Anticipated Political Backlash: Lessons Learned from Neoliberal Antagonisms to Defund the Police Campaigns
The racial reckoning in the United States during the uprisings of 2020, amid a global pandemic that exposed and exacerbated the disproportionate structural violence that Black people experience, consolidated millions of people under the provocative banner: Defund the Police as a deepening and continuation of the Black Lives Matter social movement. More people engaged in public demonstrations than ever before in American history, yet the year following did not fundamentally change the way the vast majority of police departments are funded and produced a political backlash that has significantly harmed progressive agendas.
Contrary to popular rhetoric, it is not simply the controversial factors of “defund” as a phrase that are at fault, but an indication of fundamental misunderstandings of the demand, a media infrastructure impacted by profit motivations and sensationalism, and too few non-governmental political organizations that have effectively captured and retained engagement of individuals and communities beyond moments of heightened outrage. This multi-dimensional conclusion is especially clear in NYC following an activist occupation at NYC City Hall park known as “Occupy City Hall.”
On June 23rd, 2020 racial and economic justice organizers in the formation “Free Black Radicals” called on people demanding NYC to defund the NYPD to occupy City Hall. The shared demand, originating from the Communities United for Police Reform coalition to defund the NYPD by at least $1 billion and to reinvest those funds into housing, education, social services and care, including mental healthcare. They decided to occupy NYC City Hall park for the last week of NYC budget negotiations, to make clear for the thousands of protesters active that summer who could actually defund the police. The occupation that was in-part inspired by the 2011 occupation of Zuccotti Park, Occupy Wall Street, aimed to draw the connections that police violence against Black people is not divorced from wider questions about the economy, and the democratic-experiment in the U.S.
The occupation at City Hall did not accomplish its goal of reducing the NYPD’s budget, and by proxy, the scope of its influence and ability to commit violence against Black people. Still, elected officials from NYC suggested that a reallocation of funds from the police department to the NYC Department of Education school safety budget was in response to the thousands of activists that were engaged in demonstrations throughout the summer. The encampment continued for several weeks after being renamed “Abolition Park,” now an organization by the same name continuing to organize for abolitionist causes. In a final pre-dawn raid on July 22nd, the NYPD, dressed in riot gear, ousted dozens of homeless New Yorkers and abolitionists out of the park.
Though the police were not actually defunded, there were still claims that increases in crime were the result of the call to defund the NYPD. In May of 2021 the notably conservative NY Post Editorial Board claimed,
“After all, Gotham has seen shootings more than double since 2019, far worse than Chicago (up “just 59 percent” from 2019), for example. That’s why polls have consistently shown crime and public safety to be the top issue in the mayoral race. Yet the new $98.7 billion city budget adopted last week boosts the NYPD budget just $200 million, far less than last summer’s $1 billion cut, made to appease the “Defund the police” protesters.”
Referring to the same 2020 NYC budget a New York Times article reports,
“Critics cited, for example, City Hall’s assertion that the transfer of school safety agents to the Department of Education from the Police Department amounted to a $400 million shift of police resources. The Department of Education already funds the school safety program, sending some $300 million a year to the Police Department, according to New York City’s Independent Budget Office.”
Much of the reporting from political media in NYC on the NYPD budget highlights a range of perceptions about the origin of violence in communities, the efficacy of policing, and ultimately an insistence that safety can only be achieved and maintained via the use of historically and structurally anti-Black systems. Overwhelmingly, throughout the remainder of 2020 and 2021, both democrats and republicans, conservatives and neoliberals maintained that either the police were the solution to violence, sometimes the cause of violence, but ultimately, there is no need to fundamentally change the structures of policing because perhaps simply a minor augmentation, like body-cameras or racial bias trainings, will prevent unjustifiable violence. Defund as an idea, whether ultimately abolitionist or reformist in end-goal, is diametrically opposed to the sociological frameworks of governance that conservatives and neoliberals share.
