CommentsGUEST COMMENTARY-Six months ago, there was plenty of support for defunding the police.
And, to rebuild faith in the system, there remains a very real need to curtail unnecessary police violence and ensure open and transparent prosecution of abuse by individual officers.
Today, however, there is increasing concern about the rise of crime in our neighborhoods and on our streets. More and more Angelenos are calling for the LAPD to protect them and their property.
The Chief of Police, Michel Moore, discussed cuts and their impact at great length at the most recent City Council Budget and Finance Committee meeting to save LAPD staffing.
Front and center are the statistics documenting rising crime. What is rarely addressed is what is driving those stats in the short term.
With no further fiscal largesse expected from Washington to expand benefits or supplement local programs, people with no money to feed themselves or their families are driven to theft. Homeless families squat in unoccupied houses. Resources are limited.
Maslow’s pyramid of human needs starts with food and shelter. Without those, it’s inevitable that people revert back to basic survival mode basic survival mode to confront threats to their very existence.
Many Angelenos had minimal support – financial and otherwise – before the pandemic; now isolation further threatens their self-worth. They are angry and scared. It’s too easy to strike out at targets, at those who are different, the ones people in authority – parent, pastor, or President – say are to blame for their current suffering.
Stress affects us all – the risks of becoming ill, the often-prohibitive medical costs, the isolation of lockdown, the lack of human touch, the unknowable future.
With the prisons and jails continuing to be hot spots for infections, the inability to lock up low-level criminals emboldens all manner of law-breaking and even the enforcement of basic community safety protocols has become problematic.
The People’s Budget-Los Angeles may be aspirational, but it underlines the fact that the City needs to better address the emotional devastation of the pandemic or risk further violence.
(Liz Amsden is an activist from Northeast Los Angeles with opinions on much of what goes on in our lives. She also writes on behalf of the Budget Advocates’ mission regarding the City’s budget and services. In her real life she works on budgets, for film and television, where fiction can rarely be as strange as the truth of living in today’s world.) Prepped for CityWatch by Linda Abrams.
