public safety.

It will take work, and it will take all of us—all of our ideas and our energy and our patience. But we can build an LA where many more people feel safer than they do now, while addressing poverty and racism at the same time.

If LA were to take concrete steps toward moving resources from criminalization and into care, we wouldn’t be alone: we’d be part of a national movement.

Seattle recently reduced its police budget by 14%. Austin cut theirs by about 33%, mostly by redistributing police responsibilities to unarmed city employees. Minneapolis is in the process of transforming its approach to public safety entirely. Reallocating resources this way would bring American cities in line with major cities around the world, where law enforcement takes up a much smaller proportion of city budgets.

For generations, we’ve responded to poverty in Los Angeles with punishment. We’ve concentrated policing in Black and Latinx communities, and we’ve been told to accept the deaths of our neighbors as the cost of public safety. Is this the only system we’re capable of imagining? Or can we do better?

We believe we can.

Let’s build something new. Let’s spend our city’s resources on evidence-based solutions for reducing crime. Let’s follow the leads of Black organizers and prioritize services for low-income communities, undoing the harm of centuries of racist policies.

Let’s work together, with energy and fierce love, to create a system of public safety that works for everyone.