A18 N THE NEW YORK TIMES NATIONALMONDAY, JUNE 29, 2020
Struggle for Racial JusticeNew York
and reducing the uniformed force.
Protesters and others have de-
manded that cuts go further, and
have put up an encampment in
City Hall Park.
These tensions are now coming
to a head in budget negotiations
between the Council and Mayor
Bill de Blasio, who has not ex-
pressed support for deep cuts in
the police budget. The budget
deadline is Wednesday.
The police commissioner, Der-
mot F. Shea, has said that he sup-
ports shifting some funding from
his department to youth pro-
grams and that he is open to giv-
ing up ancillary functions the po-
lice have absorbed, like school
safety and traffic enforcement.
But he has contended that dras-
tic cuts to the number of uni-
formed officers are unwise given a
recent rise in violent crime and
will deprive high-crime areas of
vital policing services. “The peo-
ple you’re trying to help the most,
potentially I believe, you are go-
ing to hurt the most,” Mr. Shea
said in an interview with PIX11.
Demands to shrink the foot-
print of the Police Department —
together with other requests, like
to increase transparency in the
disciplinary process — are com-
ing from many quarters.
Hundreds of educators signed
an open letter to Richard A. Car-
ranza, the chancellor of the city’s
Department of Education, de-
manding that school safety offi-
cers, who are unarmed, be re-
moved from buildings.
Black and Latino students still
represent roughly 90 percent of
arrests and summonses in city
schools, though overall numbers
of arrests have declined sharply
under Mr. de Blasio.
And as police shootings have
continued, a coalition of 80 mental
health organizations has declared
that a multimillion-dollar training
initiative had failed. The program
has given half of the officers on the
force 40 hours of training in han-
dling encounters with people hav-
ing mental health emergencies.
Since the program was begun in
2015, 16 people with mental illness
have been killed in encounters
with the New York City police, a
higher rate than before the train-
ing started, said Carla Rabinowitz
from Community Access, an advo-
cacy group that has worked with
the Police Department to expand
mental health training for officers.
Just last week, a man with a his-
tory of mental illness was killed in
Queens when officers shocked
him repeatedly with Tasers.
“Forty hours of training can’t
counter the police mentality; it
can’t counter the police values,”
Ms. Rabinowitz said. “When
someone calls for help, they need
help. They don’t need someone
with a gun pointed at them.”
All but one of those 16 people
with mental illness killed by the
police were people of color, Ms.
Rabinowitz added.
And in the subway, heavy-
handed arrests of turnstile
jumpers and officers’ efforts to
clear sleeping homeless people
from trains — both of which dis-
proportionately affect black and
Hispanic people — have long been
criticized by advocacy groups.
No police department should be
invested with all these responsi-
bilities, said Jumaane Williams,
the city’s public advocate. Too of-
ten, he said, a law enforcement ap-
proach exacerbates a problem,
particularly in black and Hispanic
communities that receive outsize
attention from the police.
“The only tools they have are
handcuffs, a gun, a baton and a
summons book,” Mr. Williams
said in an interview. “That’s al-
ways going to be a disaster when
you have disparate policing de-
pending on the community you’re
in.”A Catchall Solution
At a recent news conference,
Patrick Lynch, president of the po-
lice officers’ union, said it was the
failures of other city agencies that
forced the department to take on
many additional duties.
“If they want to shift responsi-
bilities reasonably, do it,” Mr.
Lynch said. “But where are you
going to put it? Who’s going to do
it? When you fail, who are you go-
ing to ask to step up? I got the an-
swer: They’re going to come back
and give it to the P.D.”Even critics of the department
acknowledge that there is some
truth in his assessment.
In the late 1990s, amid concern
over the Education Department’s
vetting of its school safety force,
the police were called in to take
over security in the schools.
As mental health institutions
closed down or were deprived of
funding through the 1970s, ’80s
and ’90s, the department was
called on to respond to emergen-
cies and engage with the flood of
homeless people on the streets
and in the subway.
