Bloated police budgets crowd out alternatives, activist says

Civic

At the uprisings sparked by the killing of George Floyd last year, demonstrators all over the country were calling on their municipalities to “defund the police.” In Oakland, a Reimagining Public Safety Task Force in March approved a long list of recommendations, many of them made by the Anti Police Terror Project, an organization that has been calling for reducing police budgets in order to fund alternatives to law enforcement for years. As former police officer Derek Chauvin, accused of murdering Floyd, is tried, we hear from James Burch, policy director for the Anti Police-Terror Project and the Justice Teams Network and president of the National Lawyers Guild Bay Area.