(Photo by Eduardo Munoz Alvarez via The Associated Press/CC BY 4.0 DEED)
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The New York City Police Department finds itself in another of a long line of recent scandals. On September 15, 2024, body-cam footage later released by the NYPD shows two officers in pursuit of a man who did not pay his train fare, eventually opening fire into a subway car full of civilians after he allegedly began to threaten the officers with a knife. 49-year-old commuter Gregory Delpeche was struck in the head by an officer’s bullet and remains in critical condition; Delpeche’s family plans to sue the city of New York (NYC) for the incident.
This shooting follows months of increased police activity in NYC. After a mass shooting in the city’s subway in April 2024 injured 29 people, NYC Mayor Eric Adams, a former police officer, committed to increasing police presence around the city’s subways to crack down on violent crime.
With images of highly-armed police officers deployed to stand guard at subway turnstiles becoming more frequent, the pro-police messaging of Mayor Adams’ administration has been made clear. Students at New York’s Columbia University, who began encamping on their school grounds in solidarity with the millions of Palestinians affected by Israel’s war on Gaza earlier this year, have been met with the consequences of these policies in recent months. As these encampments grew more popular, police have been sent in several times to ‘clear’ the area, using force against students, teachers, and journalists.
According to the New York City Civil Liberties Union, complaints about police have soared under Adams’ administration. The rate of violent crime during the COVID-19 pandemic increased nationwide throughout the United States, in part due to large-scale social unrest in the country. Despite a concerted increase in police presence and a decline in crime to pre-Covid levels in many U.S cities, NYC struggles to do the same, raising questions about whether the city truly prioritizes safety and what we can learn from poor police outcomes.
The State of Policing in New York
On September 17, 2024, a large group of protesters filled the Brooklyn subway station where police had shot several bystanders two days earlier. Police took 18 protesters into custody, escalating the evasion of a 2.90 USD subway fare into a moment of increasing scrutiny of the NYPD.
NYC allocates over $5.8 billion annually to the NYPD, making it the highest-funded police department in the United States. This figure does not include the hundreds of millions in additional funding that goes towards overtime, pensions, and the settlement of cases of police misconduct. According to The Intercept, settling NYPD misconduct cases has cost the city more than $500 million over the past six years, including nearly $115 million in 2023, spurred by a greater number of wrongful convictions being overturned in recent years.
With supposedly hundreds of millions of additional funding going towards the increased police presence in subways, it is worth noting that fare evasion accounts for $300 million of losses for the New York Metropolitan Transit Authority (MTA). Could this massive funding, which has only recouped $104,000 in lost fares for the MTA, not have been used to address this deficit instead?
Mayor Adams commended the officers for this subway incident despite their reckless endangerment of innocent commuters. As both the NYPD police commissioner and his interim replacement recently resigned, and Adams faces a federal investigation for corruption and alleged bribery, the subway shooting has compounded pressure on New York’s pro-police administration.
A Renewed Focus on Police? Highlighting National Protest Movements
Protest movements in response to the subway shooting have found parallels in other movements this year. Throughout the summer of 2024, groups of keffiyeh-wearing students and protesters hopped over the turnstiles in protest of Israel’s war on Gaza, which has killed over 40,000 Palestinians.
The keffiyeh, a Middle Eastern head scarf that has come to represent the Palestinian struggle for liberation, was listed as a banned garment on public transit as part of new legislation in New York State’s Nassau County. This mask ban, which targets both protesters and the immunocompromised as the state faced a Covid surge, is being supported by Mayor Adams, meaning it could come soon to NYC.
Additionally, yearly budget increases have led observers to draw connections to constructing a $90 million police training facility in Atlanta. The Atlanta Public Safety Training Center, referred to by protesters as ‘Cop City’, is set to be constructed on a public parkground. Widespread protests have followed this development, and police have responded with repression. After the police killed an activist in January 2023, these protests escalated the following summer and remain ongoing, though construction remains largely unaffected.
