Defund Concord PD group to protest City Council July 7
Concord, CA— Protesters with the group Defund Concord PD — a group fighting to redistribute police funds into community-based, transformative approaches to public safety, healthcare, mental health, housing, job programs and violence prevention — plan to gather at Concord City Hall on July 7, at 6:00pm to take over the City Council public comment period and publicize their demands. After the City Council agreed to a pro-police union letter to secure police employment levels for the next three years, the group made a plan to pressure councilmembers to acknowledge and reverse their decision or be voted out of office. This is the first action in that plan.
- Protesters emphasize that equitable public safety is created through racial justice, quality education, affordable housing, and financial, food and health security more than police.
- This is the first of many actions Defund Concord PD will organize as they pressure City Council to represent the people instead of the police association that funds their candidacy campaigns.
Of the recent traction gained by Defund the Police movements, group co-founder Andrea Rios says, “This fight has been going on for years in Concord among individual groups fighting for Immigrant rights, housing rights, mental health services, and more. Defund Concord PD is working to unite those fights because they are interrelated. People need to understand that police do not represent public safety for all members of our community — especially Black, Brown, and Indigenous members. We need public safety to be equitable, and that starts with funding and resource redistribution.”
The belief of Defund Concord PD is that the police are responsible for tasks and programs for which they are ill-equipped to handle. Police are trained to be heavily militarized, violent enforcers of community control and treat all people as potential threats. According to the group’s press release: “It is well-known and well-documented that police criminalize Black and Brown people, resulting in deadly brutality. Given this background, we cannot expect police to appropriately assess nuanced situations, such as welfare checks for people with mental illness or those experiencing homelessness. The Concord Police Department misdemeanor arrest rate highlights this issue: it is higher than 31% of other California cities and disproportionately harms Black citizens. Police officers cannot be allowed to continue acting as judge, jury and executioners in their role as enforcers of state-sanctioned oppression.”
The group aims to prevent harm to Black, Brown and Indigenous People of Color (BIPoC) in Concord. They want to do this by taking these responsibilities (and their associated funding) away from the police to build up resources for organizations that are better suited to handle these situations. Defund Concord PD member and Regional Coordinator for Tenants Together Eduardo Torres says, “I think there are ways to move programs out of the police department so that Black and Brown people can feel safe to make complaints. The city of Concord’s Bed Bug complaint program used to be managed by the Concord police department, which prevented many renters from reporting their issues. But we advocated for a different method to report these problems, and now renters can avoid calling the police by using the city’s rental housing inspection program instead.”
For more information, visit Defund Concord PD.