Among a spurt of ballot initiatives passed last November to reform policing, Los Angeles County’s Measure J stood out for coming the closest to the ideals of the “defund the police” movement. The measure directed the county to invest 10% of its unrestricted funds into alternatives to incarceration and policing. But last week, that initiative suffered a blow when a coalition of law enforcement unions successfully challenged the measure in court.

The ruling highlights the challenges ahead for criminal justice funding reform, at a time when the city of Los Angeles is one of a number of localities already attempting to reverse or water down recent police budget cuts. But even without a new constitutional mandate, the current county board of supervisors may decide to pass a budget that incorporates Measure J anyway.

The historic charter amendment, approved by 57% of voters, was dubbed “Re-Imagine L.A. County,” and was hailed by reformers for its potential impact on racial justice. The funds, anywhere between $300 million and $1 billion, would go to policies like strengthening pretrial reform, providing rental assistance and supporting mental health care. 

While Measure J didn’t explicitly call for reducing the law enforcement budget, the measure would prohibit new investments from being used for the sheriff’s department or the jail and prison system. The Coalition of County Unions, which is affiliated with the deputy sheriffs’ union and a number of other unions for public employees, filed the lawsuit seeking to overturn it.

Blaine Meek, the chair of the Coalition of County Unions, said that “the lawsuit was not about the merits of Measure J; rather, it was simply to protect the constitutional authority of Boards of Supervisors,” which he said was impeded by a measure that would “abdicat[e] current and future Boards of Supervisors’ budgetary authority to the voters.”

The tentative ruling by L.A. County Superior Court Judge Mary Strobel held that the measure is “constitutionally invalid” because it restricted supervisors’ budgetary discretion. But the county had argued that the measure “does not prevent the board from directing the budget” or complying with legal requirements. It also pointed out that the board could reduce the 10% set-aside at any time; it would just require a four-fifths vote.

In a statement, Isaac Bryan, a Democrat in the California State Assembly who was an architect of Measure J, called the ruling a “direct attempt to subvert the will of the people,” after “voters spoke loud and clear in November.” 

The county hasn’t said yet whether it will challenge the ruling. But even it isn’t reversed, the current board of supervisors can still choose to craft a budget that follows Measure J’s mandate. Four of the five board members initially supported Measure J, and county spokesperson Lennie LaGuire says the board does intend to carry out “both the spirit and the letter of voters’ intentions.” The board has already proposed a $100 million allocation for programs in line with the measure’s “care first, jails last” priorities, she said.

The difference is that without Measure J on the books, nothing requires future boards of supervisors to follow that template, too. Lasting change to the county constitution was the intent of the ballot measure, says Eunisses Hernandez, the co-executive director of La Defensa, an organization that advocates for pretrial reform.

“You see how political moments come and go,” said Hernandez, who helped author Measure J. “In the future we could get a board that could be against everything we have worked for for over a decade.”

Already, at the city level, Los Angeles is one of many localities that has reevaluated its initial calls to cut police funding this year. Mayor Eric Garcetti has proposed a new budget that increases the department’s funding by $50 million, only a year after slashing it by $150 million with a pledge to reinvest that money into initiatives to help Black Angelenos. 

Ballot measures, which can be proposed via citizen petition in many states, are an expanding strategy among progressive organizers, who have used them to push through left-leaning change popular with voters without needing lawmaker buy-in. But lobbyists, special interest groups and lawmakers have taken recent steps to reverse voter-approved ballot measures on everything from Medicaid expansion to marijuana legalization.

Alec Karakatsanis, the founder and executive director of Civil Rights Corps, a nonprofit that advocates for racial and economic justice in the U.S. legal system, called the court decision on Measure J “a really shallow ruling.”

“Events like this are very revealing about where the true power in our society lies,” he said. “For all the platitudes about voting and democracy, when things happen that people in power don’t want to see, they have an infinite range of bureaucratic and judicial procedural tools to ensure that those things don’t happen.”