Beyond the Budget: Community Organizing To #DefundNYPD and City Hall Complicity
Occupy City Hall - June 30, 2020 New York City (Credit: Pamela Drew / Flickr)
On June 12th, the New York City Council offered New Yorkers a budget proposal that failed to satisfy the $1 billion demand to defund the NYPD or meaningfully reinvest in education, housing, and healthcare for Black and brown communities—amounting to what activists have described as “budgetary musical chairs”. Rather than shrinking the scope of the department, or even implementing a hiring freeze (as has been imposed on other city agencies, including teachers) the $880 million “cut” was achieved primarily by redirecting NYPD expenses, such as shifting the NYPD’s budget toward “school safety” and moving NYPD spending on traffic enforcement into the Department of Transit.
Why, in a time of such deep crisis and suffering across our city, do most city and state officials continue to believe that punitive policing will solve the problems of unaffordable healthcare, crumbling public infrastructure, and frayed community relations?
The Vote
On July 1st, the compromised budget passed as news outlets like CNN and the Wall Street Journal erroneously announced that $1 Billion had been cut from the NYPD. De Blasio and the City Council attempted to publicly align themselves with the most robust protest movement in US history while simultaneously preventing any meaningful reduction to the NYPD’s operational budget. Many councilmembers, already under weeks of public pressure, instead spun their support for the problematic budget.
Queens councilmember and co-chairman of the Council’s Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus (BLAC) Daneek Miller actually suggested that demands to defund the NYPD were not from New Yorkers, remarking, “We can’t allow folks from outside our community to lecture us about Black lives and what we need in our communities.” Brooklyn councilmember and council majority leader Laurie Cumbo echoed her colleague’s claim, stating “These are individuals who have never been seen before, been active before,” and more egregiously remarked, “This is not being led by the Black community or Black voices. It's really unfortunate. It's disrespectful.” But Councilmembers’ attempt to delegitimize #defundNYPD contradicts what New Yorkers know to be true from participating in protest movements such as Occupy City Hall, expertly coordinated by Black organizers from historically Black New York neighborhoods precisely to call attention to the city’s budget and provide mutual aid to vulnerable New Yorkers—even while facing NYPD raids of the very same police brutality they were organizing against.
Other members of the BLAC caucus deflected scrutiny over the compromised budget by attempting to highlight the Council’s own record on working towards police and criminal justice reform. Bronx councilmember Vanessa Gibson in her statements supporting the budget reminded New Yorkers that “police reform did not begin or end today,” while Manhattan councilmember Margaret Chin emphasized past measures to curb the NYPD’s controversial and racist “stop and frisk” practices.
The significance of these comments is three-fold. First, the claim that the hundreds of community organizations along with thousands of activists, organizers, and protesters who have demanded their elected officials defund the NYPD are not from local communities, nor led by Black leadership, is a stunning erasure of the tireless organizing work by local groups and activists—most often led by Black women, queer, Indigenous, and Latinx/immigrant leaders, communities, and collectives. Furthermore, to claim that the demands to defund the NYPD were coming “from folks outside our community” also belies the consistent problems that policing and mass incarceration have wrought against Black and Brown communities in New York City for decades. Police violence is not a new issue in New York, and neither are the clear calls to change a bloated and punitive system. Finally, these comments reveal our BLAC councilmembers’ complicity in both historically enabling and empowering police budgets at the expense of critical social services, and also in passing half-measure reforms that ultimately fall short of truly protecting Black and Brown communities from police violence.
Where We’ve Been, and Where We’re Going
The broader context of this local budget fight is, of course, the growing nationwide and international wave toward abolitionist politics—growing in tandem since the mid-1970s alongside the United States’ steep trajectory towards becoming the world’s largest jailer. Particularly since the 1990s, alongside yet another spate of police brutality in the city, New Yorkers have been doing this work as longtime organizers, academics, and activists building a path towards a substantive reimagining of public safety. Because of such skillful organizers, “Defund the Police” has quickly become a popular demand across the country over the previous month, and has been openly questioned or debated. But this is not a new demand from New Yorkers. It’s one that actually precedes the mass uprisings following the murder of George Floyd in May. Organizers and activists have been incredibly specific and precise in their demands to reduce city spending on policing, and have clearly stated they would “not be satisfied by fuzzy math,” and crucially, that cutting at least $1 billion from the NYPD this year was “the floor, not the ceiling.” These explicit demands from local New Yorkers reflect the broad-based need for transformational change, and the limitations of incremental reform.
While it’s true that NYC has put forth decades of police reforms, the problem, as activists have outlined clearly, is that these reforms neither address nor prevent the harms that police cause. One example, particularly critical to our current crisis in the wake of George Floyd’s murder by asphyxiation, is the long history of New York City’s ineffective reforms to address police killings by chokeholds.
Long-time New Yorkers will remember that in 1994 NYPD officers choked 22-year old Ernest Sayon to death in Staten Island and also killed 29-year old Anthony Baez using a chokehold in the Bronx. Yet, no officer was held accountable as local residents protested vehemently for reforms. Critically, however, both killings had occurred just over a year after chokeholds were actually banned by the NYPD in 1993. That ban, predictably fought by police unions and pro-law and order electeds, was enacted after community outrage over the 1991 police killing via chokehold of Frederico Pereira in Queens. This 1993 ban was actually a clarification and enhancement of an earlier 1985 rule against chokeholds, which specified that the tactic could not be used except in the cases when an officer fears for their life. To assess the efficacy of these incremental police protocol reforms, fast forward to 2014, when the world watched the horrific footage of NYPD Officer Daniel Pantaleo using an explicitly banned chokehold on Eric Garner, without any dispute or recourse from fellow officers, who along with bystanders witnessed Mr. Garner desperately say, “I can’t breathe” 11 times before he was killed.
