Sonali Kolhatkar speaks with Melina Abdullah.

The demand for cities to “defund” their police stations is not a new one.

It is only new to those who are finally taking seriously a core demand of the Black Lives Matter movement.

While many are asking and debating what it means to “defund the police,” one need look no further than the work that activists have been doing for years.

In Los Angeles, where the liberal democratic mayor Eric Garcetti finally capitulated to a modest decrease in the LAPD’s outsize budget, Black Lives Matter’s LA chapter has laid extensive groundwork for a campaign that they called A People’s Budget LA.

A day after the historic budget cut, Dr. Melina Abdullah, a prominent member of Black Lives Matter LA spoke to The Intercept about it.

For more information visit PeoplesBudgetLA.com.

Melina Abdullah, Professor and Chair of the Department of Pan African Studies at California State University of Los Angeles, active with the Los Angeles chapter of Black Lives Matter.

Rising Up with Sonali is a radio and television show that brings progressive news coverage rooted in gender and racial justice to a wide audience. 

Rising Up With Sonali was built on the foundation of Sonali Kolhatkar's earlier show, Uprising, which became the longest-running drive-time radio show on KPFK in Los Angeles hosted by a woman. 

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