Budgeting By and For the People

Melina Abdullah, Ph.D., is a fixture among racial justice activists in Los Angeles, leading Black Lives Matter LA (BLMLA)’s protests and actions from the campus of California State University, Los Angeles, where she’s a professor. In 2024, she became Cornel West’s choice of vice president for his independent presidential run.

As an outspoken abolitionist, Abdullah has championed defunding the police using a concrete, practical, and deeply democratic method of participatory budgeting in which city residents decide how their tax dollars should be spent.

In a conversation in January 2024, Abdullah pointed out how BLMLA was poised to prove that defunding and abolishing police were not impossible. BLMLA’s People’s Budget survey, conducted prior to the May 2020 police killing of George Floyd, revealed that, when given the opportunity to allocate city funds, most people choose public well-being, health, and safety, rather than law enforcement and punitive measures.

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Sonali Kolhatkar: Where did the idea of participatory budgeting come from, and was it always a pathway toward reimagining public safety?

Melina Abdullah: Some people think that Black Lives Matter came up with participatory budgeting, that it’s some new thing that was developed in order to defund the police. We do want participatory budgeting to be used to defund the police, but the concept goes back many, many decades. It’s very deeply rooted in the concept of democracy.

When you talk about participatory budgeting, you’re talking about people having an investment in how their tax dollars are spent. And so, rather than having policymakers or elected officials determine without any public input where the dollars go, people actually have a say-so and a voice in where their dollars go.

We know that without the voice of the people, special interests tend to influence local, state, and federal budgets to spend an exorbitant amount—often the lion’s share of the budget—on policing and militarism. By special interests, I mean lobby groups like police associations, which are not unions but which wield tremendous power, as well as defense contractors.

Kolhatkar: How have participatory budgeting processes been applied toward defunding police in Los Angeles specifically?

Abdullah: In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic first hit Los Angeles, we started looking around and asked why they were still spending upward of 50 percent of the city’s general fund on police. Nobody was even outdoors. What we needed were resources for people staying in their homes and mental health support. We’re still in the midst of the worst public health crisis in global history and need resources to address it. That’s where our funds should be going, but upward of 50 percent of the city’s general fund is spent on police. We should be spending money on services, not police.

We convened a meeting with virtually every Black organization in greater Los Angeles, and we all agreed that we wanted to fund services, not police. If we as organizers felt that way, what did Black Los Angeles feel? To answer that question, we launched the People’s Budget survey. What came back was that people’s top two funding priorities are mental health and housing. The top two things they wanted to cut funding to were police and traffic enforcement.

Those priorities intensified in May 2020 when there was a worldwide uproar following the state-sanctioned lynching of George Floyd. People started asking: What would police abolition look like? What would new systems of public safety look like? We had collected two to three months of data before Floyd’s murder, and then after May 2020, people wanted to defund the police even further. That’s what the People’s Budget sought to amplify.

Since 2020, we’ve done that survey every single year. We’ve organized town hall meetings, workshops, work groups, and focus groups to figure out how we can get to where most people want to be. Black women most intensely want to move away from oppressive models of policing and toward this resource-rich, community-focused, system of public safety.

Kolhatkar: How has the People’s Budget been received by elected officials, such as the mayor and city councilmembers?

Abdullah: Former L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti refused to receive the People’s Budget presentation. We were able to present it to the L.A. City Council because then City Council President Herb Wesson invited us to do so. One of the things that we believe cost Wesson his reelection in 2020 was a complete turn in how he viewed public safety.

One of his most famous quotes from that time was, “I won’t always be an elected official, but I’ll always be a Black man, a Black father, and a Black grandfather.”

As he ran for his next seat, he actually rejected the endorsement of the Police Protective League and the Association for Los Angeles Deputy Sheriffs. He sent the endorsement back saying, “I don’t want it anymore.” And we think that probably cost him that seat.

After Floyd was lynched, there was a Black Lives Matter uprising and a period of racial reckoning. In order to kind of appease that movement, many elected officials were willing to hear us out. That year we gave our presentation inside city council chambers, and it was particularly compelling. By 2021, a backlash had begun, and we weren’t invited back by the full city council. We had to push Herb Wesson’s successor, Nury Martinez, who we later found out was not a fan of Black people, to allow us into that space to give a presentation.

