Invest In Black Futures: A Public Health Roadmap For Safe NYC Neighborhoods

Invest In Black Futures:

A Public Health Roadmap For Safe NYC Neighborhoods In Honor Of

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Who Are We?

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Executive Summary

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Introduction

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Violence, Health, and the Criminal Legal System

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NYC 2022: The Current Context

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What Mayor Adams Gets Right—and Wrong

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Recommendations

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References

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In Honor Of This work is dedicated to those we have lost, literally and figuratively, to the violence of the criminal legal system.

To those whose names are lifted up in struggle and to those whose names will never get called in public.

To all those who fight in honor of loved ones.

To all women, gender non-conforming and trans folks who have been harmed by state violence, like Layleen Polanco, Eleanor Bumpurs, and Deborah Danner.

To the families of Saheed Vassell, Delrawn Small, Ramarley Graham, Mohamed Bah, Eric Garner, Anthony Baez, Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Akai Gurley, Shantel Davis, Kimani Gray, Antonio Williams, and Kawaski Trawick: we love you and are inspired by your leadership.

Thank you for lifting up your family members’ names and stories across generations in New York City and for bringing so many of us into the movement for Black lives.

We honor the legacy of Dr. Josephine English, whose work to personally fund public health and cultural institutions in Central Brooklyn built the foundation for the life-sustaining resources that require far more substantial investment. In founding the Women’s Health Clinic in Bushwick, the Adelphi Medical Center & Paul Robeson Theater in Fort Greene and the Up The Ladder DayCare and After-School Program, Dr. English’s work centered the belief that investment in the health and future of our communities saves lives.

Our work inherits her determination to obtain these critical resources for the communities and people for whom she cared: those who need them the most.

Mural of Dr. English at the Paul Robeson Theatre -- Matthew Beeston Invest In Black Futures: A Public Health Roadmap For Safe NYC Neighborhoods

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Who Are We? We are an all Black-led, intergenerational working group of public health researchers, community safety organizers, and public policy advocates. Our work is rooted in the legacy of those who have come before us to help heal and to build power in Black & Brown low-income, working-class communities. Our experience of engaging in difficult conversations with communities about violence and harm means we walk with the knowledge that, as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “Violence is anything that denies human integrity, and leads to hopelessness and helplessness.”

We have been a part of formations to stop community violence without police interventions and to ensure the safety of those in contact with police. And we have experience in passing legislative community safety reforms that actually make people’s lives safer, like the Community Safety Act, the Right to Know Act, and the Safer NY Act. We have led research projects to analyze and synthesize the experiences of New Yorkers in their everyday lives. We have facilitated youth programs in neighborhoods under-resourced by New York City, providing direct community support in the face of widespread disinvestment.

Many of us have lived in New York City for our entire lives. All of us have been personally impacted by neighborhood violence here. We know the legacy of structural racism is alive and well in NYC. Ensuring well-being for all requires undoing anti-Black racism and all its intersecting oppressions: class, age, gender, ability, sexual orientation, immigration status and more.

We are organizers who care deeply about communities and individuals suffering from violence. We are public health professionals driven to solve problems using rigor and evidence. We write this report in solidarity with other formations across New York City struggling to ensure safe, healthy futures for all communities.

Authors & Contributors Authors Anthonine Pierre, Brooklyn Movement Center Dr. Rahwa Haile, SUNY Old Westbury & Brooklyn Movement Center Leo Ferguson, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice Maya Williams, MPA, Brooklyn Movement Center Darian X, Brooklyn Movement Center

Contributors Dr. Alice Weinreb, Loyola University Chicago

Keli Young, Esq., VOCAL-NY

Dr. Brett Stoudt, The CUNY Graduate Center & The Public Science Project

Sala Cyril, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement

Yul-san Liem, Justice Committee Rama Issa-Ibrahim, Communities United for Police Reform Ileana Méndez-Peñate, MSW, Communities United for Police Reform Sarah Landes, Make the Road New York Tracie M. Gardner, Legal Action Center Lurie Daniel Favors, Esq., Center for Law & Social Justice at Medgar Evers College