In the city’s darkest days — dur-
ing the crack epidemic and the pe-
riod of runaway crime in the 1980s
and early ’90s, and after the Sept.
11, 2001, terrorist attacks — police
officers were looked upon more fa-
vorably in many quarters.
The Police Department of today
is the result of the expansion to
meet the challenges of those eras.
The city now has fewer than 400
homicides each year, though the
size of the uniformed staff has
changed little from the early
1990s, when there were more than
2,000 murders annually.
While few would argue that the
terrorist threat has gone away
completely, some elected officials
and civil rights lawyers have
questioned the need for the de-
partment’s vast, secretive intelli-
gence-gathering apparatus. The
Police Department, for instance,
has several liaison officers sta-
tioned abroad.
Even some defenders of the po-
lice acknowledge that civilianagencies were better suited to
dealing with the mentally ill, the
homeless and public health crises.
“Could some other agencies do
that better?” said Chuck Wexler,
executive director of the Police
Executive Research Forum, a law
enforcement policy nonprofit. “I
think the answer is, in some cases,
absolutely.”‘A Moment of Reckoning’For decades, city leaders of all
political persuasions, fearful of be-
ing blamed for a rise in crime,
have been loath to pare back the
Police Department, even as crime
has fallen. Its budget has grown
from $3 billion in 2000 to $5.7 bil-
lion today.
Mr. de Blasio came to office in
2014 promising to overhaul the de-
partment and to end the practice
of searching large numbers of
young people in high-crime areas
for weapons and drugs, which a
judge found unconstitutional.
But the department grew under
his tenure. When the coronavirus
pandemic cratered the city’s econ-
omy, it was education and youth
programs that Mr. de Blasio cut
when he released his proposed
budget in April. He left the Police
Department virtually untouched.
The mayor has shifted his
stance in the face of protests,
pledging some cuts that will free
up money that can be diverted to
social programs, particularly in
predominantly black and His-
panic neighborhoods. But he has
not said how far he is willing to go.The City Council speaker, Corey
Johnson, and his allies said the
time had come to sharply shrink
the department’s sphere of re-
sponsibility.
Uniformed officers should not
police schoolyards or provide se-
curity at homeless shelters, Mr.
Johnson said in an interview. Nor,
he said, should the department
continue to rack up $700 million in
overtime payments, as it did last
year.
Mr. Johnson has proposed
shrinking the department by
2,000 uniformed officers.
“This is a moment of reckon-
ing,” he said. “It is a moment of
structural, systemic and transfor-
mational change, and that means
redesigning what public safety
looks like and it means not relying
only on the N.Y.P.D.”
Police officials say that most of
the budget goes to salary and
overtime for people on patrol, and
that there is no way to cut $1 bil-
lion without deep layoffs, which
they say would drive up response
times in a period when crime is
ticking upward.
Even some supporters of rein-
ing in the police have cautioned
against going too far.
Councilman I. Daneek Miller, a
Queens Democrat who is a co-
chairman of the Black, Latino and
Asian Caucus, said that he sup-
ported the council’s proposal to
cut $1 billion from the police budg-
et, but that it should not come at
the expense of progress in rela-
tions between his district and the
police.“It would be irresponsible for
me to dismiss all of the work the
community had done with those
precincts to get us to this point,”
he said in an interview. “We’re not
where we want to be, but we’re
damn sure better than we were.”Change From WithinIn the past, restrictions on the
Police Department’s authority
have often come as a result of out-
side intervention, and often in the
face of opposition from city lead-
ers. Court orders, for instance,
forced the city to drop its policy of
“stop and frisk” and to limit its in-
telligence gathering in mostly
Muslim neighborhoods.
Still, there are indications that
the political climate may change
the department’s reluctance to
back off aggressive enforcement
strategies that its leaders have
stuck with for decades, as crime
has steadily dropped to levels not
seen since the 1950s.
This month, Mr. Shea, the police
commissioner, announced that he
would disband and reassign 600
officers on plainclothes “anti-
crime” teams, which for nearly
two decades have focused on mak-
ing gun arrests and proactively
preventing violent crime.
