HomeMy WebLinkAboutHeidi Harmon_ please take action!Dear Mayor Harmon and San Luis Obispo City Council,
I hope that this message reaches you well. I know that you’re probably receiving a large amount of emails, but I ask that you please consider the reasons behind this sudden onset of
emails as a genuine need for serious, radical change.
My name is Eddie and I am currently attending Cal Poly as a to-be 4th year. I will be living in SLO for the 2020-2021 academic year, and so I request that San Luis Obispo City Council
adopt a city budget that prioritizes community well-being and the residents of SLO by redirecting funding from the police force.
In 2019, San Luis Obispo allocated 36.3 million dollars to our police system, which amounts to 27.5% of the total budget. Just 9.7 million (7.3% of the budget... less than 10%!) went
towards community development, and only $1.4 million went towards housing development (even less percent!). This is a huge problem. We should also take into consideration the fact that
in 2021, we’ll have an estimated $8.6 million deficit due to the current coronavirus pandemic. I am extremely uneasy that there hasn’t been a concrete plan on how the city will make
up for these shortcomings. Thus, I believe that SLO can rebuild these funds by divesting the police department budget!
I hereby demand that City Council begin meaningfully defunding the SLO Police Department and reallocating those funds towards programs that effectively encourage a safer and more equitable
community. We desperately need more funding for mental health services, substance abuse treatment, and affordable housing programs; this would undoubtedly reduce the need for such extensive
funding for the police force in the first place. Further, the need for affordable housing programs and drug abuse rehabilitation centers is especially critical in SLO, where our homeless
population is unusually high. You need to rethink our budget so that it better reflects the needs of the SLO community.
As you probably already know, police reform is not enough. Innocent lives are being lost at the hands of police officers. Although it is easy to forego these tragedies as numbers, we
must remember that each individual killed/harmed by the police is not just a statistic. They had a mother, father, spouse, children, a family. We have to take a hard look at how the
socioeconomic system, which operates off of colonialist structures of white supremacy and institutionalized methods of oppression, fails to serve the community. Please, allow us to
come together to think critically about how large of a part police officers should be taking within SLO.
I urge you to revise the budget for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, and to invest in the people, not the police.
Thank you in advance!
Best,
Eddie Railsback
edenrailsback@gmail.com
3108011613