Context: A City Familiar With Crisis, Skeptical of Promises

Los Angeles has long been a proving ground for public policy experiments born of scale, inequality, and political fragmentation. The city’s size and diversity magnify every failure of coordination. Housing shortages, mental health crises, and carceral overreach have been persistent features of civic life rather than episodic emergencies.

By the early 2020s, residents were deeply familiar with the pattern of declared reforms followed by limited delivery. Jail expansion plans advanced even as service gaps widened. Police budgets grew while encampments expanded. Voters were not short on rhetoric. They lacked evidence that the government could shift course without losing control of public safety or fiscal discipline.

It is within this environment that Eunisses Hernandez was elected to the Los Angeles City Council in 2022, representing District 1, which includes Highland Park, Chinatown, and portions of Northeast Los Angeles. Her election did not resolve these tensions. It did, however, place an explicitly care-centered framework inside a governing institution that had long treated punishment as the default response to social disorder.

Eunisses Hernandez and District 1

Hernandez is a lifelong resident of Highland Park and the daughter of Mexican immigrants. Before holding office, she worked as a criminal justice reform organizer and co-founded La Defensx, an organization focused on ending money bail and expanding non-carceral pretrial systems. Her work placed her at the intersection of legal reform, community organizing, and lived experience with the systems she sought to change.

She ran for office with the endorsement of the Democratic Socialists of America Los Angeles, unseating an incumbent in a race that emphasized grassroots organizing over institutional backing. Her platform reflected a throughline from her organizing work: public safety should be built through stability, care, and prevention rather than expansion of incarceration.

That framing placed her squarely in a political tradition often labeled abolitionist, a term that remains widely misunderstood.

What Abolition Means in a 2025 Governing Context

In contemporary discourse, abolition is often caricatured as an immediate dismantling of police and prisons without replacement. In practice, abolition as articulated by Hernandez and similar policymakers is neither instantaneous nor nihilistic.

Abolition in a 2025 governing context refers to a long-term project of reducing reliance on carceral systems by building alternative institutions that address the underlying drivers of harm. It treats incarceration and aggressive policing as system failures rather than permanent fixtures.

This framework has several defining characteristics.

First, abolition is additive before it is subtractive. It prioritizes building mental health services, housing stability, substance use treatment, youth programs, and restorative justice mechanisms. Only when these systems demonstrate capacity does it argue for reducing carceral footprint.

Second, abolition is iterative. It accepts that complex systems cannot be replaced in a single legislative act. Progress is measured through declining jail populations, reduced pretrial detention, and improved community outcomes over time.

Third, abolition is risk-aware. It does not deny the existence of violence or harm. It questions whether incarceration is the most effective or humane response in most cases and seeks evidence-based alternatives where possible.

In short, abolition is a governance philosophy concerned with system design, not a demand for institutional absence.

Measure J and the Care First Framework

The most concrete manifestation of Hernandez’s policy orientation predates her City Council tenure. Measure J, approved by Los Angeles County voters in 2020, mandates that at least 10 percent of locally generated unrestricted county funds be allocated to alternatives to incarceration. These funds support housing, mental health services, youth development, and restorative justice programs.

Hernandez played a key role in organizing for Measure J, framing it as a redirection rather than an expansion of public spending. The measure did not eliminate jails by decree. It constrained future budgets by reserving funding for community investment, thereby altering incentives over time.

Once in office, Hernandez aligned her council work with the Care First framework that Measure J embodies. At the city level, this has meant advocating against jail expansion, supporting non-carceral pretrial systems, and promoting harm reduction approaches to substance use and homelessness.

Coalition Building Under Pressure

None of these efforts occurred without resistance. Law enforcement organizations opposed Measure J. Some city officials expressed concern that care-based investments would weaken public safety. Media narratives often framed abolition as reckless or naive.

Hernandez’s approach to coalition building mirrored the strategy seen in Chicago’s Treatment Not Trauma effort. Rather than framing debates as moral confrontations, she emphasized outcomes and alignment with voter intent. Survivors of violence, formerly incarcerated individuals, service providers, and fiscal reform advocates were brought into the same conversation.

This coalition was not ideologically uniform. What united it was a shared assessment that the existing system produced poor results at high cost.

Her electoral victory itself reflected this strategy. Grassroots organizing replaced reliance on institutional endorsements. Campaign messaging centered on lived experience and pragmatic alternatives rather than abstract theory.

Implementation and Early Indicators

Care First is not a single program. It is a funding and policy orientation that reshapes how decisions are made.

Under Measure J, hundreds of millions of dollars have been earmarked for community reinvestment. These funds support mental health and substance use services, housing initiatives, youth employment programs, and restorative justice efforts. While county-administered, their presence reshapes city-level policy discussions by making non-carceral options materially viable.

At the city level, Hernandez has consistently opposed policies that expand jail capacity while supporting investments that reduce contact with the criminal legal system. This includes advocacy for gender-responsive services, alternatives to cash bail, and programs that intervene before crises escalate into criminal cases.

As with Chicago, comprehensive outcome data remains uneven. These systems are in build-out phases. What can be observed is directional change. Funding streams once reserved for incarceration are now structurally committed to alternatives. Policy debates now begin with care as a default option rather than an afterthought.

Community Impact Without Grand Claims

Claims of transformed neighborhoods would be premature. Los Angeles remains a city under strain. Homelessness persists. Violence has not disappeared. Care First does not offer a clean narrative arc.

What it does offer is evidence of institutional learning. District 1 has seen expanded access to services that previously required navigating fragmented systems. Community organizations report improved capacity to respond to crises without police involvement. Residents engaged in program design describe a sense of being addressed rather than managed.

This is not universal satisfaction. It is something more modest and more durable: responsiveness.

Batting Average, Not Perfection

As with Treatment Not Trauma, the value of the Care First approach lies in its trajectory rather than its endpoint. The question is not whether every intervention succeeds, but whether the system improves its batting average.

Are fewer people jailed pretrial because they are poor? Are more crises met with clinicians rather than handcuffs? Are public dollars increasingly aligned with prevention rather than punishment?  All of these questions are valid and come from critics of this approach.  But moving the needle in the right direction, after years of failures by threat of incarceration-as-a-solution, when it clearly does not work, has proven valuable to the lives of the people living there.

By these measures, Los Angeles has begun to move. The pace is uneven. Political opposition remains. Fiscal pressures constrain expansion. Yet the direction is discernible.

What This Case Adds to the Record

Eunisses Hernandez’s work does not resolve the debate over abolition. It reframes it. By anchoring abolition in budgeting, service delivery, and coalition governance, it moves the concept out of abstraction and into administrative reality.

Like the Chicago case, it demonstrates that progressive governance need not rely on maximalist promises. It can operate through constrained systems, accept partial victories, and still produce meaningful change.

In a political environment saturated with declarations of failure and inevitability, Care First offers something quieter and more instructive: evidence that care-based approaches can be integrated into large, complex governments without abandoning fiscal responsibility or public safety.

That is not a conclusion. It is a data point. And for readers evaluating whether progressive governance can deliver under pressure, data points matter.