Year after George Floyd’s murder, what happened to ‘defund the police?’

Police stand watch at Vincent Lugo Park in the San Gabriel Valley, May 22, 2021. Photo by Amy Ta/KCRW

Tuesday marks one year since George Floyd walked into a store to buy cigarettes and ended up dying at the hands of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. Immediately afterward, people nationwide pushed for defunding the police.

But now with gun violence up, LA’s police budget is going up too. The LA City Council voted last week to hire about 250 more officers, which is the opposite of what activists have been demanding for the last year.

KCRW looks at the state of policing with LA City Councilman Marqueece Harris-Dawson and Andrea Headley, a scholar of racial equity and criminal justice policy at Georgetown University.