Alicia Singham Goodwin, MPH, Jews for Racial & Economic Justice Michael Sisitzky, Esq., New York Civil Liberties Union LoriKim Alexander, Anti-Violence Project Mark Winston Griffith, Brooklyn Movement Center Dr. Llana Barber, SUNY Old Westbury Spencer Williams, Municipal Art Society Victor Dempsey, NAACP Legal Defense Fund

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Katurah Topps, Esq., NAACP Legal Defense Fund

Carolyn Martinez-Class

Dr. Sirry Alang, Lehigh University

Endorsing Organizations Alliance for Quality Education

Justice Committee

Arthur Ashe Institute for Urban Health

Kings Against Violence Initiative (KAVI)

Black Jewish Liberation Collective (BJLC)

Legal Action Center

Black VegFest

Make the Road NY

Brooklyn Movement Center

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement (MXGM)

Brooklyn NAACP

Member Action Coalition

CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities

Movement for Black Lives

Campaign Against Racism NYC Chapter

NAACP Legal Defense and Education Fund

Center for Law and Social Justice at Medgar

New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU)

Evers College

New York Communities for Change

Children’s Defense Fund-New York

New York Immigration Coalition

Chinese-American Planning Council

North Bronx Collective

Citizen Action of New York

NYC Anti-Violence Project

Citizens’ Committee for Children of New

NYC Coalition for Educational Justice

York

Theatre of the Oppressed NYC

Color of Change

The Public Science Project

Community Resource Hub for Safety &

The People’s Plan

Accountability

Urban Youth Collaborative

Communities United for Police Reform

VOCAL-NY

Data for Black Lives

Women’s Empowerment Coalition of NYC

East New York Community Land Trust

Youth Represent

Equality for Flatbush FIERCE! Freedom Agenda GANGS Coalition Girls for Gender Equity Housing Data Coalition Jews For Racial & Economic Justice (JFREJ)

Design Ronnette A. Cox, Layout & Design, RC By Design Jazz Peña, Cover Art Matthew Beeston, Mural of Dr. English

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The next generation of New Yorkers shouldn’t have to guess if they’ll actually receive mental health services when they call for an emergency response, whether they’ll be sufficiently employed to meet their families’ needs, or where they will sleep at night.

Executive Summary At this point in 2022, we are two years into a global pandemic and over 100 days into a new mayoral administration in NYC. Public health conversations have extended beyond the traditional arenas of academia and health provision into our daily lives, from the kitchen table to the (online) watercooler.

Beyond the COVID-19 crisis, violence has emerged as a hot-button public health topic. From interpersonal violence between individuals to the structural violence that causes community-level harms, chances are you’ve been talking about violence. The American Public Health Association (APHA) asserts that violence is a preventable public health crisis that requires public health solutions (2018).

“ The Blueprint disregards the research on how policing, mass incarceration, and gun violence are each public health crises driven by structural violence. ” On Monday, January 24, 2022, in response to the killing of two NYPD police officers over the previous weekend, Mayor Eric Adams released The Blueprint to End Gun Violence, a 15-page plan for increasing NYPD presence in largely Black & Latinx low-income, working-class communities (The Mayor’s Office, 2022). The Blueprint states that “gun violence is a public health problem,” a position that Cure Violence and many public health & police accountability organizations have taken. Adams’ report, however, is distinct in proposing increased policing as the primary solution.

Unfortunately, the Blueprint is not informed by anti-violence public health research. On the contrary, the American Public Health Association, the central U.S. professional organization for public health researchers and practitioners, calls for divesting (2020) from carceral approaches like those at the core of the Blueprint, which proposes

to flood 30 largely under-resourced neighborhoods with more NYPD officers, in what is described as “precision policing.”

The Blueprint disregards the research on how policing, mass incarceration, and gun violence are each public health crises driven by structural violence. Truly addressing gun violence as a public health issue would require resourcing communities with the social determinants of health – quality housing, education and food, and living wage jobs– and also working closely with communities to identify, prevent, and interrupt the proximate risk factors of violence.

Violence, policing and incarceration are public health crises The American Public Health Association asserts that violence is a crisis (APHA, 2018) that is largely preventable (APHA, n.d.). However, policing “solutions,” like those outlined in the mayor’s Blueprint, are ineffective at reducing violence in the long-term (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering & Medicine, 2018) and themselves create and exacerbate countless kinds of public health crises and harms. Those exposed to incarceration – disproportionately Black – have elevated rates of mortality and of chronic and infectious diseases, including COVID-19 (Acker et al., 2018; The Covid Prison Project, 2022). These harms, in turn, tear through communities and families.

