Making minor tweaks to law enforcement budgets will truly protect and serve our communities

With skyrocketing gas, food, and energy costs, all of us have gotten used to asking this question: what can I afford to lose? 

During this budget season, city officials have repeatedly asked New Orleanians a harder question: What programs can you live without?

New Orleanians simply cannot live without housing, health, safety, and a generation ready to inherit it. The Big Easy Budget Coalition is urging the city council to reject  budget cuts that would decimate the social safety net. Instead, the council should pull funds from larger departments that can absorb these cuts.

Amid a nationwide affordability crisis, New Orleans — the city with a growing rate of poverty in the poorest state in the country —  cannot afford to lose the progress it has made in housing, community safety, youth programming, and public health. 

New Orleans cannot afford to lose the right to counsel, or lose a hard-fought ecosystem of community safety programs. New Orleans can’t afford to cut young people out of work and opportunity, reduce mental health services, or abandon transit infrastructure , or slash a department that makes streets safer, and families healthier.

New Orleans can afford to fund its future

Earlier this year, the Vera Institute of Justice, in partnership with the Big Easy Budget Coalition,  released “7 Ways to Build a Thriving New Orleans,” which details how to make New Orleans a better place by investing in community safety alternatives, meeting residents’ basic needs, and creating a more inclusive budget. 

The proposed 2027 budget does not align with the city council’s priorities and its track record of investing in opportunity. It also doesn’t align with what residents have said they want in a budget. Our survey of more than 1,200 residents over the last three years shows consistently that housing, youth opportunities, infrastructure, mental health services, and programs for low-income people are top budget priorities.  

For years, respondents have said that we give too much to police and not enough to basic needs and services. This repeated misalignment dissolves public trust in local government. With hostile state leadership and an indifferent federal government, city officials need public trust to maintain a stable population despite dire economic forecasts and looming tax increases.

While the city can and should continue to look for other revenue streams to fund thriving services, this alone will not address misplaced priorities. It’s a choice — and a bad one at that  — to close a $77 million dollar gap by making deep cuts in departments that serve small communities and youth instead of cutting a fraction of large departments.

Let’s look at the budget math: A $10M cut to a small department like New Orleans Office of Health and Human Services is 62%. A $10M cut to a large department like the New Orleans Police Department is 6% of their budget–the impact of these cuts are not comparable or fair.

Over the past three years, NOPD has received tens of millions in recruitment, retention bonuses, and new vehicles while directly contributing to the budget crisis through massive overtime and misconduct scandals.

The city has to get serious about safety and recognize that a 6.5% reduction in NOPD’s budget ($10.6M) would free up enough money to fund youth programming at the Juvenile Justice Intervention Center ($430K), as well as other essential programs like the maternal and baby visits done by Family Connects ($628K), the low-barrier shelter ($5M), Right To Counsel for those facing eviction ($2.5M), workforce development programs for in-and out-of-school youth ($500K), Mobile Crisis Units ($250K) for those in crisis, juvenile public defenders for young people (105K), Domestic Violence program for survivors (150K) and school-based violence intervention for safer schools ($150K). 

We could even reverse cuts to workforce development and economic planning with more than 500K to spare. Budgeting is about choices, and the council can choose another way.

Programs like the Mobile Crisis Unit and On Scene Services accident responders have reduced the scope and burden on the NOPD. But instead of cutting the largest single expense in the general fund with a sordid history of misconduct, the mayor’s administration has proposed to cut these essential programs. 

It’s our contention that NOPD can live without $10 million dollars or recoup that in reductions to overtime, but the public cannot live with a department of health and human services without enough humans or services to meet their needs.

The city can also reduce the jail population to pre-pandemic levels. Even in neighboring “tough on crime” Jefferson Parish, when the population exceeds jailbeds, the sheriff’s office rolls out people who do not pose a risk to public safety. Not in Orleans, where we just expand the jail to new spaces, and often keep people in jail because they cannot afford even a small amount of bail.

Instead of decimating a low-barrier shelter for 296 people, address the jail’s 200-person overflow. Each person in the jail costs the city $53,000 per year, so reducing that number would make financial sense. 

Ending the jail overflow alone would save approximately $10.6 million annually.

We cannot see all cuts to police and corrections as off-limits. Especially when we know the alternative: asking the public to live without things that are essential to life: affordable housing, access to food, functional roads, a developed workforce, or programs for growing young people.

The Big Easy Budget Coalition envisions a New Orleans with twice as much funding for social services, not half. We are a diverse and growing alliance of advocates, residents, organizers, community groups, and service providers across New Orleans working to build safe and thriving communities, through budget investments that address violence at its root.

The City must serve the people, and the people have spoken.

The city council must use its power over the final city budget to spare cuts to programs that we can’t live without. Together, we have made New Orleans safer. Let’s continue to build a thriving New Orleans together. .

The Big Easy Budget Coalition, a group of over 40 organizations, is advocating for public investments that address the root causes of violence, including systemic disinvestment, poverty, lack of economic opportunity, and isolation.