Los Angeles City Council Takes First Step Toward Replacing Police Force

In the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of the Minneapolis police department, Americans across this great nation of ours began to demand change.  They had witnessed something so horrific in that incident that they were compelled to take to the streets and have their voices heard.

Their message was broad at first:  The protesters were demanding justice for Floyd, who lay handcuffed with officer Derek Chauvin’s knee on his neck for nearly 9 minutes, suffocating slowly to his death in a video that was soon seen ’round the world.  It was a stark reminder to some that evil still lurks in our world, and it was unfathomably motivating for many.

But, after Chauvin and his fellow officers were arrested, the protesters were still not satisfied, and took aim at the very system that produced him.  Soon there were calls around the nation to defund and abolish the police as a whole, a concept that has predictably received plenty of criticism.

In Los Angeles, however, they are moving ahead with the idea. 

The Los Angeles City Council passed a motion Tuesday to replace Los Angeles Police Department officers with unarmed “crisis response” personnel to be assigned to “non-violent calls for service” such as “neighbor disputes.”

The motion, introduced by Councilmember Herb Wesson and five colleagues on the 15-member council, would:

1. INSTRUCT the Chief Legislative Analyst (CLA) and the City Administrative Officer (CAO), with assistance from the Los Angeles Police Department and the Los Angeles Housing Services Authority and in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health and other relevant government service providers, to develop an unarmed model of crisis response that would divert non-violent calls for service (mental health crisis, substance abuse, neighbor disputes etc.) away from LAPD to the appropriate non-law enforcement agencies.

2. INSTRUCT the CLA to analyze and report back on programs utilized both domestically and internationally such as CAHOOTS in Eugene, Oregon as well other models of crisis intervention.

Reports from Breitbart indicated earlier this week that morale among LAPD officers was approaching an “all time low”.

This latest news out of the City of Angels comes after the Mayor of L.A. announced that he was looking to cut $150 million from the police force’s budget.