By 2022, very few elected officials or city councilmembers would hear our presentation. So, city councilmembers who see themselves as allies like Mike Bonin and Marqueece Harris-Dawson were eager to receive that information. When Karen Bass was elected mayor in 2023, we were able to give the People’s Budget presentation to the mayor.

The mayor of Los Angeles didn’t invite us to City Hall. Instead, she came to our ’hood and our home: the Center for Black Power in Africatown, which some people call Leimert Park, the birthplace of Black Lives Matter. She came there and, before a packed room of hundreds of mostly Black Angelenos, we gave the People’s Budget presentation to her.

Unfortunately, when we gave that presentation, it was toward the end of the budget process. So even though she received the information, she’d already gone along with what many advisors told her to do and had, in fact, increased the police budget.

In 2024, we’ve been invited to present her the results of the survey and the results of the entire People’s Budget process earlier in the budget process. We hope that it’s considered as she builds the new budget. Hopefully, she’ll consider us as deeply as she considers police interests.

Kolhatkar: Can you put the Los Angeles effort around participatory budgeting into a national context? Is L.A. further along than other cities? In addition to Minneapolis, we’ve seen flashpoints in cities like Detroit, Oakland, and Seattle, where there’ve been efforts to defund the police.

Abdullah: Sure. Since 2020, we’ve been convening with groups located everywhere from Santa Clara, California, to Des Moines, Iowa, to discuss a People’s Budget process. There are now between 30 and 50 cities replicating this process. And there are some groups whose participatory budgeting work predates our own.

It’s gaining traction. People, no matter what their political stance, believe in the concept of democracy. They say, “Taxes are our money. We should have a say in how they are spent.” We’re able to get lots of folks on board around that.

In fact, what we see also is that, regardless of political persuasion, people tend to lean toward defunding the police. They may not like that term “defunding” anymore, but when they see a simple pie chart presented to neighborhood councils in Los Angeles, they see in red that 54 percent of the city’s general fund goes to police. Everybody—from the Howard Jarvis tax people to Black folks in South Central Los Angeles and Watts—knows that’s too much money for police.

That’s true in Los Angeles, and it’s true in Oakland, where I know people like Cat Brooks and the Anti Police-Terror Project are also working toward defunding police. It’s also true in Minneapolis, where the organization Black Visions is working on issues like this. These are just a few of the 30 to 50 municipalities that have been part of these People’s Budget calls.

Kolhatkar: When we look at the results of the People’s Budget surveys, people were happy to designate a mere 1.64 percent of the entire city’s budget to police, which is quite remarkable. As an abolitionist, do you want to see something on that order or zero percent?

Abdullah: I say zero! There are very few Black people who feel safer when a police cruiser pulls up behind them in traffic. So, when we think about that, we know intuitively as Black people that police don’t keep us safe. Police rarely prevent crime. They might respond to a crime after it’s happened, but they are only successful in solving the most egregious crimes less than 2 percent of the time.

We have to do a better job talking about alternative models, particularly ones that have already proven to be successful. Newark, New Jersey, for example, has invested deeply in community safety programs. Phenomenal work is also being done by people like Aqeela Sherrills—cofounder of the Community Based Public Safety Collective in Watts. These efforts have been much, much more successful in making communities safer than policing.

The most brilliant economist that I know, Dr. Julianne Malveaux, says that budgets are moral and ethical documents. If we spend almost $4 billion on police in the city of Los Angeles, that’s $4 billion that could have provided housing, health care, and mental health care for all. We have to be willing to take funding from oppressive forces and invest in the things that actually make us safe.

So, yes, my position is let’s completely abolish police and use those funds to invest in forms of public safety and wellness that are rooted in community.

Kolhatkar: What will it take to spread this idea of participatory budgeting in cities around the country? It’s one thing for it to work on a local level. It’s another thing to realize that vision nationally. And even though cities like Minneapolis and Oakland are working on defunding, the U.S. is a huge country. Are you hopeful that this idea of deciding budgets in a participatory way is catching on?

Abdullah: Yes. People like it, and it’s going to catch on. Participatory budgeting is not abolition, but it is one way of pulling masses of people into a process and engaging them in ways that empower communities to radically re-envision and reimagine the world and work toward the world of our greatest hopes and dreams.

This excerpt, adapted from Talking About Abolition: A Police-Free World Is Possible by Sonali Kolhatkar (Seven Stories Press, 2025), appears by permission of the publisher.