LOS ANGELES — On Monday, after the Los Angeles Police Department spent days violently attacking people protesting police brutality and racism, the City Council appeared set to allow a new budget — which would allocate nearly 54% of the city’s discretionary spending to the LAPD — to go into effect.

Organizers from Black Lives Matter, the activist movement best known for protesting police officers who kill Black people, worked for more than a month with a coalition of activists in Los Angeles to fight the budget proposed by Mayor Eric Garcetti, which included union-negotiated $41 million in bonuses for officers with college degrees.

Black Lives Matter has been at the center of nationwide protests sparked by the death of George Floyd, a 46-year-old Black man killed last week by a Minneapolis police officer who knelt on his neck for nearly nine minutes, even as he pleaded that he could not breathe.

But Black Lives Matter’s leadership in fighting Los Angeles’s budget is indicative of the more tedious but equally important political organizing work the group has been doing for nearly seven years — things like community education, pushing state legislation to make records of police misconduct public, mobilizing against prosecutors who fail to hold cops accountable and lobbying school boards to end racist “random search” practices.

Black Lives Matter activists asked Los Angeles County District Attorney Jackie Lacey for meetings and delivered petitions and letters to her office.

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