San Francisco Mayor London Breed unveiled a proposed budget Friday that includes pulling $120 million from law enforcement agencies and putting it into programs that support the city’s largely underserved Black community.
Although the specific spending details are still unclear, Breed’s proposal would direct 60% of the funds to mental health, wellness and homelessness initiatives in the Black community, while 35% would support education, youth development and economic opportunities. The remaining 5% would go toward developing a plan to replace police officers with social workers as the main responders to noncriminal calls involving the homeless and mentally ill.
Those allocations reflect spending priorities conveyed by Black residents during a series of recent community meetings and public surveys led by the city’s Human Rights Commission, Breed said.
“It’s important that we listen to Black voices. It's important that we allow Black people to lead this movement,” Breed said at a press conference Friday. “We have to listen to the people in the community. We have to listen to the people who have seen and lived the devastation resulting from decades of disinvestment.”
Breed’s defunding plan was devised in collaboration with Supervisor Shamann Walton as a reparation for city policies that led to “decades of disinvestment” in the Black community.
Black people make up only about 5% of San Francisco’s population — a proportion that has consistently decreased in the last 50 years — but comprise nearly 40% of its homeless residents. African Americans have among the city’s highest mortality rates and lowest median household incomes, and are involved in a disproportionately high percentage of police use-of-force incidents.
The plan would cut $40 million annually over the next two years from the San Francisco Police Department, reducing its nearly $700 million annual budget by almost 6%. The Sheriff’s Department, meanwhile, would see a total of $20 million in cuts.
The heads of both of those departments expressed initial, if measured, support for the proposed cuts, most of which would come from not filling vacant positions and reducing overtime expenditures.
“We knew there would be pain and sacrifice associated with these budget cuts, but we also know they're necessary to fulfill the promise of Mayor Breed's and Sup. Walton's reinvestment initiative to support racial equality,” San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott said in the statement. “While the cuts are significant, they are cuts we can absorb and that will not diminish our ability to provide essential services.”
The mayor's defunding plan comes largely in response to huge, prolonged demonstrations — in San Francisco and around the world — following the death of George Floyd at the hands of Minneapolis police, and amid growing calls to shift resources away from law enforcement. In June, Breed also directed the Police Department to no longer respond to noncriminal complaints, revise its accountability and anti-bias practices and stop using military-grade equipment.