The loved ones of incarcerated people – also disproportionately Black – have elevated levels of depression, anxiety, sexually transmitted infections, and heart disease (Wildeman, Goldman & Lee, 2019).

Nearly a third of New Yorkers with mental illness (see below), and nearly a quarter of Black New Yorkers experience direct exposure to police violence (DeVylder, 2021), which puts them at risk of depression, anxiety (Alang et al., 2021), and suicide (Devylder et al., 2017).

People residing in areas with high levels of police violence have elevated levels of high blood pressure, diabetes (Sewell, 2020), and preterm birth (Goin et al., 2021). Additionally, those whose experiences and observations have taught them to fear police violence have elevated levels of depression and anxiety (Alang, 2021; DeVylder et al., 2017).

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Similar to families of incarcerated people, family members of those directly harmed by police describe symptoms consistent with post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and anxiety (Outland et al., 2020).

We are all too familiar with the psychological violence NYC residents face. Nearly a quarter of Black NYC residents report psychological violence inflicted by the police (DeVylder, 2021). The routinely disrespectful and violent ways in which law enforcement officers interact with Black communities reflect a stable pattern of NYPD behavior for decades (Taylor, 2019). Police violence against LGBT communities is also routine and plans like the Blueprint that intensify policing will inevitably intensify the fears that these communities already have of police. For example, nearly three quarters of trans people feel uncomfortable asking the police for help, often due to prior victimization by police (Interrupting Criminalization, n.d). Trans people are three times more likely than non-trans people to experience police violence, and trans people of color are more than twice as likely as white trans people to experience police violence (New York Civil Liberties Union, 2018).

Structural violence is the root cause of these public health crises Structural violence refers to the systematic deprivation of the social, economic, and environmental resources necessary for life, alongside systematic hyper-exposure to that which annihilates life (Farmer, 2004). Black New Yorkers are among the most likely to be exposed to structural violence and are also among the most likely to be systematically deprived of the social determinants of health, including quality and stable housing, quality education and food, and living wage jobs. As public health leaders have shown, access to these social determinants of health is necessary for communities to enjoy healthy and long lives (WHO, n.d.).

The NYC neighborhoods outlined in blue in Maps 1 & 2 are those targeted by the mayor’s administration for heightened criminalization and policing. We see illustrated here how racialized forms of structural violence shape exposure to violence and poverty. These neighborhoods have among the highest proportions of Black and Latinx residents and among the lowest levels of income (Social Explorer, 2019).

Racial Demographics of Brownsville v.s. Upper East Side White 1%

Other

Other Asian

2%

2%

Black 3%

10%

Latinx 7%

Latinx 20%

Black 76% White 78%

Let’s zoom in and observe how these patterns operate at the neighborhood level by comparing two specific communities: the majority Black and Latinx Brownsville and the majority white Upper East

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Side. Although children in each of these neighborhoods are born with the same potential for brilliance, creativity, and joy, the circumstances of life on the Upper East Side nourish these possibilities, whereas the longstanding forms of structural violence in Brownsville – a formerly redlined community– do not.

Brownsville & the Upper East Side: a tale of two neighborhoods Whereas a child born in census tract 144.1 of the Upper East Side can expect to live until about age 90, a child born in census tract 906 in Brownsville can expect to live twenty fewer years, only to age 70 (National Center for Health Statistics, 2018). In other words, children in this part of Brownsville live 3 years shorter than children born in El Salvador, and 3 years shorter than children born in the West Bank and Gaza (The World Bank Group, 2019).

Examining the conditions of life in these two NYC areas, mere miles from each other, clarifies how structural violence has created these inequities. People in Brownsville are hyper-exposed to policing: the

rate of incarceration is 24 times higher there than in the Upper East Side (NYC DOHMH, 2019), and a shocking 30% of Brownsville residents have a family member who has spent time in a correctional facility (Citizens’ Committee for Children, 2017).

Poverty is a predictor of exposure to the carceral system (Acker et al., 2018) and to illness and shortened life expectancy, and is also routine in Brownsville: 47% of children in Brownsville live in poverty (Citizens’ Committee for Children, 2019) and 20% of children in Brownsville’s Community School District 23 are unhoused (Advocates for Children of New York, 2019).

