"We’ve been showing up to a lot of the recent city council hearings but we haven’t really had the chance to speak,” said Gilbert Johnson, Lead Justice Organizer at @CoCoSouthLA to open the 3hr-long forum on budget priorities held in collaboration w/ @BLMLA & #PeoplesBudgetLA 
With so much of the focus on defunding the police, there hasn't been as much attention given to how funds would be reinvested. As participants pointed out during the forum, it's important to make sure the money being thrown at problems actually reaches folks on the ground.
Gang interventionists like Skipp Townsend, Kevin Orange (Twin) and LaTanya Ward pointed to the shortcomings of programs like GRYD and made strong cases for funds being directly invested in the boots on the ground.
Long-time residents made the case that they'd lived through multiple promises of reform over the years and were still terrified at the thought of their teen sons having an encounter with LAPD.
Lechelle Williams, the mother of a special needs son, for example, recalled when the principal called the police on her son because he repeated a bad word. The boy was 5. She wanted to see more investment in caregivers like herself and interventionists.
Carlos León, Lead Organizer with @CoCoSouthLA recalled having 5 to 7 cars taken away from him - adding up to thousands of $ - when he was an undocumented youth trying to get back and forth to school. He advocated for a deep transformation of the system.
LaTanya Ward cried as she confessed she had struggled to figure out which stories of police encounters to tell forum listeners about. As someone who had come up a gang member, she said, she was afraid she would not be seen with compassion.
“[Gang members] are victims of this system…if not the *most* abused by this racist system. And it shows in our behaviors.” Ward said as she made a plea for advocates to show more compassion to those that were often written off as "criminals."
LaTanya Ward, btw, was one of the people behind the historic coming together of gangs - some of whom had beefed it for four decades - for a peace march in the wake of the passing of Nipsey Hussle.
theguardian.com/music/2019/apr…
theguardian.com/music/2019/apr…
Carlos Cázares said he was five the first time he had seen his mother handcuffed. He was handcuffed for the first time when he was 11: “We’re done paying for an institution that produces racism, violence & poverty. We are done talking. It’s time to put $ where the people are at.”
Several people that called in had lost loved ones to police violence, including Verneen Mincey, whose brother’s death by chokehold in 1982 finally led to LAPD’s moratorium on the practice. They could not afford to trust LAPD to reform itself.
It's great that ppl have used their privilege to push for the budget to be revisited. But more space must be made for the folks that have lived through decades of repressive policing and who know where the money needs to go. See the full story & forum here la.streetsblog.org/2020/07/02/bla…
