Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti (D-Calif.) announced his intentions on Wednesday to divert hundreds of millions of dollars of city funding away from police and law enforcement, and instead redirect it to “communities of color,” as reported by Fox News.
Garcetti has asked that the city government “identify $250 million in cuts” that can be redirected to “people who have been left behind,” as Garcetti describes them. According to the Los Angeles Times, just over half of that amount, $150 million, will come from the LAPD budget alone. The current LAPD budget is approximately $1.8 billion.
“It’s time to move our rhetoric toward action to end racism in our city,” Garcetti said. However, the co-founder of Black Lives Matter’s Los Angeles chapter, Melina Abdullah, said that even this measure doesn’t go far enough in her opinion, saying that Black Lives Matter “won’t be bought off with just this minimal amount of money.”
Los Angeles has seen the highest amount of arrests in the ongoing race riots since they first began, with now over 3,000 people being arrested in the city.