The racial justice uprisings of last summer, along with the COVID-19 pandemic, have turned mayoral races across the country into a focal point amid demands for leadership committed to representing marginalized communities. 

In Omaha, Nebraska, a city rocked by protests against police violence, some see the upcoming mayoral election as an opportunity to chart a new course on policing, public safety, and racial equity.

Protests erupted in Omaha last year after Minneapolis police killed George Floyd, and again in November when Omaha police fatally shot Kenneth Jones, a Black man, during a traffic stop. Police crackdowns on the protests and the murder of a Black demonstrator by a white man known for bigotry further escalated tensions and fueled demands to defund police.

Mayor Jean Stothert, a Republican who first took office in 2013 and  is seeking her third term, instead proposed to increase police funding. Now the Omaha Police Officers Association, which did not endorse a mayoral candidate in 2017, is backing Stothert.

“This is us rewarding loyalty for a mayor who has stood with us,” announced the association’s president, Sgt. Tony Conner. 

Local activists are rallying behind two Democratic challengers: criminal justice reform advocate Jasmine Harris and school board member Kimara Snipes. The election of either Harris or Snipes would give Omaha its first Black female mayor. Both candidates have spoken about the need for a more holistic approach to public safety that recognizes the root causes of crime that simply increasing policing doesn’t address.

Two other Democratic candidates, high school teacher Mark Gudgel and real estate firm owner RJ Neary, will also appear on the ballot for the nonpartisan April 6 primary. The top two vote candidates will move on to the May general election

“When we’re talking about the city [government], this entity that’s supposed to represent us, it needs to have the same work ethic and reflect the diversity and the makeup of the people who are doing the work,” said Dawaune Lamont Hayes, founder of a community-led local news outlet, North Omaha Information Support Everyone (NOISE). “Because we’re out here, and we’re making it happen.”

Hayes launched a short-lived bid for Omaha mayor with a wide-ranging platform that included restorative justice, equitable transportation, and environmental sustainability. They withdrew from the race after not receiving enough verified signatures to get on the ballot, but that has not deterred them from becoming a driving force for voter engagement along with local grassroots groups. 

No matter who wins this year’s municipal elections, Hayes said, “we still need an engaged electorate that’s going to hold those people accountable.” Hayes is among the activists supporting Harris and Snipes, describing them as “brilliant coalition-building women who have offered incredible ideas.”

Public safety is a key issue in this race. More than 36 percent of the city’s budget goes to policing. During heated fiscal debates last summer, Omaha City Council president Chris Jerram proposed a measure to remove $2 million that Stothert added to the police budget and put it toward mental health services and employment training. The council shot it down, but then passed an amendment to pull $1.8 million from the city’s cash reserves to fund those services. Stothert vetoed the amendment saying it would be “reckless” and “irresponsible” to take money from the contingency fund during a pandemic. 

Harris said one of her first priorities as mayor would be to review all agency budgets to identify programs that need reworking for greater efficiency and equity. She said the police department is no exception. 

“When people talk about public safety, they’re always saying ‘we need to add more police to keep the public safe,’” said Harris, who works as the advocacy and policy director for RISE, a statewide organization that supports people coming out of prison and advocates for initiatives to reduce incarceration. “But at the end of the day, everybody doesn’t feel safe with the police. So we need to ensure that public safety encompasses everyone. And for me that’s taking on a preventative and proactive approach.”

Harris said she would work to decriminalize activities that traditionally have led to interactions with police, like panhandling. She also wants to demilitarize the police by restricting their use of riot gear and chemical weapons. To ensure police accountability, there should be “a transparent misconduct process where our community members know what’s going on along the way,” Harris explained. “That means creating an independent police oversight board. So that way, they have authority to be able to do investigations and to have the discipline afterwards.”

Harris wants to see the Omaha Police Department’s behavioral health and wellness unit further expand and receive proper funding and support. Last year, Omaha implemented a program that pairs precincts with mental health co-responders. The program debuted shortly before the city settled with the family of Zachary Bear Heels who was shot with a Taser and beaten while handcuffed in June 2017. He was having a mental health crisis and died as a result of the officer’s conduct.

Harris pointed to the CAHOOTS program in Eugene, Oregon, and the STAR program in Denver as models she supports. These programs send mental health responders to some emergencies instead of, rather than alongside, police.

Snipes, an elected member of the Omaha Public Schools Board, told the Political Report in an email that she would take a holistic approach to public safety, including expanding the role of mental health professionals. 

“To be a 21st century city, we need to jettison 20th century politics,” wrote Snipes. “That means we need to show an openness to change and innovation.”

Snipes wants to establish an all-civilian police oversight board. And she told the Political Report that public safety requires addressing the root causes of crime, “including unemployment and underemployment, mental health, homelessness, poverty and inequities.”

During  a forum held by the League of Women Voters of Greater Omaha this month, Snipes criticized the mayor’s handling of protests. “The people should not have to wait on leadership,” said Snipes. “[Mayor Stothert] showed she was out of touch with the community when we were dealing with the social justice protests.”