Additionally, the ratio of supermarkets to bodegas, a key neighborhood indicator of quality food access, is five times higher in the Upper East Side, as compared to Brownsville (The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2019). As research from the NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene makes clear, 54% of deaths in Brownsville would have been avoided if Brownsville residents died at the same death rate as those in wealthy neighborhoods like the Upper East Side (2018).

Yet, these deaths were not averted. Instead, Black NYC communities continue to be targeted with systematic deprivation of the social determinants of health. This systematic deprivation is the product of budget and policy decisions that deem Black life as without value. Budget decisions like the decades-long evisceration of the social safety net (Cohen, 2010) and anti-Black policies and practices including redlining (Rothstein, 2017), segregation, and the wars on drugs and crime, intentionally targeted Black NYC communities for violent

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disinvestment and criminalization (Hinton, 2016).

Formerly racialized white ethnic groups were able to accumulate wealth for their families and descendants because they were the beneficiaries of sweeping government programs like the New Deal – from which Black people were largely excluded – that enabled access to high quality housing, education, and wealth-building opportunities (Rolley, 2020). But working-class Black New Yorkers have been waiting for their New Deal for over a century. As legendary New York poet Langston Hughes pointed out, we too are America (Hughes, 1926) and we too require the resources and investments – the social determinants of health – that enable safety, thriving, and well-being.

City budget decisions have favored Black death over Black life Our elected leaders have spent decades, even centuries making carceral budget and policy decisions that cultivate the conditions of suffering and death among Black New Yorkers. We are fighting the health effects of generational public disinvestment in resources that cultivate Black life, like citywide restorative justice practices, health & mental health services, affordable housing and more. This disin-

vestment has occurred simultaneously with exponential increases in investments in policing and incarceration, which by contrast are institutions that undermine community safety, increase health inequities and produce Black suffering and death.

In a January 2022 report, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of California at San Francisco named that, “Once in place, however, systemic racism is often self-perpetuating, with damaging effects on health even after the original explicitly discriminatory measure is no longer in force or has even become illegal.” In the face of these lingering effects of decades of budget violence against Black and Brown, low-income & working class communities of color, our elected officials bear the responsibility for leading 21st century funding models that repair and restore the harms done to their constituents.

Yet these are hardly new claims. Less than a century ago at the 1951 United Nations Genocide Convention, the Civil Rights Congress charged federal, state and municipal U.S. governments with genocide of Black Americans, in a report entitled We Charge Genocide.

Signed by scholars and leaders such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mary Church Terrell, the report described state-sanctioned forms of racial violence that ranged from police killings to economic violence to the denial of voting rights. It is within this Black human rights tradition that we work to end the status quo that relegates Brownsville residents to live 20 years less on average than Upper East Side residents.

The American Public Health Association (APHA) explicitly states that continued investments in carceral systems and policing are not the answer (2020) to the problem of violence. Clinicians and scientists show that conceptualizing violence as a matter of “bad people” or “bad choices” reflects scientifically ungrounded thinking (Slutkin, 2017), and so solutions grounded in punishment will inevitably continue to fail.

Instead, the APHA recommends taking a primary prevention approach to increasing safety through access to quality housing, edu-

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cation, jobs, and healthcare (APHA, 2020). Researchers have found that community-based, non-punitive approaches like Ceasefire have substantially reduced shootings in Chicago (Skogan et al., 2008), and that Cure Violence programs have also had success in reducing gun violence in New York City (Delgado et al., 2017). Unfortunately, community-centered, non-carceral approaches have been shockingly underfunded and un-centered (Kaba, 2021), despite research showing effectiveness and promise.

Enough. Now is the time for our leaders to heed the scientific evidence and acknowledge that what we need is a new pathway forward: one that chooses to meaningfully invest in the resources that sustain life and create the conditions of thriving in our communities.

The Blueprint will harm communities by deepening inequities caused by structural violence The Blueprint, reportedly rushed (Kurshid & Max, 2022) in response to the killing of NYPD officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora over the previous weekend, is a knee-jerk response centering increased policing as a reaction to gun violence against police. The Blueprint also references some funding for social services, largely in response to calls over the last two budget cycles for increased funding to under-resourced communities.