Occupy City Hall - June 30, 2020 New York City (Credit: Pamela Drew / Flickr)
For more than 5 years after his death, Eric Garner’s family has led a fight for police accountability that finally culminated in the June 2020 Eric Garner Anti-Chokehold Act.
In that time—between 2014 and 2020—996 New Yorkers reported to the Civilian Complaint Review Board that they had been put in a chokehold by NYPD officers. The new legislation, an incremental victory achieved in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, now criminalizes police’s harmful use of chokeholds, which theoretically would allow survivors or family members of victims to pursue charges of “aggravated strangulation” against officers. Even this limited reform, however, has been met with outcry from police unions and officers themselves who do not think their job can be performed without the unfettered right to choke, even lethally, New York civilians. It bears mentioning as well that despite the 35-year ban on NYPD chokeholds, no officer, including Pantaleo, has yet to be found guilty of any criminal wrongdoing.
The case study of New York chokehold legislation underscores the fatally slow, and arguably ineffective path of relying on marginal reforms in order to curb lethal encounters between officers and civilians. This is not to say that these struggles are futile—on the contrary, these fights, most often led by Black women, are the tip of the spear pushing us all toward a more just world. But the conception of justice we need does not end at hard-won police accountability. It must extend to ending the conditions of exploitation and poverty that produce social instability from the start. There is a world-changing and life-saving difference between what Critical Resistance scholars call “reformist reforms” and “abolitionist reforms.” The leadership of New Yorkers like Iris Baez, mother of Anthony, Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, and his daughter, the late Erica Garner, has been pivotal in sustaining the movement of community organizations and grassroots collectives in communities most impacted by NYPD violence. Broad-based coalitions like the Movement for Black Lives, FTP Formation, Communities United Against Police Reform, and local organizations including Justice Committee, VOCAL-NY, and Equality4Flatbush, were not only prominently engaged in police accountability activism as part of the wave of mass uprisings, but have in fact been actively leading organizing efforts that effectively respond to New York’s chronic disinvestment from healthcare, housing, and the working-class (except those in the punishment industry) in local Black and Brown communities for many years.
The call to defund police asks us to take violence seriously, and view it systemically. Distinguished scholar and co-founder of Critical Resistance Ruth Wilson Gilmore has argued, “Police killings are the most dramatic events in a contemporary landscape thick with preventable, premature deaths.” Gilmore’s work documents and describes the escalation of “organized violence” as it accompanies the state’s “organized abandonment” of places and peoples, primarily poor and mostly of color, through the same neoliberal policies of disinvestment which have bolstered the unparalleled use of police force and incarceration to solve social problems.
The staggering over-investment by US cities and states in policing and incarceration over the last 40 years has occurred in tandem with the radical disinvestment in all other public sectors. Schools, hospitals, parks, public transportation, affordable housing, and all forms of social welfare have been drastically cut most often by politicians who claim the private sector can better handle these public needs. Yet in practice, while access to life-affirming public resources has been slashed, the state’s involvement in people’s lives has grown through the massive expansion of police forces, militarized technology, prisons and jails. These carceral systems disproportionately impact, and ultimately shorten the lives, of poor Black and Brown New Yorkers.
Whether we agree on the need for police or not, the Council’s budget decision reflected again the privileging of police over every other civic and social need for New Yorkers. As Public Advocate Jumaane Williams put it simply before the budget vote, at the very least, “If we have a hiring freeze for every single city agency, that should include the N.Y.P.D.” The passed budget did not.
The critical misfire of the New York City Council this month was to underestimate the intelligence and resolve of New Yorkers who are everyday more boldly resisting state violence; as well as to overestimate their own political power—granted by us, their constituents—and the efficacy of superficial police reforms. Although the people’s battle for the budget was lost this round, the City Council and Mayor de Blasio would do well to study up on the long and ongoing struggles for justice amongst Black, Brown and all working-class New Yorkers. We want an end to police violence, yes, and also to the violence of impoverished healthcare, under-funded education systems, the violence of evictions and skyrocketing rents, and the interpersonal violence that festers within the United States as a result of this profound dis-investment in human needs and well-being. As activists have loudly and clearly declared: $1 billion was never enough. Rather than signalling an end, New York organizers worked to transform Occupy City Hall into Abolition Park following the budget vote, and the NYPD’s police violence too proceeded apace despite recent police reforms, with the violent eviction of the activist encampment in the dead of night, and the forcible abduction of protestors in broad daylight. But just as police brutality has persisted through reforms, the broad-based movement for transformative justice continues undaunted by state violence and led by local communities. Our elected officials would be best served, and would best serve their constituents by eschewing passive complicity with police violence, and instead actively following the lead of their local communities for next year’s budget and beyond.
Dr. James Rodriguez is an Assistant Professor of History at Guttman Community College CUNY, where he teaches courses on New York City, urban history, gentrification, race, and the state. He holds a Ph.D. in American Studies New York University (NYU) after completing his dissertation on race, police, public housing policy and gentrification in New York City. He also holds a Bachelor’s degree in both English and Psychology, with a minor in Puerto Rican and Latino Studies, from Brooklyn College. Dr. Rodriguez is the co-author of the chapter “Social Capital, Gentrification, and Inequality in New York City,” in Racial Inequality in New York Since 1965 (SUNY Press, 2019). Alongside teaching and academic research, Dr. Rodriguez has worked as a public housing and land use organizer on the Lower East Side, curriculum developer and consultant for CUNY’s School of Labor & Urban Studies, and invited lecturer for the International Honor’s Program:Cities course, and NYU’s Prison Education Program.