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<a class="gmail-domain gmail-reader-domain" href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/apr/07/covid-relief-funds-california-cities-police">theguardian.com</a>
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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">California cities spent huge share of federal Covid relief funds on police</h1>
<div class="gmail-credits gmail-reader-credits">Sam Levin - April 7. 2022<br></div>
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<div class="gmail-moz-reader-content gmail-reader-show-element"><div id="gmail-readability-page-1" class="gmail-page"><div tabindex="0" id="gmail-maincontent"><p><span><span>B</span></span><span>ig cities in <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/california">California</a>
spent large portions of their federal Covid relief money on police
departments, a review of public records has revealed, with several
cities prioritizing police funding by a wide margin.</span></p><p>As part of the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/10/covid-us-house-biden-coronavirus-relief-stimulus">American Rescue Plan Act</a>
(Arpa), the Biden administration’s signature stimulus package, the US
government sent funds to cities to help them fight coronavirus and
support local recovery efforts. The money, officials said, could be used
to fund a range of services, including public health and housing
initiatives, healthcare workers’ salaries, infrastructure investments
and aid for small businesses.</p><p>But most large California cities spent millions of Arpa dollars on law enforcement. Some also gave police money from the <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/world/coronavirus-outbreak">Coronavirus</a> Aid, Relief and Economic Security (Cares) Act, adopted in 2020 under Donald Trump. The records show:</p><ul><li><p><strong>San Francisco</strong> received $312m in Arpa funds for
fiscal year 2020 and allocated 49% ($153m) to police, 13% ($41m) to the
sheriff’s department, and the remainder to the fire department,
according to the city controller. San Francisco also gave roughly 22%
($38.5m) of its Cares funds to law enforcement.</p></li><li><p><strong>Los Angeles</strong> <a href="https://twitter.com/kennethmejiaLA/status/1503423229305655296?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1503423229305655296%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.lataco.com%2Fcovid-relief-fund-paid-lapd%2F">spent</a> roughly 50% of its first round of Arpa <a href="https://www.lataco.com/covid-relief-fund-paid-lapd/">relief funds on the LAPD</a>, according to a public <a href="https://lacity.nextrequest.com/requests/22-2360">records</a> request by the controller candidate Kenneth Mejia, and first <a href="https://www.lataco.com/covid-relief-fund-paid-lapd/">reported</a> in local news site LA Taco.</p></li><li><p><strong>Fresno</strong> spent $36.6m of its Cares funds on the
police, making up 67% of Cares spending on city salaries, and roughly
40% of all of Fresno’s Cares funds.</p></li><li><p><strong>San Jose</strong> allocated roughly $27.8m of its Cares
and Arpa funds to police salaries and the police dispatch department,
representing about 12% of its relief money. </p></li><li><p><strong>Long Beach</strong> <a href="https://longbeach.gov/globalassets/city-manager/media-library/documents/lb-recovery-act/recovery-plan_city-of-long-beach-2021">allocated</a>
the majority of its $135.8 million Arpa funds to police, though a
spokesperson said a detailed breakdown of funds was not available.</p></li><li><p><strong>Oakland</strong> allocated $5m (13.5%) of its Cares funds to police salaries; <strong>Sacramento</strong> allocated $2.2m (2.5%) of Cares funds to police; and <strong>San Diego</strong> spent roughly $60.1m (64%) of its Cares funds on police in fiscal year 2020, and $52.6m (33%) in fiscal year 2021.</p></li></ul><p>The budgeting and reporting process varies by city and is often
opaque, making it difficult to compare and analyze how governments
prioritized police and executed their budgets.</p><p>In Fresno, the city
allocated more than double of its Cares money to police than it did to
Covid testing, contact tracing, small business grants, childcare
vouchers, transitional housing and small business grants combined.
Oakland’s police allocation was greater than the amounts spent on a <a href="https://www.oaklandca.gov/resources/oakland-cares-act-keep-oakland-housed-outcomes">housing initiative</a>, a small business grant <a href="https://www.oaklandca.gov/resources/oakland-cares-act-small-business-grant-program">program</a> and a workforce <a href="https://www.oaklandca.gov/resources/oakland-cares-act-workforce-support-programs">initiative</a>.
