Ryan Carter
As the City Council contemplates the city’s proposed fiscal year 2022 budget, Pasadena is in the midst of its own “defund the police” moment.
Its police department is facing demands to “re-imagine” itself and do it with less funding in an era when the on-video deaths of George Floyd and Anthony McClain loom large.
Those demands — to shift police money to other endeavors — ramped up this past week as the City Council faced community pushback on the department’s proposed $92 million budget for next fiscal year.
The budget, the largest of any city department by far, will increase from a fiscal year 2020-21 adopted budget of $91,093,000 to $92,795,553 for the coming year, which starts July 1. While it’s been called essentially a “status quo” budget from 2021, local leaders and residents lament its size and are urging the council and city staff to reassess spending priorities.
A question of values
Mayra Macedo-Nolan, executive director of the Pasadena Clergy Coalition, told the council last week she was “disappointed” that in a time when police-community trust is “in the gutter,” the Police Department’s spending plan does not better reflect the times.
“I believe that a budget is a moral document. It is precisely a point-in-time statement of our priorities and an expression of our values,” she said.
She and a host of others — from clergy to local social justice groups — have been lining up, and ramping up calls at City Council meetings, demanding a reassessment of those values.
Advocates for reshifting police dollars foresee the public health and parks and recreation departments as alternative depositories. These departments comparatively receive much less funding than police, but advocates say they provide community services that close gaps in social equity and increase public safety — without a need for a police response.
The Public Health Department’s piece of the budget is proposed to go from $15.6 million adopted in 2021 to $19.4 million next fiscal year (the 2021 public health budget was eventually revised upward to $18.7 million). Parks and Recreation will jump from $22.8 million adopted in 2021 to $26.2 million (the 2021 Parks & Rec budget was also revised upward to $26.1 million.)
But in a city with a total spending plan of close to $900 million, that’s not enough, critics say.
The pandemic highlighted gaps in housing, public health and care of the homeless. And the murder of George Floyd and the fatal Pasadena police shooting of Anthony McClain in August have rekindled calls for re-thinking how officers do their jobs and whether there are some jobs police need to do at all.
“It is that moment when we say, now look, now’s the time to look at reallocating the resource of Police Department so it better serves the community and decide what amount we take away from the police so this doesn’t happen any more,” said Martin Gordon, chair of the Pasadena Community Coalition, a group of clergy, local service providers and leaders who advocate for equity, police accountability, affordable housing and health care.
Aftermath of Floyd, McClain shootings
Pasadena is not alone, of course. Cities and counties across the nation are grappling with similar issues over police funding, particularly in the wake of Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officers on Memorial Day 2020. Whether it’s deemed “defund the police” or a reallocation of resources, the common thread is a demand to spend less on policing and more on services and programs proponents say would make for a safer community.
Locally, the police shooting of McClain, 32, fatally shot in the back while running from an August 2020 traffic stop, has fueled scrutiny over big-ticket money items, such as police salaries and capital improvement efforts, including a plan to acquire a new $2.2 million mobile command unit. The shooting remains under review by the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office, a third-party auditor hired by the city, and ultimately by the Police Department itself.
Those concerns were on display at the June 7 at the City Council meeting as police Chief John Perez laid out the department’s spending blueprint and plans for the coming fiscal year. Most of that budget, $79.8 million, goes to personnel, including filling positions for an anticipated 12 retirements in the next six months, Perez said.
“The budget here is, in fact, flat,” he added, highlighting efforts over the last year to reorganize the department and look for ways to tap additional funding, such as grants, to tamp budget creep.
Perez, who in May announced he will retire next year, said a department goal should be to invest in youth intervention and prevention programs.
“Everything we do into the future, in the next decade, should focus on youth. All the money should be going in that direction,” he said. “When we have more prevention, we have less policing.”
Still, Perez said, there are pressing law enforcement needs that should not be ignored:
- Increases in violent crime and a spike in the number of firearms recovered in the city.
- The need to maintain the department’s participation in youth violence and prevention programs.
- Bolstering the department’s Homeless Initiative.
In addition, the Police Department and the L.A. County Department of Mental Health collaborate to provide three Homeless Outreach Psychiatric Evaluation, or HOPE, Teams consisting of one specially trained police officer and a mental health care specialist. The teams provide crisis intervention to address the immediate mental health needs of people experiencing homelessness.
Who should provide the services?
But many advocates of shifting money away from police departments say officers should spend less time on homeless outreach and crisis intervention teams and more on violent crime. They lament what many say is over-reliance on police to deal with many social ills.
There are some early signs of shifting some of that reliance. The city is seeking to create a second Pasadena Outreach Response Team, or PORT. The teams — grant-funded through the Public Health Department — work in the field, providing support and advocacy services to homeless people with health and addiction issues. The Police Department recently has begun “experimenting” with shifting calls for service connected to the health of homeless persons to PORT teams, composed of a paramedic, a social worker and an outreach worker
“This effort, while still in its early stages, needs to be built out in a careful and methodical manner to ensure its success, as there is no simple ‘bolt-on’ solution to achieve the desired outcome,” according to City Manager Steve Mermell’s letter to the council in May outlining the proposed 2021 fiscal year budget. “Ultimately, it is believed that thousands of calls for service annually might be redirected away from the Police Department to PORT or some successor model.”
Still, at the core of community advocates’ concerns is an imbalance. They point to a UCLA study, published in April, that found Pasadena spent more money on overtime pay than other police departments. The analysis, by the university’s School of Criminal Justice Program, found that if Pasadena reduced its overtime pay to levels aligned more with the LAPD or the L.A. County Sheriff’s Department, the city would save $4.6 million a year.
Overtime expenses
Five officers, according to the study, received more money from overtime than their base salaries. One officer, the top earner, received $159,348 in OT alone, when that officer’s base salary was $107,489. In response, city officials said the department’s total compensation falls at about the median of 10 other law enforcement agencies and that the study failed to elaborate on the “proper role of and funding for law enforcement.”
Gordon said the department could take more than a dozen actions to find savings. Even an action like leaning on trained volunteer officers — perhaps retired police others who have gone through a police academy — to do some tasks could save money, he said. Savings of $200,000 could be shifted toward computers for young people to use to further their own education, or to add social workers.
Mermell said each year’s budget builds on city services developed in prior years “through many interactions with constituents.”
“While wholesale restructuring of budgetary allocations is possible, it would likely disrupt existing service levels,” he said in a statement to this news group. “Consequently, any such actions are best taken only after careful consideration of impacts and thorough public dialogue.”
Ultimately, he noted, it’s in the hands of the City Council, which is continuing a series of public hearings before it adopts a new budget for 2022. And that’s got Gordon concerned, saying the council appears ready to greenlight the budget as proposed.
“The Police Department budget is just overblown,” Gordon said.
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