By Maia Surendra
LOS ANGELES, CA — The Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors passed measures this week that included the creation of a Care First and Community Investment Committee (CFCI), a Public Safety Realignment plan, and $187.7 million dollars in funding for the CFCI committee.
The LA County Board of Supervisors has been working on this plan with two organizations, the JusticeLA Coalition and the Re-Imagine LA Coalition. JusticeLA works with communities and organizations to redirect funding from incarceration towards communities, and Re-Imagine LA is a group of different entities that focuses on health, jobs, and housing for the LA community.
The county currently has a mission called “Care First, Jails Last,” which began with the Measure J Advisory Committee. (Editor’s note: the La Defensa clarifies: “the county has been working on this initiative for almost three years now, prior to the creation of the Measure J Committee.) Essentially, the measures passed by the board transform the Measure J Committee into the CFCI 
committee, and help to further the Board’s Care First mission.
The mission of Care First is to give those who are marginalized a voice in the matters of divesting from mass incarceration and investing in the community. The CFCI committee will be made up of community members who are appointed, and they will work with different county entities to determine how to implement the funding passed.
The Board also implemented the Public Safety Realignment Team (PSRT), which is intended to direct AB 109 funding towards the Care First Mission. (Correction: “the County adopted the language around care from community organizations during ATI process, not on their own” as reported in this article).
Essentially, AB 109 is the bill that was passed which redirected tracking of low-level offenders to the county level. The PSRT recommends that 80 percent of AB 109 funding will be directed towards community organizations.
With these measures being passed, the Board has partnered with two organizations who have long fought for funding and resources to be directed back to the community to do just that.
JusticeLA and Re-Imagine LA call the funding a step in the right direction, but that there is much more work to be done to create equity of resource access in the LA community, they said.
