Salinas Reinvest Holding candidates accountable in equitable distribution of public funds

Downtown Salinas | Photo by Joe Livernois

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By Carissa Purnell 

This November, communities across the country will have the opportunity to lay the developmental framework they want to see their neighborhoods built upon. We will decide the future for the places we call home.

Aside from a federal election that has the potential to shift the narrative of power in our nation, as we look at local candidates — from school boards to city council races — our votes’ capacity to serve as a catalyst for reform are now more profound than ever. These unprecedented times of documented excessive use of force, police brutality and the militarization of our law enforcement agencies have inspired our generation to demand change and actively engage in our local political decision-making. While we have always known Black Lives Matter, it has not been reflected in how our local law enforcement offices patrol, enforce or practice.

We have to ask ourselves and those seeking to serve in public office: What is the price we pay for maintaining the status quo?

To help answer this question, I have been a part of a group of Salinas residents who have  been working in partnership with Harvard Co-Design, a research and community design group from the Harvard Graduate School of Design that provides technical assistance to community-based organizations and coalitions. A group of graduate researchers has been compiling a suite of evidence-based practices for local politics and governance, particularly around questions of community reinvestment, municipal budgeting processes and participatory planning.

The team found that an overwhelming body of data and academic literature negates the dominant false narrative present in our community — that bolstering law enforcement’s capacity and force inevitably leads to improved public safety outcomes. Contrary to belief, the police are not the primary input in determining the health and safety of our city.

Our Past

Since 2015, there has been an increase every year in funding for the Salinas Police Department. While its budget again increased this year, there was a $326,000 proposed reduction for library and community services and reduction in our city’s public works department.

Between March and July of 2014, Salinas Police Department officers were involved in four officer-involved shootings which resulted in the deaths of four Latino men and a federal investigation from the Office of Community Oriented Policing Services, U.S. Department of Justice. On March 1, 2019, Brenda Rodrigez Mendoza was shot and killed by Salinas police. She was a 20-year-old mother suffering from postpartum depression, was experiencing suicidal thoughts, and had run out of her bipolar medication.

Our Concern

The dominant message promoted following these deaths, and for decades prior, has been that our police departments are proven deterrents to crime, and an increase in their budgets would reduce the likelihood of future officer-involved shootings. However, while spending has increased nationwide for police departments, there is no evidence to suggest the increased allocation of dollars has made a statistically significant impact on crime. According to data collected from Urban Institute and Lincoln Institute of Land Policy since 1995, the U.S. homicide rate has dropped by a third, but police spending per capita, however, has increased by 46 percent nationally — and in some cities, by far more.

“Virtually every cross-sectional or correlational study published on the topic (of the causal impact of police on crime) finds either no impact of police on crime, or even a positive relationship between the two variables… a result at odds with both the beliefs and the behavior of policymakers on the issue,” writes University of Chicago economist Steven D. Levitt in “Using Electoral Cycles in Police Hiring to Estimate the Effects of Police on Crime.” 

But the research has proven how non-policing approaches statistically reduce crime. For example, across 20 years research has proven that in 264 U.S. citiesthe addition of 10 community nonprofits per 100,000 residents leads to a 9 percent decline in the murder rate, a 6 percent decline in the violent crime rate, and a 4 percent decline in the property crime rate, as described by researcher Patrick Sharkey and his team in “Community and the Crime Decline: The Causal Effect of Local Nonprofits on Violent Crime”.  Community philanthropy plays a direct, and proven role in reducing crime.

Our Findings

The impact of the nonprofit and philanthropic sector in reducing crime carries additional impact when compared alongside an increase in access to quality mental health care support. The Justice Policy Institute in 2019 suggested that “funds disproportionately allocated to policing could be more effectively invested in social services to improve health.”

The 2013 study “Preventing Youth Violence and Dropout: A Randomized Field Experiment” explored the impact of cognitive behavioral therapy, or CBT, and found the reductions in crime to be far more impactful than any increase in policing. The American Psychological Association defines CBT as a form of psychological treatment that has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including depression, anxiety disorders, alcohol and drug use problems, marital problems, eating disorders and severe mental illness, and affirms that numerous research studies suggest that CBT leads to significant improvement in functioning and quality of life.

The study highlighted the benefit-to-cost ratio could be as high as 30:1 from reductions in criminal activity alone. This intervention resulted in a 44 percent reduction in violent crime arrests, and increased graduation rates by 7 to 2 percent across the school-age youth in the program.

Our Ask

This collaborative effort to data dive with the Harvard team validates the rage, frustration and exhaustion so many of us in the community have felt and held for far too long. We can no longer wait for the change we have only dreamed of. We have now seen that change come alive in communities like ours, and seen the impact it can have.

Inspired by local sentiment and research, and in the spirit of Tuhiwai Smith’s approach to building power, we believe in using irrefutable data to “research back.” As Dr. Patti Lather notes, oftentimes ethnocentric assumptions and exploitative research are used to shift a community in alignment with the agenda of people in power, and now it is our time to demand the exact opposite.

We ask our local candidates running in November to acknowledge the expanse of research, but most importantly, acknowledge the sentiments of the community that lives what that research explores day in and day out.

We will hold candidates accountable to an equitable distribution of public funds. We ask candidates to commit to reinvesting the local law enforcement budget to social services and proven intervention strategies such as those explored in this project. We need more support for nonprofits, for proven mental health care strategies, and for youth development programs exactly as the data proves.

Our decision making now will forever impact how our community moves forward, and this election we have the opportunity to reinvest not only with empathy in the best interest of the children and families who call Salinas home, but in alignment with quantitative data and proven research that will build an equity-inspired community and will allow every resident to thrive.

Carissa Purnell has a Ph.D. in education. She has lived in Salinas for more than 15 years, is an activist and educator with a strong passion for soccer and East Salinas. She wrote this in collaboration with the Harvard Co-Design Team. 

Further reading: 

Making policing more affordable: Managing costs and measuring value in policing (2010).

United States Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs (2020).

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