Throughout his presidential campaign, Donald Trump made no secret of his hostility towards movements that have drawn attention to police violence, challenged the confluence of immigration and local law enforcement, and called for meaningful police reform and accountability and reform.
Following on the heels of passing the Criminal Justice Reform Act, which diverts the prosecution of a number of low-level nonviolent offenses to civil rather than criminal avenues, the City Council will hear a bill on Tuesday that also addresses criminal justice reform, but this time by targeting bad actors within the NYPD.
On Thursday exactly a year ago, New York City was practically on fire. The startling decision last December 3 by a grand jury to not indict Daniel Pantaleo, the police officer behind the videotaped death of Eric Garner, blew the lid off a razzled metropolis whose citizens were already familiar with police brutality and discrimination. By then, of course, protests had spread across the country, due to the nearly concurrent decision with Michael Brown's case in Ferguson. In New York, as in Missouri, the anger was palpable—like you could reach out and touch it. And it stayed that way, for a while.
As the gears of federal government have ground to a halt, a new energy has been rocking the foundations of our urban centers. From Atlanta to Seattle and points in between, cities have begun seizing the initiative, transforming themselves into laboratories for progressive change. Cities Rising is The Nation’s chronicle of those urban experiments.
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Posted on January 10, 2014
On January 10, 2014, Communities United For Police Reform and members of the Community Safety Act Coalition gathered on the steps of City Hall to denounce the police union and the former Mayor's efforts to overturn the Discriminatory Profiling Ban of the Community Safety Act and announced the filing
As the Police Department performed a mounting number of stops on New York streets, voices of opposition, slow and scattershot, struggled to be heard.
Complaints, mostly from minority areas, never quite coalesced into a movement. Police officials and city leaders casually dismissed opponents, denying that the stops were race-based and pointing to the plummeting crime rate as justification for the tactics.
A coalition of City Council members and advocates led by Councilman Jumaane Williams of Brooklyn introduced Wednesday a package of police reform bills the group says will bring greater accountability to the NYPD.
The elected officials and advocates who stood outside City Hall on Wednesday form a group called Communities United For Police Reform, which intends to make police reform a major issue in the upcoming mayoral election.