Those teams have attracted a
disproportionate number of mis-
conduct complaints and have
been involved in some of the city’s
most notorious police shootings.
“We welcome reform, but we
also believe meaningful reform
starts from within,” Mr. Shea said.
“This is a policy shift coming from
me, personally.”
Further changes to the depart-
ment, however, will require other
city agencies to begin shouldering
the burden of public safety, said
those who support reducing the
role of the police.
Rory I. Lancman, chairman of
the City Council’s justice commit-
tee, said it would be easy to reduce
number of officers to meet today’s
demands, but more difficult to
teach other agencies to take over
those roles and to do a better job.
“You can’t get the police out of
the Department of Education
without reforming how the De-
partment of Education ensures
public safety,” he said. “That’s true
for homeless services, mental
health services, you name it.”Does the N.Y.P.D. Get
Too Much? Or Perhaps
It’s Asked for Too Much?
Arrested protesters this month
in Manhattan. The City Coun-
cil speaker has proposed cut-
ting one-sixth of the Police De-
partment’s $6 billion budget.TODD HEISLER/THE NEW YORK TIMESFrom Page AIt started on Tuesday night
when about 100 protesters began
occupying City Hall Park in Lower
Manhattan — with some spending
the night — in an effort to draw
more focus to their demand for
deep budget cuts to the Police De-
partment.
In a matter of days, a movement
took root. What started on a patch
of lawn and a few square feet has
now taken over most of the park
and drawn extensive attention
across social media, with “Occupy
City Hall” as the group’s rallying
cry. Volunteers have flocked to the
park, dropping off food, coffee and
supplies to build a kind of camp-
ground.
So far, the police have not bro-
ken up the gathering, which has
taken some inspiration from the
Occupy Wall Street demonstra-
tions of 2011 at Zuccotti Park in the
financial district in Lower Man-
hattan. But some disagreements
have resulted between protesters
and the police over the use of um-
brellas, tents and bicycles.
The City Hall encampment,
which was initially spearheaded
by Vocal-NY, a grass-roots organi-
zation, is the latest addition to the
wave of protests in New York after
George Floyd’s death at the hands
of Minneapolis police in late May.
Jawanza James Williams, direc-
tor of organizing for Vocal-NY,
conceptualized the occupation as
a way to pressure the city into re-
ducing its police budget by at least
$1 billion, a sum the group has
asked to be shifted to other re-
sources, including education and
social services.
The protesters, who are part of
a movement to defund the police,
are focusing on the July 1 deadline
for the city’s budget.
Corey Johnson, speaker of the
City Council, which must approve
the budget, has called for a $1 bil-
lion reduction in the $6 billion that
the city spends on the Police De-
partment, but Mayor Bill de Bla-
sio has not endorsed such a cut.
“We can’t leave anything to
chance,” said Mr. Williams, who
refers to “Occupy City Hall” as “a
people’s bazaar for liberation.”
In a short time, organizers,
largely black and queer, have
transformed the plaza. Hand-
drawn art covers any semblance
of government infrastructure:
subway entrances, metal barri-
cades and kiosks — a sharp con-
trast to the limestone municipal
building across the street.
A sophisticated network was
created to make the space hab-
itable. Organizers built a library,
community garden and even a hut
for tea lovers. They gathered do-
nations of prepared meals, water,
hand sanitizer, blankets, vitamins
and cigarettes. And they formed
elaborate teams for safety, sanita-
tion and food distribution.
Orange armbands distinguish
the de-escalation team from the
medics, who wear a red cross em-blem made from electric tape. By
Saturday, organizers had installed
internet service and set up a laun-
dry schedule.
As the movement expands, ten-
sions over strategy have
emerged, especially over whether
Vocal-NY is demanding deep
enough cuts in the budget.
Some supporters of the move-
ment to defund the police have ex-
pressed discomfort over the num-ber of young, white people who
are taking part in the gathering,
as well as over an atmosphere
that is occasionally upbeat.
