On a recent afternoon in Flushing, Queens, Assembly Member Ron Kim filtered through Main Street’s crowded sidewalks with his 6-year-old daughter in tow,
Nialah Edari is one of the protesters who took to the streets a year ago, and she is not satisfied with the pace of NYPD reforms. Are people still being murdered by the police? If that answer is yes, then we haven’t gone far enough, said Edario, the co-founder of the group Freedom March NYC.
She is not alone in her disappointment. Twelve months after Floyd’s death, the group “Communities United for Police Reform” says Mayor Bill de Blasio s administration has failed to deliver on this announcement to cut the NYPD budget by $1 billion dollars.
Did the city really defund the NYPD? The non-profit, non-partisan Citizen’s Budget Commission said the city did reduce its police force by about 1,200 officers. However, those cuts amounted to less than half of the $1 billion announced by de Blasio, much of which was cut was overtime.
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George Floyd’s murder on May 25, 2020, sparked a global uprising against systemic racism and police brutality and put the spotlight on decades-long movements dedicated to abolition and criminal justice reform. Memorial events and marches are celebrating George Floyd’s life and commemorate the first anniversary of his murder, and President Joe Biden is hosting some of his family at the White House as negotiations continue in Congress over legislation that bears his name, the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Monifa Bandele, who sits on the steering committee for Communities United for Police Reform and is an organizer with the Movement for Black Lives, says the racial justice uprising that followed Floyd’s death served as a “clarion call” to defund police and reinvest those resources. “What you see emerging from the communities is a much more powerful demand to actually shift the realities so that
Miller also noted that only 69 of the 976 complaints made against individual officers last June and July named SRG officers, which he suggested “may be due to the advanced training SRG officers receive in team tactics for arrests that are specifically geared to reduce injuries to those being arrested and to the police officers arresting them.” Yet the SRG was heavily involved in some of the most brutal repression of protests in the wake of Floyd’s killing last summer, including the violent arrests of at least 263 people police had trapped in the streets at a June 4 protest in the Bronx. Last month, The Intercept published a series of SRG training documents that reflect the unit’s heavy-handed approach to the policing of protest: coaching cops on tactical maneuvers and mass arrest scenarios, as well as providing additional training for SRG’s distinctive armor-clad bike squads.