Thread by @sahrasulaiman

If you tuned into council today, you might have heard public comment from Fernando Rejón, ED of the Urban Peace Institute. The #FundPeacemakers campaign had asked for $54mil of the budget reallocation be directed toward funding intervention efforts.

UPI runs the L.A. Violence Intervention Training Academy - a 140-hr course those looking to become city-contracted intervention workers take. They also provide technical training and assistance to the LAPD's Community Safety Partnership (CSP). urbanpeaceinstitute.org/our-work-urban…

They were there @ the outset of CSP (back when they were part of the Advancement Proj.) and were heavily involved not just in training officers, but in trying to build up community infrastructure in Latino & Black nbhds in Watts to engage LAPD & make LAPD responsive to residents.

I've done a bunch of threads on the origins of CSP, for those looking for background on the how/why it exists - most recently here, for those interested:

https://twitter.com/sahrasulaiman/status/1363554707625496576

But this convo. btwn Rejón & Connie Rice might be of interest to those looking to know more about CSP & why, while it seems like such a step backwards in the wake of events last summer, it (at the time it was created) represented such a sea change in LAPD

Again, the goal was to see more $ to channeled toward folks doing violence interruption at a time when it could not be more important. Rejón says that the de-escalation work of interventionists can have a significant impact on retaliatory shootings (he says as much as 42%).

But there are some interesting tidbits that emerge from civil rights attorney (and one of the architects of CSP) Connie Rice's discussion. Perhaps the most surprising thing? That CSP's future wasn't secure when Beck left; it was in danger of being lost when Moore took the reins.

Another point of interest was mention of the study by UCLA that many advocates of been critical of. Valid as many of those critiques are, the reason they did that study was b/c LAPD effectively wasn't making any effort to analyze or evaluate CSP effectiveness on their own.

There wasn't even any kind of manual or blueprint for the program, despite it existing for a decade. One of the things that had annoyed LAPD was that although the goal hadn't been crime reduction, CSP areas were doing better in that regard than the "search and destroy" models.

So they hadn't been eager to replicate it. And, Rice says, (confirming things I've heard) early on, gang officers often sabotaged CSP work to undermine them and taunted CSP officers, making it a hostile environment. Making CSP a bureau helps address some of these issues.

Because nbhds had been so battered by LAPD but also in desperate need of someone they could call, it was easier for CSP to build partnerships within communities than it had been to build collaborative partnerships within the department.

CSP, she says, "threaten[ed] the identity of most police officers" by taking a guardian approach and moving away from the us v. them frame they are accustomed to [where they get to be the superhero].

None of that is to suggest CSP is a panacea. And it's certainly not what advocates have been clamoring for. But the history is interesting b/c of what it says about what a herculean effort was needed just to move the needle on the tiniest of cultural changes within LAPD.