On Thursday, June 25 the Board of Commissioners of the Housing Authority of the City of LA (HACLA) will consider a resolution to hand over nearly $9 Million to the Los Angeles Police Department, an increase of $875,000 from their last LAPD agreement, for their "Community Safety Partnership" (CSP). You can see the full proposal on HACLA's Meeting Agenda here.

Please support us by submitting a written public comment before noon on Wednesday to HACLA opposing item VI.A.1 and telling HACLA to #DefundLAPD! You can submit public comment using this form, or emailing your comment directly to Tiffany.Prescott@hacla.org by noon on Wednesday. (HACLA's Board of Commissioners does not allow public comment by phone, only via email.)

HACLA is the Housing Authority of the City of LA. It receives funding from the Federal Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to provide housing and economic development support to the City of LA. It's core mission is to prevent homelessness and provide housing to LA's most vulnerable people. The Community Safety Partnership (CSP) is a program that is funded by HACLA, using "resident services" dollars, to bring additional police presence into HACLA's public housing communities, which provide housing to 6,500 of LA's lowest-income families.

We stand with our allies at Black Lives Matter-LA and the People's Budget Coalition in demanding that Los Angeles #DefundThePolice. We can think of countless other ways that LA's Housing Authority could put $9 million to good use: supporting residents with public and mental health programming, supporting senior citizens, youth and immigrant residents, providing English language and computer classes, and so much more. $9 million represents an individual allotment of $1,300 per public housing family in LA, and that's a lot of money to give away to another public agency that already has plenty of funding.

LAPD receives more than half of LA's discretionary budget, but that's not even their entire budget. A common tactic used by police to further enlarge their budgets is to cannibalize public budgets from agencies whose mission has nothing to do with policing, which is why we're asking for the HACLA Board of Commissioners to reject this proposal, and to terminate the CSP program entirely.

LAPD often holds up CSP as a great success story. What they don't tell you is that the program is taking money away from other resident services that could be supporting public housing residents. We have also heard more than enough stories from residents about how LAPD is helping to drive evictions and displacement inside LA's public housing communities. The program does plenty of harm on its own, and gives the LAPD a propaganda tool that is robbing public housing residents of other services.

For all of those reasons, we are calling on the HACLA Board of Commissioners to reject item VI.A.1 on Thursday's agenda, a proposal to increase the CSP contract with LAPD by $875,000, and to join the #DefundLAPD movement by ending funding for the CSP program from HACLA resident services funding. Please join us by using this form to submit a public comment by Wednesday at noon. You can also send a public comment via email directly to Tiffany.Prescott@hacla.org before noon Wednesday.