NOISE reported last month that the ACLU of Nebraska obtained emails showing the city of Omaha and police had coordinated surveillance of racial justice organizers. Lieutenant Sherie Thomas told NOISE via email that officers acted in consultation with the city’s legal department to determine which sources of intelligence they could legally access. 

The events they monitored were generally regarded as protected First Amendment activities, including a sidewalk chalking event, a former NOISE reporter’s livestream of a City Council meeting, and a prayer vigil for James Scurlock, a Black protester killed by a racist white bar owner. 

Omaha Abolition Research (OAR) is among several local groups that have pushed for the city to move away from policing. In an email, the group told the Political Report that in different neighborhoods, “safety differences are not correlated with police presence. … Safety is correlated with economic stability or instability and the continued impact of class and racial divides.” 

OAR named affordable and safe housing, transportation access, a clean environment, and access to food and healthcare as some of the things that make a neighborhood safe.  OAR added that Omaha’s status as a city with a large per capita share of millionaires enables wealthy people to disproportionately influence the city’s priorities.

“Omaha would benefit greatly from a participatory budgeting process so that middle and lower class residents … are able to have a voice in how public funds are allocated,” explained the OAR team. 

Participatory budgeting is underway in Seattle, where community organizers and elected officials are using the process to reallocate funds cut from the police budget. Harris said in a forum in January that she would like to use participatory budgeting to “let the community members decide how funding will be spent.”

That could lead to investments in housing and transportation, which Harris named as two major issues affecting residents in the city. 

“In Omaha, people live in one area and jobs are in another,” Harris explained. “And our public transportation isn’t set up to conducively get people from their home to their job, or back from their job to their home if they have a late shift.” She pointed to the struggle to find living wage jobs as a key challenge for many community members, particularly people who were formerly incarcerated. 

Snipes expressed a similar concern during the League of Women Voters forum, citing a shortage of approximately 80,000 affordable housing units. She referenced a study from the Sherwood Foundation that found that the shortage is concentrated in majority-Black North Omaha.   

Gudgel echoes these stances. He told the Political Report that tackling issues like affordable housing, better public transportation, and access to higher education is the way to address the “poverty that breeds crime.” Gudgel also expressed an interest in having an independent police review board, decriminalizing marijuana, and demilitarizing the police. “Military grade weapons, such as tear gas, should never be allowed for use against civilians,” Gudgel wrote in an email. 

But Gudgel’s commitment to racial equity was called into question this month when anti-Black Lives Matter comments made by one of his primary campaign donors came to light. Gudgel, who is white, apologized and cut ties with the donor.

Neary, who has raised the most campaign funding among those challenging Stothert, did not respond to requests for an interview.

Despite Neary’s financial advantage, Hayes is skeptical he could beat Stothert in the general election. They make the case that Neary lacks the grassroots support necessary to build the kind of multiracial coalition they think it will take to win. The campaigns that Snipes and Harris are running are “emblematic” of Omaha politics shifting toward electing “a mayor that represents the people,” Hayes said.

The post This Election Could Transform Policing in Omaha appeared first on Bolts.

Most cities finalized their 2021 budgets last year in the usual way, with mayors, city managers, and council or commission members hashing out the details. But in Seattle, residents will get to decide over the coming months how to spend millions of dollars that would otherwise go to the police department.

In the wake of protests against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other Black people, a movement to defund police departments has taken shape across the country. Last year, organizers in many cities created “people’s budgets” that showed how officials could cut police funding and invest in housing, health care, and other social services. 

Few cities cut police department budgets in response to public pressure, but of those that did, Seattle went a step further in November by allocating $30 million to a participatory budgeting process that will give everyday people a say in how the money should be used. Twelve million dollars was directly diverted from the Seattle Police Department, while the remaining $18 million comes from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s Equitable Communities Initiative Fund, which is sourced from cuts to several departments and new taxes.

“Those closest to the problems are closest to the solutions,” reads a statement signed by 75 local organizations that advocated for what they call a solidarity budget. “Black, brown, Indigenous, and immigrant communities are most harmed by COVID-19, climate injustice, racism, and criminalization, and should be central to the process of transforming Seattle’s budget into one that serves all people.”  

Throughout the summer and fall of 2020, the groups called for a budget that divests from policing and uses participatory budgeting—a governance model with roots in Brazil—to invest in “priorities that can generate true public health and safety for all Seattle residents.”

“That really put forward a strong vision for the city that could then be strengthened and reiterated by folks who were marching and protesting, who were having meetings with their [elected officials] and seeking to hold folks accountable,” said Kristania De Leon, the director of partnerships and strategy at the Participatory Budgeting Project, a national organization that supports local campaigns. 

Two coalitions in particular, King County Equity Now and Decriminalize Seattle, worked to channel momentum from the streets into the city’s budgeting process, demanding that the City Council defund the Seattle Police Department by at least 50 percent and “reinvest that money into Black communities and toward community-led health and safety systems.”