Organizers responded that the
movement’s ability to accommo-
date a diverse range of opinion
was a sign of success.
The threat of the coronavirus
also looms over the gathering.
During peak hours, it’s impossible
for protesters to socially distance.
Thousands are elbow-to-elbow at
the plaza even as the occupation
sprawls farther south. At night,
protesters still cluster at the lawn,
sleeping with masks on. Others
unroll their sleeping bags and
tarps farther out when it’s time to
call it a night.
The encampment is run by a
combination of veteran organ-
izers and first-time volunteers.
Sierra Nicole, 23, from West
Harlem, didn’t think she would
end up overseeing the welcome
desk when she first arrived onThursday afternoon. On that first
day, Ms. Nicole had gone straight
to that desk to get more informa-
tion, but when she noticed a volun-
teer who appeared tired, she of-
fered to take his place. He agreed.
A few hours later, a protester
walked up to Ms. Nicole eager to
volunteer. The next available slot
was in eight hours, at 3 a.m., but
the protester, a woman, didn’t
seem to mind. Ms. Nicole signed
her up.
Many volunteers work around
the clock. At 4 a.m. on Friday,
Gregory Lecrocq, 31, from the Up-
per East Side, began his shift at
the food station, making breakfast
sandwiches for early risers. He
sleeps from 8 a.m. to 3 p.m., and by
4 p.m. he’s usually back at the pro-
test.
Occupy has also become a
meeting point for other marches.
Protesters from Upper Manhat-
tan and Brooklyn have stopped by
to show their support as well as topick up food and water.
Some protesters have said they
plan to remain at the plaza beyond
the budget deadline day, until
their demands for systemic
change are met. Mr. Williams said
he’s not opposed to people staying
longer.
Either way, Vocal-NY members
said they were optimistic that
they had organized a movement
that could sustain itself in the
long-term, said Jasmine Budnella,
34, the group’s drug policy coordi-
nator.
Still, as the week has pro-
gressed, organizers said they had
grappled with setting the right
tone. While showing joy is an im-
portant form of resistance, Mr.
Williams said, the group doesn’t
want people to forget why they
have gathered. At times, the occu-
pation can appear festival-like.
But those moments are often fol-
lowed by a speaker stressing the
need to stay alert and vigilant.
“We’re here because black peo-
ple are dying in the street,” one
speaker told the crowd on Thurs-
day night. “We’re not here to so-
cialize, we’re here for real-life
problems.”
Many protesters said they had
committed to sleeping outside ev-
ery night until the end of the
month, noting that they have ev-
erything they need to survive:
food, water, clothes, a place to
shower and restrooms.
Others said they would try to
show up every other night. Those
who didn’t want to sleep outside
said they would volunteer from
sunrise to sundown.
Organizers said the move-
ment’s ethos is centered around
anti-consumerism, inclusivity
and camaraderie. Everything is
free of charge, and protesters are
constantly on the lookout for one
another. Making the encampment
a safe space for vulnerable com-
munities has also been a top pri-
ority, they said.
On Thursday evening, Moji
Armu and her two children —
ages 6 and 9 — stumbled upon the
demonstration on their way home.
Ms. Armu said her children no-
ticed an art-making station at the
Occupy gathering and ran to the
tray of paint tubes.
A little later, she said her 6-year-
old son paused in bewilderment.
He didn’t realize that what he had
been witnessing — the art mak-
ing, dancing — could be consid-
ered protesting.
He asked his mother if he had
just attended his first protest. She
smiled and said, “You sure did.”‘Occupy City Hall’ Protesters Vow to Stay Until Police Budgets Are Cut
Protesters have slept in an encampment in front of City Hall,
above and left, since last week, and have transformed the plaza.
The movement has taken inspiration from Occupy Wall Street
and one organizer called it “a people’s bazaar for liberation.”PHOTOGRAPHS BY AMR ALFIKY/THE NEW YORK TIMESBy JULIANA KIM
and AMR ALFIKY