All photos and reporting for this article were created by Joe Catron for MintPress News.
NEW YORK — Demonstrations against the New York Police Department’s killings of Eric Garner and Akai Gurley, as well as the deaths of other black people at the hands of law enforcement agencies across the country, surged through downtown Manhattan early this month, with protesters targeting a proposal for local taxpayers to fund the hiring of 1,000 new NYPD officers.
Public funding of police departments “is the most systemic cause” of their abuses, Candace Simpson told MintPress News.
Simpson worked with other graduate students at Union Theological Seminary to organize a “Holy Week of Resistance,” marches that resembled traditional Good Friday and Easter Sunday processions while protesting anti-black violence by police and other state agencies.
“We want to be proactive and get to the root of the problem,” Simpson said.
“Anyone but themselves”
The hiring proposal, which originated with NYPD Commissioner Bill Bratton last September, has drawn opposition from protesters, but support from some elected officials, including prominent Democrats like City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito.
“The Council believes that raising the headcount of NYPD is essential and we will be advocating it strongly this budget cycle,” Mark-Viverito said in a joint statement with the Council’s Finance Chairwoman Julissa Ferreras in February.
In late March, the New York Post reported Bratton had stormed out of a meeting with Deputy Mayor Anthony Shorris after a budget drafted by Mayor Bill de Blasio did not include the requested funding.
Angered by Shorris’ refusal to support the plan, Bratton reportedly told his erstwhile superior, “If I don’t get them from you, I’ll go to the City Council and get them,” an account the commissioner angrily denied.
The Post claimed multiple sources had confirmed the accuracy of its report.
The City Council’s support for the measure angered many protesters, who said it contradicted not only the interests of Council members’ constituents, but also their own public positions.
“Members of the City Council don’t represent anyone but themselves,” William Johnston told MintPress. “They’ll speak at press conferences, have their protests and go out and block traffic, then turn right around and vote to give more of our money to the same police who are killing us.”
Johnston, a Brooklyn resident, spoke during a lull in a noisy rally outside the NYPD headquarters at 1 Police Plaza on the afternoon of April 3.
After the “Reclaim Holy Week” procession, which started in Union Square and ended at the Manhattan Federal Courthouse, its participants marched several blocks further south to join a larger crowd assembled by the “Safety Beyond Policing” campaign.
The group rallied there, as well as the nearby City Hall Park, before pouring into the street, where they continued to march late into the night.
“It’s unbelievable”
Many protesters used their signs and chants to highlight what they called better uses of the proposal’s funding, projected to top $90 million per year.
“Most people in this city can’t afford their rent,” Maria Gutierrez of Queens told MintPress. “Schools are falling apart, and hospitals are closing. And they want to spend all of this on new cops? It’s unbelievable.”
De Blasio’s proposal already includes $9.2 billion in 2016 allocations for the NYPD, including $8.9 billion of city funds, or 15.2 percent of local spending.
The amount is more than the city’s combined spending on its fire, sanitation, health and mental hygiene, and homeless services departments, the 11 hospitals, five nursing homes and various community and school medical services of the Health and Hospitals Corporation, 24 campuses of the City University of New York, and the New York City Housing Authority’s 334 sprawling developments, which house over 400,000 New Yorkers.
With the city’s population near 8.5 million, it spends over $1,000 on policing for each of its residents every year.
Only the city’s Department of Education, which is responsible for educating 1.1 million students in over 1,800 schools, exceeds the NYPD as a local expense.
With the city’s crime rates leading a statewide plunge of over 54 percent between 1994 and 2012 — a national trend which analysts say has little correlation to incarceration — many see little reason for police spending to rise.
And New York City’s recent history shows few connections between crime rates and police headcounts.
“Between 1985 and 1999, New York City increased its sworn police force by 60%,” a 2011 white paper by IBM Global Business Services found. “During this time, crime dropped by 50%. Between 1999 and 2009, New York City reduced its sworn police force by 16%. During these years, crime dropped by 37%.”
Nationally, “no relationship was found between spending on police services and lower crime rates,” the report said.
As the latter decline, “cities should be reaping a ‘public safety dividend,’” it continued, but have instead continued to increase their spending on policing, regardless of its benefits. “An opportunity is being perhaps missed.”
“The police are about the first ones to worry about”
“It’s about the question of limited resources,” Simpson said. “We cannot pay for 1,000 new officers and 1,000 new teachers. We cannot pay for 1,000 new officers and 1,000 new nurses. We have to choose what is most needed for our communities. We are sure that there are better ways to spend these funds. Especially in this climate, it seems offbeat to add more police officers if it is not clear that we know how to train them.”
Indeed, participants in recent demonstrations against police killings say these steadily increasing allocations have never made them safer.
“In my neighborhood, we’ve never looked to the police for help,” Johnston said. “High crime rate or low crime rate, everyone knows the police are the first ones to worry about.”
Yet spending continues to rise, whether driven by unwarranted fears of crime rates in steep decline, pressure from powerful local police unions or, curiously, public outrage over police misconduct.
Last December, President Barack Obama proposed a three-year $263 million program to fund the purchase of 50,000 body cameras and retraining of officers by local police departments.
Intended as a response to a national wave of protests against police killings after the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, for many the president’s call raised the question of what police might have to do to see their funding cut.
The proposal prompted a sharp rise in the price of stocks in body-camera makers, including TASER International, and came as Obama defended controversial programs that arm local police departments with hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of military materiel every year.
Facing mounting animosity in the aftermath of Ferguson, several departments have sought to return tanks and other equipment, but found their source, the Pentagon, unwilling to accept them.
Beyond federal aid, police spending by local and state governments reached $9.7 trillion in 2012, in increase of $1.3 trillion, or 15.4 percent, over the preceding five years alone.
This constant rise encountered little opposition until protests against police killings exploded across the country after Brown’s death last summer.
Whether they can change a process supported by both powerful special interests and the force of habit by local governments remains to be seen. But with an unprecedented movement afoot, many say their chances are better than ever before.
“We have reduced public safety because of inadequate educational options, poor job options, and rising costs of living,” Simpson said. “We must address the source of crime, which is usually a need that has not been met, rather than waiting for it to happen and then catching people.”