Outside St. Petersburg’s overdue, still-under-renovation President Barack Obama Main Library, activists gathered last Saturday to decry Mayor Ken Welch’s proposed $17 million dollar increase to police budget, which the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) calls “unprecedented in St. Pete” and the “largest increase in city history.”
Pointing to some of the highest inflation rates in the country, an unprecedented rent crisis, a student homelessness crisis, and rapid gentrification, PSL, in a press release, said that more funding for police would not address those issues, but create even more problems. Instead, they’re asking for more public housing, education and social services.
“The police criminalize, brutalize, and even kill the working people of St. Pete,” the release said. “The real root of many crimes is poverty.”
