Melina Abdullah, Ph.D., is a fixture among racial justice activists in Los Angeles, leading Black Lives Matter LA (BLMLA)’s protests and actions from the campus of California State University, Los Angeles, where she’s a professor. We do want participatory budgeting to be used to defund the police, but the concept goes back many, many decades. When you talk about participatory budgeting, you’re talking about people having an investment in how their tax dollars are spent. Kolhatkar: How have participatory budgeting processes been applied toward defunding police in Los Angeles specifically? Kolhatkar: Can you put the Los Angeles effort around participatory budgeting into a national context?