Richmond’s City Council wants to divert $10 million from police to community crisis response team, other services

RICHMOND — A majority of the City Council wants to cut $10.3 million from the police department — roughly 15% of its $67.2 million budget — and divert the money to other services, including homeless and youth programs, and create a non-police response team for mental health and other non-violent crises.

Their declaration of support for the move came after the city’s Reimagining Public Safety Community Task Force proposed the cuts to the council in a meeting Monday.

Investing in the proposed services would cost $10.3 million, which the task force recommended taking from the police department — a type of defunding police that many cities, including Oakland, have been exploring in the wake of police killings and racial justice protests over the past year.

The five Richmond City Council members present at Monday’s meeting (Mayor Tom Butt and Councilmember Nat Bates were absent) embraced all the recommendations from the task force enthusiastically, instructing staff to incorporate the ideas into the city’s upcoming budget that the council will have to approve this summer.

“I have faith that we will see changes … that we will see a serious reduction of crime,” said Councilmember Demnlus Johnson.

Among the recommendations from the task force is to create a Community Crisis Response Program to dispatch medics and mental health specialists to behavioral health crises and substance use calls instead of police. The task force says the program should eventually expand “to support additional community based issues such as domestic conflict, street based conflict and noise complaints.”

The program would need about $2.45 million in its first year, according to the task force’s projections.

Other recommendations from the task force would give $1.9 million to Richmond’s YouthWorks program, a city program to give teenagers and young adults job training and academic support that in 2020 had about 175 people taking part and a budget of $375,000. That could increase the number of students taking part up to 1,000.

It also proposes spending about $3.4 million to beef up services for homeless people, including providing a “streets team” of case managers, and hygiene and health services. It also would create additional transitional housing to help people living on the street move into more sustainable housing.

Another recommendation is to add $2.5 million to the budget of the Office of Neighborhood Safety, which provides violence prevention and intervention efforts and currently has a budget of $1.9 million.

Councilmember Claudia Jimenez said during Monday’s meeting that there has been a “lack of investment in our community” that has exacerbated safety issues in Richmond.

Jimenez and a majority of the council said during Monday’s meeting they see the task force’s recommendations as a way to increase that investment and shift some responsibilities away from police and onto others better equipped to handle them.

“Police aren’t mental health counselors,” said Councilmember Melvin Willis. “That’s something that needs to be invested in.”

Many of those who called into the council meeting seem to agree with that, and with the idea that the non-police services require more investment. But there was disagreement about whether Richmond needs to dive headfirst into diverting such a big chunk of money from its police department.

Mayor Tom Butt was not present at Monday’s meeting but said in an interview that he’s wary about a reduction to police services, and that many of his constituents are, as well. He thinks the City Council is trying to take on too much.

“Why not insist on more services from the county?” he asked.

Contra Costa County provides some mental health crises response teams, and calls to expand those services have increased in recent years.

Crisis response teams have been successful in other cities, notably Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program. Oakland is working on creating a pilot program to test out a non-police response unit that would send out counselors and outreach workers to non-violent situations.

Richmond Police Chief Bisa French said she supports the idea of creating those teams, noting that it could probably reduce the need for officers to respond to those calls, and she believes investing in the task force’s overall recommendations “can ultimately lead to safety in our community.”

But French doesn’t want the city to fund the recommendations by taking dollars from the police department, which she says already took too much of a hit during the last budget cycle, when 34 positions were cut from the department.

Further reductions could hamper the police’s ability to respond to calls for service, French said, pointing out that if, for example, the traffic unit was cut, beat officers would be tied up longer with handling things like major car accidents that they normally hand off to the traffic unit, slowing down their responses to other calls.

Currently, the police department is authorized to have 157 officers, but it has 12 vacancies and 25 people out on long-term injury or working “light duty,” French confirmed.

Proponents of the task force’s ideas say that investing in the recommendations would reduce crime and thus reduce calls for police service. They maintain that the city needs to prioritize what it wants officers to handle and what it can hand over to non-sworn staff to prevent potentially harmful interactions between police and residents.

“These programs are intended to provide people with the resources needed to thrive without resorting to illegal means of survival or engaging in violence,” says the task force’s report.

Supporters point to the wave of police killings across the country that have traumatized people nationwide this year.

Researchers for the task force analyzed police budget data and found that spending per capita on Richmond police in 2021 is 163% more than it was in 1980 and that the city spends more per capita on police than many similarly sized California cities.

The task force’s recommended $10.3 million cut would reduce the police’s share of general fund spending from its current 39.8% to 33.6%.

The city manager and staff will have to present their own recommendation about whether the proposed budget allocations would be feasible. Any impacts that cuts would have on the job duties of existing officers would have to be worked out with the police union.

But it will be up to the council to approve the budget. It has to pass a balanced one by the end of June.