Funding social services is aligned with public health scholarship, but the Blueprint’s promises are largely absent from Adams’ preliminary FY23 budget proposal. While the Blueprint boasts of an “unprecedented” Summer Youth Employment and Engagement Program, the Administration’s $236M investment in the City’s Summer Youth Employment Program is not even a tenth of the NYPD’s over $11B total expense and fringe budget. Furthermore, baselining 100,000 jobs only meets a fraction of the average demand for summer youth employment, which even the Blueprint estimates at 250,000. This notable disparity between community resource funding as compared to policing raises reasonable questions about Mayor Adams’ intent for true impact.

Beyond underfunding youth employment needs, the Blueprint attacks New York State’s Raise the Age law, passed to ensure that young people can receive the support they need even when caught in a cycle of violence. The plan’s recommendation to try young people with gun charges as adults to deter gun violence discounts the violence these young people themselves face. In an August 2020 report, the Center for Court Innovation reported that 88% of youth they surveyed had a family member or friend who had been shot. It is worth noting these surveys occurred in three of the neighborhoods being targeted by the Blueprint (Morrisania, Brownsville, and East Harlem).

“The Blueprint regurgitates ineffective policing strategies of past NYC Mayors, like broken windows policing, while ignoring calls to hold accountable those very same systems for gross abuse and misconduct.”

The Blueprint regurgitates ineffective policing strategies of past NYC Mayors, like broken windows policing, while ignoring calls to hold accountable those very same systems for gross abuse and misconduct.

The NYPD’s Anti-Crime Unit, which was disbanded in 2020 after officers were criticized for the use of reckless tactics, racial profiling, and a pattern of abusive policing, has been rebranded as kinder, gentler policing under Mayor Adams as “Neighborhood Safety Teams.” These officers often act on suspicion, a blunt policing tool that lends easily to racial discrimination and bias, followed by aggressive tactics that have resulted in brutalization and death for those being policed.

They have been disproportionately deployed in low-income neighborhoods of color, where their transgressions against community members often include unconstitutional stops and excessive use of force.

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Plainclothes officers in Mayor Bloomberg’s Anti-Crime Unit and its predecessor, the Giuliani-era Street Crime Unit, were responsible for killing dozens of New Yorkers spanning three decades, from Amadou Diallo in 1999 to Antonio Williams in 2019. The contradiction between the kinder, gentler characterization of the Neighborhood Safety Teams and the brutal reputation of the Anti-Crime Unit was highlighted in City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ January 24, 2022 statement, when the Speaker said “concerns have been raised in communities about the plain clothes unit’s ability to reduce violence, given its past history of initiating undue violence.”

The Mayor’s plan also calls for increased surveillance of communities through technologies like facial recognition with questionable effectiveness and which routinely mis-identify darker-complexioned people, especially those presenting as women (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018). The NYPD’s use of these technologies will exacerbate the NYPD’s already existing history of discriminatory law enforcement practices.

The Blueprint recommends regressive bail reforms despite the fact that those released as a result of bail reforms are not responsible for recent increases in gun violence (Center for Court Innovation, 2021).

In July 2020, using the NYPD’s data, the New York Post admitted that “despite the insistence of department brass to the contrary,” “state bail reform and coronavirus-related releases are not driving recent surges in shootings” (McCarthy, Campanile & Feis, 2020).

“We cannot significantly reduce gun violence without meaningfully addressing structural violence.”

Invest in Black futures Ultimately what the Mayor’s safety plans get wrong is not acknowledging that structural violence is at the root of gun violence. We need concurrent strategies to disrupt both; research has confirmed that we cannot significantly reduce gun violence without meaningfully addressing structural violence. Ending the decades-old scourge

of gun violence in NYC requires changing the status quo of inequity and racialized disinvestment in New York City. We have to level the playing field, not just for New Yorkers struggling today but for future generations of New Yorkers whose lives are in our hands now.

The next generation of New Yorkers shouldn’t have to guess if they’ll actually receive mental health services when they call for an emergency response, whether they’ll be sufficiently employed to meet their families’ needs, or where they will sleep at night. Substantial public investments now in the future of New York can radically shift the landscape for us all.

Our Recommendations We cannot rest until children born in Black and Brown, low-income & working class neighborhoods like Brownsville have the same life expectancy as children born in mostly white and affluent neighborhoods like the Upper East Side.

