Demand LA City fund unarmed crisis response services!
It’s our last chance to influence the 2024-2025 LA City budget! City Council is making a last set of revisions this week – and we need them to step up and fund community safety initiatives like unarmed crisis response services.
It’s our last chance to influence the LA City's 2024-2025! City Council is making one last set of revisions this week – and we need Councilmembers to step up and fund community safety initiatives like unarmed crisis response. Despite a year of working with council offices, we’re not certain that council will include $4.5 million for unarmed crisis response – less than 0.1% of the budget.
To make sure the city does the right thing, it's critical that YOU take action by filling out the form below to send a message to your councilmember.
When you’re done, take more actions using our social media toolkit here.
And join us Wednesday, May 22 at 8:30 am for a press conference and rally the South Lawn of Los Angeles City Hall!
Want to learn more about the details of this work? Keep reading below the form.
At LA Forward, we’ve been organizing for the last year around comprehensive and accessible unarmed crisis response for LA City residents across the city. While our city budget infamously invests in LAPD, it’s abundantly clear that Angelenos are seeking alternatives to armed policing as forms of creating and maintaining public safety. As such, LA Forward’s Unarmed Crisis Response working group is interested in:
Who residents can call when they are experiencing or witnessing immediate crisis
What unarmed people/services are deployed as a result of that call, and
The quality of those unarmed people/services in addressing the impetus for the call
In Mayor Bass’ proposed 2024-2025 budget, the Mayor does not increase funds to expand, evaluate, or centralize dispatch for the city’s emerging set of unarmed crisis response services. The budget proposes to carry over remaining unappropriated funds from last budget year ($13.2 million) into this upcoming budget year. Some of this can be used to ensure that current programs – CIRCLE and UMCR most notable among them – continue their work this upcoming year.
At this juncture in its commitment to unarmed crisis response, we are asking LA City to budget:
$2.5 million to begin centralizing dispatch for emergency management/crisis service, so that residents can actually access unarmed crisis response services through 911 call operators and emergency responders; and
$2 million to evaluate all current unarmed crisis response services, which (at the moment) serve different needs, populations, and geographies, and operate with different practices and systems; data is currently not being collected across these services in a way that would help the city make decisions about the quality and efficacy of services being offered
We are asking for a total of $4.5 million to move both of these initiatives forward. Yes, investing just $4.5 million – less than 0.03% of the city’s total budget – in these items would enable our city to accelerate its commitment to alternatives to policing. While we appreciate $13.2 million in roll-overs from 2023-2024 budget, we need to see this growth of our city’s commitment to comprehensive and accessible unarmed crisis response – not stagnation. $4.5 million would represent a down payment toward building a comprehensive unarmed crisis response system for our city — a system that centralizes dispatch so that residents can get the help they need as quickly as possible, and a system that is grounded in quality services that we know through evaluation really helps people.