Posted by grillcover on May 21, 2022
Originally published: 01/17/2022
Reflections: (April 2021)
The organizing and protests around the budget had a huge impact on negotiations. It was clear we weren't going to be getting the full $50 billion from the slate of six bills, and certain aspects of them – like a billionaires' wealth tax – were seemingly dead in the water. But where in the past the backroom negotiations between the Governor and heads of Senate and Assembly had produced perfunctory plans to relatively little fanfare, this year the process was exposed for all to see and were delayed to the very last moment.
In the end the budget passed in early April with a total increase of $4.3 billion in new annual revenue for the state. It might seem like a modest increase compared to the ambitious goal, but it's also the single largest revenue increase ever for the state. It would be split about evenly between the Emergency Rental Assistance Program and the hard-fought Excluded Workers Fund, and would be available in future years for other spending.
One benefit of DSA's inside/outside strategy was having elected Assembly Members and State Senators, also members of the org, join for regular Zoom meetings and share behind-the-scenes details. Some of this naturally included frustrations, tales of pettiness, and disheartening roadblocks, but they also included hopeful stories of career progressives, long-stymied by the notoriously corrupt New York Democrat establishment, coming back to life with excitement because of the new crop of lefty legislators and their massive mobilizations. In my opinion DSA tends to over-rely on electoral strategies, but this was a case of a clear material win.
While Tax The Rich was a useful container for my raging urgent energy, and at first helped ground me in a defined timeline, by the end of the budget fight I had branched out into other campaigns and had found other things to fixate on. This was a blessing and a curse. It felt great to be useful, to have endless ways to be involved in important projects, but my priorities were getting all scrambled. I was having trouble keeping up with work and self-care, if it ever even entered my mind.
Defund Tabling
Beginning on April 3rd, we shifted the location of the weekly Defund tables that I would be helping lead from the Farmer's Market further east into Crown Heights. This was a residential area affected by over-policing, and we hoped the conversations would be more substantive and center the demographics impacted. It also was in a contested part of District 35, where we could have good conversations with residents about the DSA-endorsed Hollingsworth campaign.
I returned the next Saturday, April 10th, and had a great day full of interesting and moving conversations. By now I felt confident with the core arguments and could make the point from any angle. This was best exemplified when I strolled up the block a bit and came upon a group of people gathered on a stoop, saying goodbye and wrapping up their conversation.
The matriarch of the group lingered to chat when I approached and after a long talk I got her to sign on. She had family on the force and had many commonly cited concerns, but listened intently and understood our point and the vision we laid out. As I was leaving I ran into an organizer I knew from the campaign who happened to live in that building and who seemed genuinely surprised I'd gotten her neighbor to sign on. It was a nice nudge.
The next weekend on April 18th I was really getting the hang of the area and starting to see some of the same residents out and about, some of whom had already given me their signatures. We were also building a little bit of momentum with our volunteer sign-ups, and it was great to help folks build up their confidence and experience.
NYC Public Safety Pledge Outreach
By April 5th we had confirmed the language of the NYC Public Safety Pledge and were ready to begin reaching out to candidates to gauge their interest. It was a distillation of the key demands that DSA and other groups had made since the summer of 2020, and backed up by the incredible Policy Plank the Defund campaign had been compiling for months. The work I'd done organizing the candidate research had morphed into a tracking system, and with the help of some savvy copywriters, I helped lead a team of volunteers to individually contact, follow-up, and persuade scores of potential pledge-signers.
We officially launched the Pledge on April 17th at a Rally for Real Public Safety in Foley Square, where all six DSA-endorsed City Council candidates came together to voice their support and lead the way. The turnout was pretty good and the candidates gave fiery speeches, but we were disappointed by the lack of press attention. Defund was becoming the great bogeyman of the cycle, and despite our concerted efforts to demystify and educate around the issue (note the lack of controversial "slogans" in the language of the pledge...), and how widespread we knew the support was, it was still considered a fringe stance.
One funny thing that day, though, was that we shared Foley Square with a massive congregation of BMX riders who were gathering to do tricks on the public infrastructure. Apparently this was the first gathering of its kind in NYC since the beginning of the pandemic, and the vibes were amazing. We parlayed and shared the space amicably, save for the occasional rider who used the open lane behind our speakers to build up speed.
Below: Hundreds of local riders gathered around a jump spot in Foley Square. People took turns as tricks escalated for hours. Near the end one daring rider climbed up and rode off the building seen as seating in the background. It... didn't go great.
Defund Research / etc.
Throughout the month I would continue to meet regularly with members of the Defund Research subcommittee and campaign leadership, especially around the strategy and progress regarding the Pledge. There were a ton of skills to share, things to learn, and balls to roll to support all the various campaign work, and I was eager to help.
As I mentioned at the end of March, I spent a couple weeks of April tracking NYPD events from a range of their public channels. This was how I became mildly obsessed with the Build the Block community policing program. The program is ostensibly to provide the community with an opportunity to meet with local precinct officers to build trust and respond to local issues. In practice, they're poorly advertised and the crowd they've cultivated merely reinforces the cycle of policing that criminalizes poverty. We did some recon, and there have been occasional protests outside BTB meetings, but in the end we decided it was too much in enemy territory to be worth our organizing around. For now.
The other bit of pick-up research I did was in support of the #FireArtem protests around April 24th. The eponymous Officer Artem is a cop who'd drawn his gun on protesters back in January when they asked him to put his mask on. Since then, there had been serious energy in the street to see him fired. One of the connections between those protesters and Defund made the ask and the Research team dove in; turns out the guy has a well-documented history of brutality. The protests against various problem officers would merge into #FireThemAll, an action the campaign continues to support.
That weekend I also attended a meeting of the Defend Coalition, a group of grassroots activists trying to come together as a united front. There is already a collection of nonprofits under Communities United for Police Reform, but the actual amount of member involvement in decision-making and organizing is limited. They have some great resources and we've been proud to stand along with them, but it's not exactly movement politics.
While I'd pivoted hard into DefundNYPD after the budget fight, I still found time on April 30th to join a canvass for Brandon West in my old neighborhood of Gowanus. I'd been advocating for the other Central Brooklyn DSA candidate all month at the tables in Crown Heights, but I wanted to balance out my efforts a bit. That day I also picked up some more of his posters for a second wave of marking our territory.
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Phew. This was as far as I thought I'd get when I started back up last May, but it clearly took a lot longer than that. For now I'll say my intentions are to finish catching up this month (January 2022), which even with my higher output still leaves me lagging. Some later months will be combined for various reasons, though, so perhaps it's not overly ambitious as I pick up the pace!