San Jose, meanwhile, spent significantly more on housing services and
food programs than on law enforcement. And although Long Beach initially
reported that it was allocating 100% of its Arpa funds to police, a
spokesperson said $11.8m of those funds were now going to direct relief
grants and that a portion was also supporting the city’s parks and
marine departments.</p><p>Officials from Oakland and Anaheim both said
that their Arpa awards were used as “revenue replacement” for their
general fund, and said it was not possible to specify where the federal
money went (though both cities typically spend large portions of their
overall budgets on police, with Oakland going $22m over budget last
year). A Bakersfield representative said $13.6m in Cares funds went to
public safety, but did not specify how much of that went to police.</p><p>Cities have explained their spending on police in a number of ways. In a <a href="https://longbeach.gov/globalassets/city-manager/media-library/documents/lb-recovery-act/recovery-plan_city-of-long-beach-2021">report</a>
for the US government, Long Beach said police were “heavily involved in
the City’s Covid-19 response”, including opening an emergency
operations center and providing security at testing and vaccination
sites.</p><p>Stephen Walsh, Oakland’s controller, said that claiming
Cares funds for the police was an “accounting strategy” and that the
relief money wasn’t used to expand law enforcement, but rather to avoid
cuts. He said this allowed the city to “pursue a great variety of worthy
projects directed at Covid relief”. A spokesperson for the LA
controller also said the Arpa funds were used for LAPD revenue that had
previously been budgeted, and a representative for the LA city
administrative officer said allocations for “public safety services”
were “consistent with the intent of the funds”.</p><p>Hillary Ronen, a
member of the board of supervisors in San Francisco, noted that there
were minimum staffing needs for the fire department and police, and that
Covid cases in those departments forced cities to spend large amounts
on public safety overtime. But she also said she appreciated the
criticisms of the law enforcement allocations and that she wanted to see
San Francisco invest in alternatives to police: “Over time, I do hope
to shrink the budget of the police department.”</p><p>Cities using relief funds for police have typically funneled the money to salaries, although <a href="https://theappeal.org/covid-funds-police-prisons-arpa/">The Appeal recently reported</a> that some jurisdictions were using stimulus dollars to buy new surveillance technology and build new prisons.</p><h2>‘Cities hide their police spending’</h2><p>The
data in California matches national trends. After the George Floyd
uprisings sparked a national debate about the role of law enforcement
and calls for the US to “defund the police” and <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/07/us-cities-defund-police-transferring-money-community">reinvest those dollars in services</a>, local governments across the US <a href="https://theappeal.org/covid-funds-police-prisons-arpa/">used Covid relief</a> to maintain and expand law enforcement, including <a href="https://www.wbez.org/stories/activists-slam-chicago-mayor-lori-lightfoot-for-directing-millions-in-covid-19-relief-money-to-police/1570442b-927f-46bc-9717-a2763649910e">Chicago</a>, <a href="https://whyy.org/articles/a-significant-chunk-of-phillys-cares-act-money-is-paying-for-police-and-prisons/">Philadelphia</a> and the state of <a href="https://whnt.com/news/alabama-news/how-will-alabama-spend-772-million-in-covid-relief-funds/">Alabama</a>.
Meanwhile, the pressure to invest more in police is growing amid a rise
in homicides and other crimes, even as the crime rate remains
significantly lower than previous decades.</p><p>The significant stimulus spending on police reflects the longstanding budget priorities in the US, where police spending has <a href="https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-06-04/america-s-policing-budget-has-nearly-tripled-to-115-billion">tripled over the last 40 years</a>, with cities spending an <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/06/12/upshot/cities-grew-safer-police-budgets-kept-growing.html">increasing portion</a>
of their general funds on officers. Arpa allowed cities to replace lost
revenue, so many of them funneled the relief to the agencies that
previously received the most money.</p><p>But in California, a state with severe income inequality and a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/22/california-homelessness-crisis-unhoused-and-unequal">dramatically worsening homelessness crisis</a>,
the stimulus spending has sparked backlash from community organizers
who argue that the funds should have gone directly to civilians and that
police should have accepted cuts.</p><p>“It was called the ‘American
Rescue Plan’, but you’re telling me that what needed to be rescued was
the police department?” said Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie, a pastor and
activist at Skid Row in LA. “The city’s kneejerk reaction is always to
use law enforcement to respond to everything … and the police forces
keep getting larger.”</p><p>“When the money is going toward law
enforcement again, it’s just increasingly criminalizing those that need
the most help,” said Hope Williams, an activist in San Francisco,
referencing the escalating police <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2022/mar/22/california-homelessness-crisis-unhoused-and-unequal">crackdown</a>
on unhoused people suffering from addiction in the city. Williams, who
has sued the police department over its treatment of protesters, added,
“It’s exhausting and infuriating, but not surprising.”</p><p>James
Burch, policy director at the Anti Police-Terror Project, a coalition
that organizes against police violence in Oakland, said it was
frustrating how hard it was to get basic information on stimulus
spending: “Cities like Oakland do everything they can to hide how much
money they spend on policing, because if the public truly knew how much
we spend on police and how little we spend on services, they would be
infuriated.”</p><p>In LA, the Arpa spending plan was not publicized
until Kenneth Mejia, an accountant and advocate running for controller,
filed a public records request with the current controller. Some other
cities’ public reports have not directly mentioned police at all,
categorizing the expenditures under “government services” or “payroll”.</p><p>“It’s shocking and not at all transparent,” said Mejia, who has also <a href="https://twitter.com/kennethmejiaLA/status/1506348232338681857">uncovered</a> how <a href="https://www.phi.org/thought-leadership/california-cannabis-tax-revenues-a-windfall-for-law-enforcement-or-an-opportunity-for-healing-communities/">cannabis business taxes</a> go to police. He further noted that LAPD was getting the funding at a time in 2021 when many of <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/aug/16/california-police-prison-guards-vaccination-rates">the department’s employees</a>
were declining to get vaccinated, with officers routinely caught on
camera refusing to wear masks. “A city’s spending is representative of a
city’s values … and you think that Covid relief money is going to help
people, but it’s not. It’s going to police.”</p></div></div></div>
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