Mayor Butt’s obsession with Reimagine Public Safety Community Task Force member Tamisha Torres-Walker continues. Torres-Walker, who serves as a City Councilwoman in Antioch, recently made a call for the hiring of four more police officers in the district she represents.

Mire este video de la Concejal Jiménez reflexionando sobre sus primeros siete meses en el oficina y mirando hacia el futuro.

Creciendo, siempre me inculcaron con creencias de libertad, justicia, oportunidad y riquezas.  Yo crecí con la creencia que un país construido de inmigrantes por inmigrantes estaba fundado en justicia y libertad para todos. Yo crecí con la creencia de que si trabajaba duro podía ser la persona que yo quisiera. Yo crecí con la creencia de que a todos importaba, estaban protegidos por la ley, y eran miembros de la sociedad.

As Richmond and other cities around the country engage in groundbreaking budgetary reform efforts, transferring resources from distended police budgets to strapped social services, a narrative is emerging that such changes create a “gap in services.” City staff and others have argued that there should be no cuts in the police budget to  “ensure there are no gaps in services while implementation actions are undertaken.” But this is a specious argument.

The logic behind the “gap in services” narrative is that while any cuts to the police budget would be felt immediately, the crime-reducing impact of social services would take time to emerge to fill its place. The flaw that holds this argument together is the mistaken belief that the police are currently providing critical social services. While it’s true that the police really are the front line of contact for all manner of incident, from mental illness crises, to truancy, to community disputes, it is decidedly not the case that they are providing our communities with what we might recognize as effective support in these areas.

The 2021/22 General Fund Budget passed on June 29, 2021. It is balanced, with revenues totaling $188.5 million, expenditures totaling $187.85 million, and includes funds for reimagining public safety, adding to the  “reserves“, increased staff compensation (Cost of Living Adjustments), facility improvements and subsidy to the housing authority.

Reimagining Public Safety was front and center at the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA) recent quarterly membership meeting. We hosted a panel with the intention of informing our members and opening up our conversation to the public. We also wanted to broaden the dialogue about how RPA can participate more actively in this critical campaign. 

This panel included seven speakers, followed by a Q&A. We brought different voices to the table to talk about public safety. The planners acknowledged there are many sides of this contentious issue so we aimed to get people thinking beyond the one perspective most often presented to the public, that is, “police = safety.” And since police and other city officials have dominated the narrative with that one equation, we chose to focus on other stakeholders whose safety needs urgently need to be heard and addressed.

It was just over a year ago when the previous Richmond City Council initiated the process of establishing a formal task force to Reimagine Public Safety in Richmond. Between the Task Force and the Council there have been hours and hours of discussion on this subject, including analyzing relevant data, developing programatic strategies and implementation plans, and developing a budget to support this vision of a safer Richmond. Please check out this video for an overview.

Last week, we learned from the email newsletter of Mayor Tom Butt that he has been under investigation for corruption. Local media has picked up the story as well. City Manager Laura Snideman and City Attorney Teresa Stricker were concerned enough about accusations a city employee made against him that they hired an outside attorney and private investigator to examine some of his business dealings. 

Details about the accusation or what was learned in the investigation had not yet been released by a reliable source -- initially only Mayor Butt was talking. 

Butt claims the accusation against him was baseless and that he did nothing wrong. Time will tell if that is true, but his response to being investigated is inappropriate and offensive.

In recent weeks, a sudden preoccupation with police layoffs entered the public conversation around the Reimagine Public Safety Community Task Force proposals. The origins of this fear have been difficult to track, as the Task Force provided numerous sample budgets for city staff to refer to when implementing the proposals—none of which included layoffs. Instead, the four pillars of the public safety program were to be funded through such budgetary procedures as eliminating frozen police positions, staff vacancies, and unnecessary contracts with private firms. Eliminating the twelve police department vacancies, for example, would save the city $3 million dollars annually while maintaining the same level of police services from last year.

The budgetary process has also indicated that Richmond is working with a sizable surplus this year (roughly $15.6 million dollars). These noticeable increases in the City’s revenue streams came thanks to voters who passed Measure H, known as the Real Estate Transfer Tax, in 2018. Because of this surplus, we can afford to fund the Reimagine proposals and not take all the funds from the police. The availability of these funds, coupled with the money that can be trimmed from the police budget, makes layoffs unnecessary.