The political backlash that followed the 2020 uprisings in NYC were so profound that we saw the city go from thousands of anti-police brutality activists demonstrating, for a period sustained beyond the summer, that the following year Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams, who is a former NYPD officer was elected Mayor. The cognitive dissonance of an unprecedented uprising against police violence to electing a former police officer with consistently conservative politics, moderate at best, was only possible because of skewed media coverage, misinformation campaigns by conservative pundits, press, and elected officials, and arguably most importantly, neoliberal democratic leadership desperate to maintain power.
Black and brown communities in NYC were subject to a measured and consistent campaign that contextualized legitimate concerns about community safety within a solely policing-centered framework, and Adams, alongside the democratic establishment and conservatives, leaned-heavily into this reductive and revisionist analysis. The societal-determinants of health and quality of life like, wages, housing security, access to comprehensive healthcare, including mental healthcare services, food security, and quality of education, responses to social anxiety associated to COVID-19, a pre-existing gun epidemic in the U.S. were not provided as context in a vast majority of local news coverage, amid a backdrop of a national move to the political right by democrats as they assumed power in Congress. All of these omissions that Defund the Police campaigns account for by the political establishment are part and parcel to the generation of conditions that are responsible for the epidemic of police violence in the first place.
The setbacks that progressive movements experienced throughout 2020 and 2021 in the U.S. and NYC are not solely on the narrative front. It also represents a period of profound missed organizing opportunities. Increasingly, especially among leftist activists and organizers, there is, albeit often legitimate, a general mistrust of organizations and the need and importance of building, joining, funding, and expanding them. This is especially true for organizations that are non-profits recognized by the government and are often subject to critiques about their alleged complacency within the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. However, all social movements are undergirded by community-based, power building organizations. The general call to defund the police is generated and supported by the Movement for Black Lives, a national coalition of Black-led community-based political organizations, for instance.
Organizations are often rendered invisible to the role that they play in seizing particular moments of social unrest and focusing and directing that animus in useful ways. But more critically, it is imperative that to move individuals and communities from these flashpoints of outrage into consistent engagement in politics beyond voting. If we want to be able to defund the police, and fund our communities, to build abolitionist futures, we have to build the organizations that are going to help transform the people.
If we want to engage vulnerable communities in NYC towards abolitionist demands, we have to launch (and win) issue-based campaigns that alleviate immediate suffering or improve immediate conditions for communities. During the fight for universal childcare, or increased wages, and other issues that impact poor and working-poor communities, organizers must engage in the political education necessary to help the masses develop increasingly critical lenses by which to analyze the world. That is always happening, but unfortunately, the principles and frameworks of analysis being offered are being offered by the elite, via the media and government, and right-wing leaning social media algorithms. We need to respond with community-based organizations that are willing to contend with the fundamental structures of American society, unapologetically, while also being accountable to a base. Defund campaigns have not been successful in the immediate, but they remain an opportunity to imagine a new world, and the chance to build the power of movements to exact it.
References
Nypost.com. 2021. De Blasio in deep denial about the NYC’s rising crime, need for more cops. [online] Available at: <https://nypost.com/2021/07/05/de-blasio-in-deep-denial-about-the-nycs-rising-crime-need-for-more-cops/> [Accessed 15 December 2021].
Nytimes.com. 2021. How the Floyd Protests Turned Into a 24-Hour ‘Occupy City Hall’ in N.Y. (Published 2020). [online] Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/28/nyregion/occupy-city-hall-nyc.html> [Accessed 15 December 2021].
Khurshid, S., 2021. What’s the Gap Between Progressive Politics and Communities of Color in New York City?. [online] Gotham Gazette. Available at: <https://www.gothamgazette.com/city/10714-gap-progressive-politics-communities-color-new-york-city> [Accessed 15 December 2021].
Nytimes.com. 2021. ‘Occupy City Hall’ Encampment Taken Down in Pre-Dawn Raid by N.Y.P.D. (Published 2020). [online] Available at: <https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/22/nyregion/occupy-city-hall-protest-nypd.html> [Accessed 15 December 2021].
