HomeMy WebLinkAboutSLO county is not innocent—racism and police violence are very much at home here—let’s change thatDear Mayor Harmon and San Luis Obispo City Council,
My name is Sydney Leonard I am a resident of Los Osos. I am writing to demand that the San Luis Obispo City Council adopt a city budget that prioritizes community well-being, and redirects
funding away from the police, with the eventual goal of total police and prison abolition.
In 2019, the City of San Luis Obispo allocated 36.3 million dollars to our police system, an inordinate 27.5% of our total budget. This is compared to just 7.3% of the budget, $9.7 million,
allocated towards community development, with only $1.4 million towards housing development. Next year, the city estimates that there will be a $8.6 million deficit as a result of the
pandemic. The city may recoup these funds by decreasing the police budget.
I demand that the City Council begin meaningfully defunding the San Luis Obispo Police Department and re-allocate those funds to programs proven to more effectively promote a safe and
equitable community. We need funding for community-based mental health services, substance abuse treatment services, affordable housing programs, not police. I demand a budget that
reflects the ACTUAL needs of San Luis Obispo residents.
History has shown that police "reform" is not enough. No more money, and more importantly, no more lives must be lost to police. We must take a hard look at the way the current system
in place fails to serve-and in fact actively harms-our community, and come together to reimagine the role of police in our city.
I am urging you to completely revise the budget for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, and to invest in the people, not the police.
This is an auto-generated email as I’m sure you can tell but I want to take a moment to talk about all the negative and traumatic interactions my peers and I have had with police in
this county, as well as the reasons why I believe the entire system of policing and incarceration we are using in this county and in this country are terribly brutal and counterproductive.
There is not one nonwhite friend of mine who has not seen or experienced police racism directly in this county. My partner, for example, a Hispanic man, was stopped and approached multiple
police officers only a few years back FOR TRYING TO ENTER HIS OWN HOME because they believed he looked suspicious. This was on Los Osos Valley Road, which is SHAMELESSLY OVERPOLICED,
undeniably just because it is the poor and brown side of town. I have never once seen a cop car in the arbors, or on San Luis Drive. But I never fail to see one passing through this
area. This was not the first time my partner was harassed by local police for his race and unless we act it won’t be the last. I am glad he has yet to experience violence because of
it. But my brother has. He was teargassed while a black student was speaking at a recent peaceful local protest. The use of tear gas is banned by the Geneva convention as a war crime.
What is it doing here in “the happiest place on earth?”
And speaking of that old tired phrase, what has San Luis been doing lately to actually live up to that title? Because what I’ve experienced is a WHOLE lot of gentrification, in which
small businesses and empty lots are being bulldozed to make room for fancy boutiques and WASP-y overpriced suburban housing. I’ve seen the blackface scandal unfold at Cal Poly, the
whitest CSU in the whole system. I’ve seen “our” sheriff allow the torture and abuse and eventual murder of a mentally ill inmate at the county jail and then try to backtrack and cover
it up. Disgusting. I’ve heard tales of a store in the Pismo area selling racist memorabilia. And the Nazi who ran over Robert Forbes in Sacramento recently? Came from San Luis Obispo
if you look up his records. I went to San Luis High, which was extremely racially segregated and clique-y and whose staff was extremely condescending to my Indian friend when he reached
out in order to request more diversity in the curriculum. Racism and classism run deep here and it is VERY clear at all times that the local nonwhite people, the local poor and homeless
people, and even the local students are extremely unwanted in this community, which caters almost exclusively to wealthy white retirees. San Luis needs to stop pretending it is some
kind of happy haven because it only is for a certain kind of person and while that makes me desperately want to leave and find someplace better I don’t want to be forever ashamed to
call this my hometown. We have to roll up our sleeves and fix it!
To me, this would mean eventually totally disbanding the police force, banning ICE from the county, bulldozing the jail and CMC and the entire mini prison-industrial complex we have
going on on that side of town, and completely re-investing those resources into desperately needed social programs like refunding education, supporting healthcare for all, providing
a real infrastructure of mental health resources, providing housing to the homeless and affordable housing for all, supporting local food banks, giving better job resources, and fostering
a sense of well being and community rather than a sense of resentment and fear. Crime is not random. It is a product of the ways in which our society fails people. We pour an ENORMOUS
amount of resources into patrolling for potential crime, investigating crime, punishing crime and holding offenders, criminal courts, etc. At almost every point in this elaborate system
bias, malice, indifference, misinformation, corruption, etc. can slip in and on the whole we end up doing more harm than good. No other country in the world kills more people by police
force or incarcerates more of its population. Does any of it really make sense from a preventing or controlling crime standpoint? Not really. If people had the resources they needed
to thrive to begin with there wouldn’t be so much crime. If whatever prison system we had actually prioritized rehabilitation with embedded counselors and mental health experts, job
programs and education, and some basic respect for prisoners rights as a human being, prisons might be a place where the problem of crime is actually addressed (see Germany) rather
than a place where rape is almost expected, prison labor is exploited to line the pockets of capitalists, and horrid human rights abuses leave inmates worse off than they were before.
The brutal methods we use now betray the intent—prison and policing was never meant to be a tactic of protection but a tactic of white supremacist control. Please see the documentary
13th. No amount of reform will change this since it is baked into the structure of the system itself. (Remember the Stanford prison experiment? Brutality was brought out in the participants
by the mere structure of their relationship.) We need total overhaul.
Thank you for your time,
Sydney Leonard
1325 Santa Ynez Avenue, Los Osos, 93402
sydneya.leonard@gmail.com
805-748-2113
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