“It was just a good combination of having the policy demands prepared, at the moment when the social movement opportunity provided us that opening. But without the movement on the ground, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Angélica Cházaro, an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle and assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law.

On Nov. 23, after an eight-week series of City Council meetings, more than 160 amendments, and vetoes by Mayor Jenny Durkan, the final budget announced by Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, chairperson of the Budget Committee, included an 18 percent cut to the police department, a portion of which was reallocated to participatory budgeting. 

“As we have throughout this spring and summer, we led with investments in our BIPOC community and support for our most vulnerable families and small businesses,” said Mosqueda in a media release. The budget also includes an agreement to reassess the participatory budgeting plan monthly and potentially increase the pot of funding. 

The concept for participatory budgeting was cemented in the 1980s by the Brazilian Workers’ Party, which sought to push past the electoral process and envision new ways of practicing democracy. In the U.S., participatory budgeting was piloted in 2009 when residents of Chicago’s 49th Ward demanded greater transparency about how the city was spending public funds. The interest in Chicago inspired residents in other cities like San Francisco and New York City to organize community-led budgeting projects. 

In 2019, New Yorkers participated in planning and voted on $39 million in projects in 32 City Council districts across the city, which has been one of the largest-scale participatory budgeting programs in the U.S. to date. Improvements to parks, libraries, public housing, and transportation are some of the things that participatory budgeting has funded. (The process was canceled in 2020 because of the coronavirus outbreak, but has been revived this year in some districts.)

Participatory budgeting is part of a global movement for solidarity economies, says Natalia Linares, communications organizer for the New Economy Coalition. The vision for the solidarity economy movement “also includes other elements like building the movement for worker owned cooperatives, building the movement for community land trusts, [and] permanently affordable housing,” she said. The Movement For Black Lives has also included participatory budgeting in its platform as part of a broader vision for community control of laws, institutions, and policies.

The idea of participatory budgeting came to fruition in Seattle during its 2015 Youth Voice, Youth Choice program that allowed young residents to give their input for neighborhood-level projects. Since 2017, all residents have had the opportunity to vote on improvements to streets, sidewalks, and parks. 

“I think one of the things that helped is that City Council members … were familiar with the idea of [participatory budgeting], it wasn’t completely new to them,” said Cházaro. But those earlier iterations have involved allocating just a few million dollars and were limited to projects carried out by the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, the Department of Transportation, and Parks and Recreation. Now, the pot of money is tens of times bigger and comes from a general fund, meaning it can be used for projects, and also ongoing programs, within most city departments. 

King County Equity Now is doing research that will inform how the participatory budgeting process will actually play out. Cházaro said they intend to involve community groups from across the city, including many Black-led organizations that have been fighting for racial justice for a long time. “This [activism] is built on … years and years of abolitionist organizing in Seattle,” she said.

The group reported that it has put together a team of more than 100 community-based researchers, “including youth, elders, people with different levels of experience in the criminal legal system, artists, healers, [and] educators].” Members of this research team are conducting online surveys (which are available in multiple languages) and in-person conversations in communities of color to identify needs and potential barriers to individuals getting involved in participatory budgeting.

“The deep history, rich legacy and strength of Black organizing in this region helped lay the foundation for much of this work,” a King County Equity Now spokesperson said in an email.

Their goal is to come up with strategies to make the process accessible to as many people as possible, including those experiencing homelessness and housing instability, people with disabilities, and formerly incarcerated people. They are also figuring out how to create an online participation system to ensure safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may require strategies for making internet access more widely available. Cházaro highlighted that organizers in Seattle “fought for money for Black-led research to inform participatory budgeting,” and ultimately received $3 million for this planning stage. 

Some local reporters have cast doubt on the effectiveness of the research and raised questions about how the money is being spent. Tammy Morales, the council member working directly with King County Equity Now, did not respond to a request for comment from The Appeal: Political Report in time for publication, but in December she rebuked a skeptical blogger, saying in an email that “Contracts which have predated this one haven’t received the same kind of scrutiny you’re offering here. So, I find it interesting that this particular contract has received so much attention from the onset.” 

Morales added that, “Participatory research is about building the capacity of our neighbors to understand what’s happening in their community and to increase civic engagement so they can inform future policy-making…To suggest that a greater standard or threshold is in order is to dismiss the people who stand to benefit most from this approach.”

In a presentation last month, organizers spoke about forming a steering committee made up of community members who will collaborate with multiple city departments to create a strategy for the participatory budgeting process based on this initial research. The process will include reviewing community-generated proposals, and creating a list of projects and programs that could receive funding, which community members will then vote on.

De Leon from the Participatory Budgeting Project said that the goal is not to create one-time projects and hope that sustained equity will come out of that; this is just one step that’s part of a larger vision of justice. “We’re looking at this as a system’s change. And it needs to be a long term, deep commitment.”

This story has been updated to include a comment from King County Equity Now.

This article was produced in partnership with Just Media, a national hub supporting young writers covering justice issues.

The post Seattle Cut Its Police Budget. Now the Public Will Decide How To Spend the Money. appeared first on Bolts.