RICHMOND — The city is poised to reduce its police budget by $3 million and invest that money in creating a non-police crisis community response team, add funding to homeless services and youth programs and expand its violence prevention office.
In a contentious meeting, a majority of the City Council voted Tuesday to have staff allott $6.83 million next year for those programs and services, combining cuts to the police department and vehicle purchasing budgets as well as excess funding left from this year.
It’s a move that proponents see as an investment in the community and an effort to stabilize people with services to help them access housing, mental health support, jobs and other resources. That, advocates say, will increase public safety.
Councilmember Melvin Willis noted that residents have compared recent spikes in crime to those around 2009 and in the 1990s.
“What I’m seeing as a commonality is financial crisis — people struggling to make ends meet,” Willis said. He believes these investments in social services will help.
Councilmembers Claudia Jimenez, Eduardo Martinez and Gayle McLaughlin agreed, all signaling their support for one of six funding options presented to them by city staff to incorporate into the budget, which needs to be finalized by the end of June.
City staff brought the options to the council after weeks of debate about how to incorporate recommendations by the city’s Reimagining Public Safety Community Task Force, a group that has convened over the last eight months to look into how the city spends on public safety and what can be changed.
Last month, that task force recommended the city cut $10.3 million — roughly 15% — of the police budget and divert the funds to the programming and non-police response units. While a majority of the City Council expressed support for that, city staff urged that it was not feasible to cut that much, and instead provided multiple options that the council could take to reinvest police dollars into other services.
The option decided by the council on Tuesday will provide $1 million to create a Community Crisis Response Program that would dispatch medics and mental health specialists to behavioral health crises and substance use calls instead of police.
Similar programs have been run in cities like Eugene, Ore., and the idea has gained steam recently in the Bay Area, particularly in the wake of high profile police killings of people experiencing mental health crises. Oakland’s City Council earlier this year approved a pilot program to start a crisis response unit that would be housed in the fire department and staffed by specialists, and city councilmembers are advocating to beef up that program in its next budget cycle. And Contra Costa County is working with local cities to beef up its own behavioral health response service.
The funding plan selected by the council also gives $1.98 million to Richmond’s YouthWorks program, a city program to give teenagers and young adults job training and academic support that in 2020 had about 175 people taking part and a budget of $375,000. The plan will add $1.8 million to beef up services for people struggling with homelessness.
It would also add $1.6 million to the budget of the Office of Neighborhood Safety, which provides violence prevention and intervention efforts and currently has a budget of $1.9 million.
Critics of the plan say it’s foolish to diminish an already stretched-thin police department by defunding it even further. While the plan approved by the city council Tuesday will not result in any layoffs to existing staff, it would freeze 12 unfilled positions that police leaders hoped to fill this budget cycle.
“There are service level impacts we are already feeling because we don’t have the positions currently,” Police Chief Bisa French told councilmembers during the meeting Tuesday, adding that she anticipates losing even more officers because people are in various stages of applying for other jobs.
Because the police department puts most of its resources to staffing patrol teams, which are assigned to fix schedules, French said they have limited staff for investigations into cold cases or robberies that don’t have strong leads.
In a memo to the council, staff also noted that the police have less time to work on issues including “human trafficking, prostitution, drug house abatement, open air narcotic sales, homelessness issues, and other complaints that take time to resolve.”
But advocates of the investments into social services argue that some of these issues, particularly homelessness, should not be taken up by police but by specialists or civilians who can help resolve the root causes by connecting people with housing, jobs and other support.
Mayor Tom Butt and Councilmember Nat Bates disagreed, noting that many people in Richmond are afraid of crime increasing without more support for police.
“You are making a mistake in defunding this police department,” Bates told his fellow councilmembers. “I have never received as many emails or communications from individual citizens, who are taxpayers and voters, who are totally opposed to defunding the police.”
Butt and Bates voted for an option to use federal money to fund the services instead of cutting the police budget at all.
Vice Mayor Demnlus Johnson abstained from the vote, expressing support instead for an option recommended by city staff that would cut police funding by $2.3 million and give $5.58 million to the recommendations by the task force — a slightly more conservative change from the one ultimately adopted by the council.
