Today City Council voted to adopt the city’s FY20-21 budget, which included cutting $27 mil in total from the Portland Police Bureau’s budget. This includes a $15 mil reduction by defunding several specialty units with the most racially unjust practices and outcomes, and (1/18)
a $12 million reduction in response to the Mayor’s call for a 5.6% budget reduction for all General Fund bureaus. All in all, the Portland Police Bureau’s final adopted budget is 6% less than last year’s budget, on par with LA's police budget reduction percentage. (2/18)
What we did with the budget was considered unimaginable two weeks ago. What we did has never been done before in this city; what we’re about to do also has never been done before. And I don’t want to diminish that victory. (3/18)
Police have driven the narrative of public safety and we have long been following, but we’re not going to do that anymore. There’s a demand to build a system that imagines alternatives to policing, (4/18)
and that’s what we began building beginning with last year’s budget which allocated $500,000 to the Portland Street Response pilot – a non-police response to calls for houselessness and behavioral health crises. (5/18)
With the $15 million from defunding the Gun Violence Reduction Team, School Resource Officers, Transit Officers, and eliminating 8 positions on the Special Emergency Response Team, we will be reallocating those funds to fund: (6/18)
• $4.8 mil for Portland Street Response, aimed at decriminalizing houseless and behavioral health crises + decreasing police interactions by sending non-police response to those types of 911 calls
• $1 mil for participatory budgeting process w/the houseless community (7/18)
• $1 mil for participatory budgeting process w/the houseless community (7/18)
• $1 million for leadership development program for Black youth aged 25 and under (8/18)
Additionally, by redirecting $2.3 mil in recreational cannabis tax revenue from funding the PPB's traffic division, we will instead fund:
• $453k in social equity grants through the Office of Community and Civic Life
• $150k for hiring another tribal outreach wrkr (9/18)
• $453k in social equity grants through the Office of Community and Civic Life
• $150k for hiring another tribal outreach wrkr (9/18)
• $124k for a position in Office of Equity & Human Rights to ensure compliance with Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, which prohibits public money from being spent in discriminatory ways. (10/18)
The remaining will be put back into contingency, with the intention for the community to determine how to use the funds, specifically our Black community. (11/18)
Never in my life would I have imagined we could cut so much so quickly out of a police budget. It wasn’t even possible to get a fraction of those cuts one year ago when I proposed defunding some of the specialty units that were finally eliminated this budget cycle. (12/18)
I understand the disappointment that council did not get to the $50 million reduction, but I strongly believe that just because the reduction goal wasn’t reached it doesn’t mean the community wasn’t successful or didn’t have an impact. (13/18)
If it were not for the emails, calls, testimony, protests, and conversations with advocates, I truly do not believe we would have gotten to where we were today. (14/18)
I also want to be clear: I don’t mind being pushed. Your role as advocates is to push us beyond what we believe we can do, and my role is to ask you the hard questions to get the best outcome as possible. (15/18)
We didn’t get to the same place on this one, but it doesn’t mean we won’t in the future. I’m going to take your pushes to each future policy conversation (16/18)
and that means I need you to be the sharpest advocates you can be in providing the analysis to convince me, so that I can then convince my colleagues. (17/18)
As I’ve said before, police accountability neither begins nor ends with the budget and I remain as committed as before to continue addressing the entire criminal justice system as a whole. (18 - End thread)