In the wake of the media frenzy surrounding the ‘defund the police movement,’ which gained traction in the aftermath of the George Floyd protests in 2020, police budgets continue to rise throughout the United States. As public pressure for change mounts, it is worth re-exploring the broader policing landscape.
Policing at a Glance – Examining Trends in Funding and ‘Reform’
One of the core arguments of the defund the police movement was that police in North America receive more funding each year without a proportional reduction in crime rates. Several organizations have done research highlighting that there is little to no evidence which suggests that more police funding results in a proportional decrease in crime.
NYC functions as a high-profile example of this. An analysis conducted by the Vera Institute states that “in 2020, despite New York City’s population remaining fairly unchanged in five years, the NYPD’s budget has grown 18 percent in that time.” In that time, the crime rate declined somewhat, but not faster than in other cities with smaller or decreased budgets.
While some may argue that NYC is a major outlier as one of the most wealthy and populated cities in the Western world, this pattern still holds nationwide. According to a study by Ebbinghaus et al., most police budgets increased in the United States after the George Floyd movement. The increase also exists within the Canadian context; a 2023 study conducted by the University of Toronto showed little to no correlation between the level of spending and a subsequent decline in crime rates across 16 major metropolitan areas in the country.
Even though there is a growing body of evidence to suggest that giving police departments more money will not solve the problem of crime, the main argument of those who feel that the flawed institution of policing can be ‘reformed’ holds that more funding will result in greater accountability and justice when things do go wrong. In particular, this has been U.S. President Joe Biden’s messaging throughout his administration. When asked about defunding the police, he said he wished to do the opposite, pledging over $13 billion of federal funds to police departments nationwide.
To say that more funding will provide more accountability, however, is to be blind to the statistical reality of policing. According to the organization Mapping Police Violence, of the 1,247 people killed by police in the United States in 2023, only ten officers were charged with a crime. Given that this number includes hundreds of unarmed individuals killed during traffic violations or non-violent offences.
An Opportunity for Change – Critical Resistance & ‘Non-Reformist Reforms’
Besides contemporary policing being a relatively unproven means of reducing crime, the reasons for fundamentally changing the police are well-founded. Racial injustice at the hands of police in both the United States and Canada has been well-documented over the past several decades and has driven various protest movements. As further demonstrated by the Mapping Police Violence dataset, “black people were more likely to be killed by police, more likely to be unarmed and less likely to be threatening someone when killed.”
Asking police to reform and hold themselves accountable will not provide safety to those systematically targeted by the institution for decades. Abolitionist groups like Critical Resistance aim to go beyond ‘defunding’ the police toward a more comprehensive reimagining of policing. Founded in 1997, the activist group’s goal is “challenging the idea that imprisonment and policing are a solution for social, political, and economic problems.”
While ‘abolition’ can admittedly be a much scarier term than ‘defund,’ it demonstrates a desire to build a new institution focused on public safety rather than maintaining a system that prioritizes ‘security’ and punishment. Critical Resistance seeks to accomplish this, among other things, by organizing around and stressing the importance of ‘non-reformist reforms’ — changes that do not give more power to the police as an institution through funding and credibility but instead take it away.
There is evidence of positive outcomes from initiatives like violence reduction units, mental health support teams, and other institutions that are separate from policing. In Glasgow, Scotland, the murder rate fell 35% after the introduction of a violence reduction unit, which is a community-integrated response team trained in conflict resolution and a public health model of violence prevention.
The only obstacle to the wider adoption of ‘non-reformist reforms,’ then, is a lack of political awareness and will for these changes. The damning statistics on our current form of policing also speak to a broader fear by policymakers to dare to imagine a better world.
Reimagining Policing
In the context of the political fear-mongering around ‘defunding the police,’ the supposed ‘dangers’ of the movement never came to pass. Police have quite clearly not been defunded; in fact, the opposite has been the case, with NYC serving as evidence. With more funding continually funnelled towards policing initiatives, the recent events in the city demonstrate the enduring need for a movement beyond simple ‘reform’ or ‘accountability’ for the police.
Edited by Chelsea Bean
