Jovan Sanchez might’ve supported defunding the police had his brother not been gunned down on the Fourth of July.
But it’s been nearly two months with no arrests since Jamal Sanchez, 28, an aspiring union construction worker, was shot dead in Harlem half a mile from home — leaving his older sibling conflicted about calls to strip the NYPD.
“Jamal was a good man. I still wake up every day and I cannot believe that someone killed my brother,” said Jovan Sanchez, 38.
“I’m not quite sure we can leave it up to a community to protect our own. I don’t think that we have that capability yet, as a people, as a community,” he said.
A day after Jamal Sanchez’s broad daylight killing, New York City faced one of the bloodiest days of the summer, with nine people dead and 41 wounded by gunfire.
Last weekend, at least six people were slain in more than two dozen shootings from Thursday to Saturday, and several innocent bystanders wounded.
With no end in sight for the city’s gun violence in mostly Black and Brown communities, victims’ families now find themselves between a rock and a hard place on the growing movement to defund the police.
Some, like Jovan Sanchez, are at odds with relatives angry about racial injustice.
“I actually agree with (the defund movement). I think the NYPD is kind of useless, unless it’s coming from a Caucasian person that’s calling,” fumed Sanchez’s 26-year-old sister, Asia.
Other violence-weary families worry that the backlash against cops might scare them away from street patrols — which would further hurt crime victims.
Rebecca McCalla, 40, said she’s noticed a decrease in police presence around her Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood.
“I feel like they’re giving up. They feel like everybody is against them. Not everybody wants them defunded,” McCalla said.
Her son, Lakee McKinney, was put in a chokehold during a police stop in 2016. Officer David Mercado lost 15 vacation days as a penalty after an NYPD trial. McKinney, accused of having a gun, was never charged.
Afterward, McCalla was inspired to get more involved in her community and local precinct. “We still need the cops, we just want to see better from them,” she explained.
The July 12 killing of 1-year-old Davell Gardner rocked the city. The toddler was hit by a stray bullet while sitting in his stroller at a family barbecue in Brooklyn. Police want to question three men in the boy’s death, but no one has been charged.
“I get it, because of what happened to (George) Floyd,” the tot’s grandmother, Samantha Gardner, said of the defund movement.
“(But) if the police are not back on the street, they’re going to keep (shooting),” she said. “It’s giving the young people the leeway to say, ‘We can take this person out, there’s no police on this street.'”
Defunding advocates argue that it simply means reallocating money in bloated police budgets to social services and other forms of non-violent public safety.
City lawmakers in July slashed $1 billion from the NYPD budget, moving school safety officers to the education department and canceling the newest class of academy recruits.
In mid-July, Mayor Bill de Blasio criminalized chokeholds, which were already banned by the NYPD, as part of series of police reform bills.
The NYPD also disbanded its anti-crime unit, an elite team of 600 plainclothes cops who went after illegal guns and has been accused for years of disproportionately targeting minorities.
The reforms were panned by those on both sides of the issue. The New York City Council is already making changes to the chokehold law after police brass claimed it would make cops second-guess their every move.
Others argue the new cuts are just a dent in the NYPD’s massive $6 billion budget.
“Most people can’t imagine a world without police,” said Hawk Newsome, chairman of Black Lives Matter’s Greater New York chapter. “People couldn’t imagine a world without Jim Crow, that’s why they fought it so hard. But look at the world now.”
Defund supporters camped out at City Hall Park for a month with support from social justice groups like VOCAL-NY. The encampment was cleared out on July 22 when the protest hub turned into a homeless haven.
Jawanza James Williams, VOCAL-NY’s organizing director, panned the camp shutdown and said people who point out that defunding the police could negatively effect victims of gun violence cause a “reduction of this moment.”
“It’s sort of adding to the narrative that somehow the BLM movement, which is about affirming the Black life and defending Black life, is somehow an illegitimate call,” said Williams. “That is racist no matter who you are.”
Williams sympathized with victims’ families but said, “It’s a complicated thing to talk about. A person in mourning or grieving perhaps may not make the best decision for a collective.”
Grief is something all too familiar to Mona Brown. She lost two sons in little over a month.
Her 35-year-old son Kenneth was shot dead in a crossfire on July 8 about a block away from his East Harlem home.
Brown contends that police didn’t respond to the scene fast enough, even though an NYPD van was parked a few feet away. No one has been arrested for the crime.
“They are meant to serve and protect this community and they are not doing that, they are just making their time on the clock,” she said. “They used to go up and down our buildings, they used to patrol our grounds. They knew our parents, our siblings, the groups we moved with, they played ball with us. Not today.”
Thirty-four days after she lost Kenneth, on Aug. 11, her older son Allen suffered a fatal heart attack. “He died of a broken heart for my son,” she explained.
The answer is not so cut and dry to the uncle of Brandon Hendricks, the college-bound Bronx basketball star who was murdered on June 29.
The 17-year-old scholar athlete was shot at on the street in his Morris Heights neighborhood. His accused killer was caught seven days later and charged with murder.
For Hendricks’ uncle, Noel Ellison, the tragedy has offered him a different perspective.
“I would not, at this point, be an advocate for defunding the police,” Ellison, 68, said. “It was not the police that pulled the trigger that killed my nephew, but it was the police that caught the individual who had done it.”
He noted that cops are under pressure to wear multiple hats in tense situations.
“Police are trained to subdue or apprehend, and I don’t believe their job is to do the social service stuff that sometimes families need,” he said.
With Thomas Tracy
