Major cities like Los Angeles and New York City have taken steps to reduce the budgets of their police departments – and in Minneapolis, where George Floyd was murdered last month, the City Council announced plans to completely dismantle the city’s police department.
The call has also gained momentum in Oakland, where a campaign led by the Anti-Police Terror Project (APTP) is calling for a reduction of the Oakland Police Department’s budget by $150 million – or 50%.
“It’s quite simple: the way to reduce police violence is to reduce the scope, size, and role of police in our communities,” activists with the Movement for Black Lives, the coalition of groups behind the national campaign, wrote in an op-ed last week.
Over the last two decades, activists say, the police department’s budget has doubled despite the fact that crime rates decreased in that time.
Meanwhile, the police department’s current budget of $330 million is greater than the amount of money the city is spending on the departments of human services, transportation, housing and community development, libraries, parks, recreation, and youth development, economic and workplace development, and race and equity combined.
