Randy Villegas Called for Defunding the Police and Abolishing Prisons Years Before the National Movement

Randy Villegas, the Bernie Sanders-backed Democratic nominee challenging Republican Rep. David Valadao in California’s competitive 22nd Congressional District, advocated defunding the police, ending detention facilities, and reallocating law-enforcement resources to social services long before “defund the police” became a national slogan after George Floyd’s death in 2020.

He has continued that advocacy as a candidate.

In his 2022 University of California, Santa Cruz doctoral dissertation, “Voices from the Valley of Vulnerability,” Villegas examined youth activist groups in Kern and Fresno counties. The work documents campaigns that sought to redirect money from police budgets, reduce resources for school campus police and safety officers, end detention facilities, and pursue restorative justice as an alternative to punitive measures. It also frames the Central Valley’s political landscape as shaped by white supremacist violence and the Ku Klux Klan, while invoking the “prison industrial complex.”

As the California Globe previously reported in “Randy Villegas’ Mechanic Branding Masks Radical Academic Record and Socialist Agenda,” Villegas has argued that political activism and researcher “biases can actually be assets” for producing research, and he has rejected purely neutral fact-finding.

Through the taxpayer-supported Central Valley Freedom Summer program (documented in a 2019 paper co-authored by Villegas), high school and college students were embedded with groups including the Dolores Huerta Foundation, the California Immigrant Youth Justice Alliance, and 99Rootz. These organizations have advocated restorative justice, organized “through an abolitionist framework to shut down detention centers,” and criticized “elected officials and law enforcement” for maintaining power through “excessive criminalization.”

Villegas has quoted Faith in the Valley Kern executive director Joey Williams on the view that “true accountability is the police admitting what they did and reallocating money from their budget to provide services such as mental health support, counseling and community-based violence intervention,” and he highlighted the group’s role in negotiations that led to the firing of school safety officers and reduced investment in campus police by the Kern High School District. Villegas served on the board of Power California (99Rootz’s parent organization).

In 2020 the group published the piece “Police-Free Communities Are the Safest Communities,” which stated that “We must defund police and fund our futures now” and called for police off schools. Power California also posted and amplified now-deleted tweets explicitly calling for “defunding the LASPD” (Los Angeles School Police Department).

He has not walked back those positions and continues to support banning private detention centers.

When recently asked whether he would defund the police to increase library funding, he pointed to a prior op-ed he wrote condemning Kern County District Attorney Lisa Green’s 2016 statement that she would close “every library in the county” if necessary to put deputies on the street. Villegas called that approach “wrong” and urged shifting focus toward education, libraries, and social services rather than police funding.

“Randy Villegas chose to rehire a pedophile into a school, and now we find out that he wants to abolish prison and let these filthy predators wander our neighborhoods to prey on more kids. Villegas is a sick, broken freak who loves his far-left ideology far more than he loves keeping kids safe,” said RNC Spokesman Nick Poche.

“Socialist Randy Villegas abused taxpayer dollars and exploited schoolchildren to build a radical indoctrination pipeline dedicated to defunding police and abolishing prisons. He has spent his career using children as political pawns while failing to protect them when it mattered most. Villegas is a dangerous, morally bankrupt fraud who belongs nowhere near Congress, let alone another school board,” said NRCC Spokesman Christian Martinez.

The California Globe has previously covered Villegas’ academic framing of the Valley through critical race theory and the prison industrial complex, his socialist fundraising ties, and his silence on sexual-assault allegations against a fellow progressive candidate while the Visalia Unified School District board (on which he has served as a trustee) approved large confidential settlements in employee sex-abuse cases.

Voters in California’s 22nd District will ultimately decide whether Villegas’s long-standing advocacy for defunding police, reducing campus security, and abolishing detention facilities aligns with the public safety priorities of Central Valley communities.