An occupation has taken shape outside of New York City Hall. Organizers pushing to defund the city's police department tell Teen Vogue their direct action has grown substantially since it got underway on June 23.
“The energy, as you can see, is real live here. It's packed,” says Tatiana Hill, an organizer with Voices of Community Activists and Leaders New York (VOCAL-NY), a grassroots group that’s been organizing around HIV/AIDS, the drug war, mass incarceration, and homelessness for over 20 years. “You see the spread? There's nowhere to even sleep.”
In a conversation at the occupation on Wednesday night, Hill says the protest came together naturally in response to the systemic racism evident in both the COVID-19 pandemic and the ongoing plague of police brutality.
“This was a bit organic, based on the climate right now, with COVID happening, the world pandemic that's primarily killing and affecting Black and Brown folks and poor people,” says Hill. “They were already frustrated and afraid, and then you see violent cops.… A lot of people are at a boiling point.”
Spearheaded by VOCAL-NY and a Black action collective focused on direct action protests, Occupy City Hall comes after a month of global protests to honor Black lives, sparked by the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis. Like those other demonstrations, Occupy City Hall is a rebellion against policing and the criminal justice system and an uprising for community resources in the Black and Brown neighborhoods that suffer the brunt of police terror.
“I think this is a reimagining of public safety,” says Nelini Stamp, an organizer with the Black action collective. “This is what it looks like. It looks like people coming collectively and creating a space together and talking to each other and figuring out what the needs are.”
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While reimagining society from the ground up is a long-term mission, the organizers say their immediate focus is pressuring city officials into making good on one of the central demands to emerge from the protests: defunding police. In this case, that means the New York Police Department (NYPD). The people on the ground want a $1 billion cut from the NYPD’s budget, and they also want those funds reappropriated into the kinds of programs organizers say can actually prevent crime.
“Those of us who are active politically understand how important this time is and how much we have to use our united power to speak to our needs and demands for our communities,” says Hill. “Got to think of where the money's at: the pockets.”
Hill says her personal experience and activist history demonstrate what communities actually need. “Over-policing doesn't increase safety; it increases harm, it increases violence,” she explains. “We know that social services are what decreases the occurrence of those things — mental health services, drug treatment programs. Not from the state, but organically, ones that prove to heal folks.”
“We also want to have services for reentry programs, education, jobs — those are the things that are going to mitigate crime and violence,” Hill continues. “It's not going to be that way if you give people the resources they need to live and survive and [have] healthy lives.”
As reported by Spectrum News NY1 earlier this month, some members of the city council have already pledged to make the requested cut to NYPD funding. And Occupy City Hall organizers are holding them to it, planning to hold the space until June 30, when the city budget is scheduled to be finalized for the 2021 fiscal year. Stamp tells Teen Vogue that VOCAL-NY leaders reached out to other organizers who had already been pressuring New York City Council Speaker Corey Johnson to bring the event together, saying it’s about “accountability” for elected officials.
Hill doubles down on this idea: “We want City Hall to feel our presence. We want the mayor [Bill de Blasio] to feel our presence. We want them to know we will not shut up. We will not move back. We're going to push forward, until we get our demands met. Because we voted you in, and we can vote you out. And we have the right to speak up for what our community needs.”
Despite the heaviness of the issues driving the protests, the mood at the occupation is positive. Spirits are high on Wednesday night, as tables for food and other supplies overflow with a bounty of donations. In fact, there have been so many donations that organizers are now telling people what they currently don’t need, through the occupation’s Instagram account.
“People want to help,” Hill tells Teen Vogue. “People are seeing their communities in need; they're seeing something going on. And there's different ways to support: You can use your voice, you can use your body, you can use your funds, you can use your mind. So people want to contribute to the community by giving us food, supplies, and everything that we need. And it's really been amazing. It's such an outpour of love and support.”
The abundance of donations is being managed through a framework organizers have laid out for the occupation: a welcome table for those just joining; a volunteer station to sign up for shifts; and a sprawling art area to paint signs.
“First, it was like a lot of folks who have not experienced an occupation or ever experienced this kind of action," says Stamp. "So people were just like, ‘Oh yeah, this is like a little party in a park.’ The mood has been really: We're getting stuff together. People are organizing different committees, making sure that people are welcomed when they come.”
“This is a Black-led space and our accomplices — cause I don't like to call it allies — but our accomplices are here to support,” Stamp adds.
Organizers lay out ground rules for the night on Wednesday evening, explaining the nature of the occupation. After that, a jazz quartet consisting of a singer, saxophone and flute players, and a keyboardist, who also holds down the drums and bass, play a set riffing on themes of justice and freedom. People dance and there is palpable joy in the air, despite months of a pandemic, weeks of street marches, and the heavy police presence lurking nearby. (Leaving the protest around 10:30 Wednesday night, Teen Vogue counts at least 18 NYPD cruisers and seven paddy wagons on a nearby street, in addition to groups of officers positioned on the outskirts of the occupation and the City Hall lawn.)
During our interview, Stamp acknowledges that preparing for police intervention is part of the reality at a direct action like this one. That’s why, after the jazz quartet wraps its set, organizers lead direct action training to offer guidance on how people can protect one another through blockades, if an attempt to bust up the occupation is made. The emphasis is on not fighting back against police, organizers say, but on meeting any potential violence with a show of love and strength as a way to embody caring for one another.
“There'll probably be some intense situations where we have to make some moves and some calls,” Stamp says. “But I think that we're going to stay here and we're going to wait until that budget is delivered, and [ensure] that [that] budget cuts the NYPD by a billion dollars and [follows through on] the commitment to putting it in youth services, housing, education, and the services we need.”
The budget cut is the focus of the occupation, and a win that could energize activists, but Stamp points out that it’s ultimately just one part of a larger push that includes other priorities in a larger project, like getting cops out of New York schools and repealing the Walking While Trans ban.
“I think that when people are saying, 'Oh, my God, what do you want to defund? Get rid of the police? Or abolish the police?,' people have to understand that communities know what's safe for them,” Stamp tells Teen Vogue. “And in upper-class communities, more white, affluent communities, there are less cops — you know why? Because they have more services in their communities; more tools to make sure children and elderly get taken care of. That's all that we're demanding. We're demanding equity.”
For Hill, that’s all part of a larger societal reset that needs to take place to address the systemic racism that undergirds criminalization.
“Our society, as a whole, is brainwashed towards what criminality is,” she says, advising that we all need to “think about shifting blame to the system and not individuals.”
“I think that would really lead to us, as a collective, coming to an awareness of what's really going on. And how we can fix it as a total, world community,” Hill continues. “If we start to have real, genuine conversations, do some real unlearning of our behaviors and thoughts, and do some history and research, we will all come to a different space, where we can support and love one another and have a just society that we all dreamt of.”
As people strive toward those dreams of a better future, both Hill and Stamp expect the protest will continue to grow over the next several days.
“We're hoping this grows,” says Hill. “I don't know how much more full we can get, but we want to take up every inch of space we can.”
Says Stamp, “We want everybody to come down and join us here on Centre and Chambers Street.”
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