Rather than turning to increased policing and criminalization, we see a two-pronged funding strategy as the path forward: an immediate triaging of gun violence, followed by long-term community reinvestment. Triaging gun violence will take immediate public funding to adequately resource communities and prevent the spread of interpersonal violence more broadly. Community reinvestments are those that are due to communities to improve residents’ access to the social determinants of health, which will offset the cost of structural violence for future generations of all New Yorkers to thrive.

Triage Gun Violence Recommendation 1: Prevent the spread of gun violence Immediately interrupt neighborhood cycles of interpersonal violence with substantial funding to non-police violence crisis prevention and intervention services. We need to invest in programs that prevent and intervene in violence, programs that safely remove guns from our communities, and programs that resource our everyday New Yorkers as community first responders.

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Recommendation 2: Meet community needs with adequate resources Immediately increase access to affordable housing, jobs, youth resources, health & mental health services, and public space to stabilize the free fall many are in that makes communities at risk for violence.

We need to invest in stable housing for unhoused and housing insecure people, increase harm reduction supports for substance users, and increase access to comprehensive community-based health & mental health programs and services. Additionally, we need to fund public employment programs (including an emphasis on youth jobs), fund resources for youth development & comprehensive, quality education, including implementing citywide restorative practices and improve the physical environment of our neighborhoods.

Invest in Black Futures Recommendation 3: Invest in the future of communities most under-resourced and most directly impacted by structural violence Commit long-range funding to improve quality of life for the next generation of communities most impacted by structural violence We need to eliminate poverty in the next generation of New Yorkers, ensure access to quality affordable housing and healthcare services for low-income and working-class New Yorkers, dismantle the war on drugs in New York City, and develop neighborhood safety alternatives to policing and incarceration.

- Sala Cyril,

Malcolm X Grassroots Movement Staffer & CPR Spokesperson, on Mayor Eric Adams' decision to bring back 'Broken Windows' policing.

Images and quotes courtesy of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR)

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IF OU R ELECTED OFFICIALS TRU LY CARE ABOU T OU R SAFETY, THEY WILL INVEST IN OU R COMMU N ITIES.

Introduction “The phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is rendered meaningless by broad scale public investments in systems that promote Black death, particularly the criminal legal system.”

Nearly a decade has passed since August 2014 when the unjust police killing of Michael Brown, a Black, unarmed 18-year-old in Ferguson, MO, inspired an uprising of activists and organizers. That watershed moment sparked a national movement for police accountability and for the valuing of Black lives. Since then, we’ve seen increased political and social acceptance of the movement’s core value that Black life matters. What has not come to fruition is the political will to meaningfully invest in safe and healthy Black futures, nor a marked change in the social conditions of Black life that have driven the movement.

The phrase ‘Black Lives Matter’ is rendered meaningless by broad scale public investments in systems that promote Black death, particularly the criminal legal system. If we aren’t meaningfully funding programs to ensure the sustainability of Black life and actively working to undermine systemic racism within such programs, the efforts of the racial justice movement become lip service, a photo opportunity, and a song and dance.

Mayor Adams’ Blueprint advocates for “precision” policing in the 30 precincts where 80% of the violent crime in the City has been tracked by the NYPD—targeting many of the neighborhoods that have the fewest socioeconomic resources and already experience the highest criminalization of low-income people. State-sponsored anti-Black practices like redlining continue to shape the spatial organization of our city such that low-income Black and Latinx New Yorkers are concentrated in areas systematically robbed of the resources necessary for thriving. The pervasive lack of resources precisely where they are needed the most creates the conditions for gun violence and other types of interpersonal violence to flourish.

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Violence, Health, and the Criminal Legal System “16% of Black NYC residents have been abused or threatened by the police.”

Violence is a Public Health Crisis Requiring Public Health Solutions The American Public Health Association agrees that violence is a crisis (APHA, 2018). As a result, practitioners and researchers continue to expend enormous effort understanding the factors that underlie violence, as well as developing and evaluating various responses. This research shows us that violence is entirely preventable (APHA, n.d.), and that we need to invest in addressing the causes of violence and in funding community-centered responses that effectively produce sustainable reductions in violence (APHA, 2018).

Yet, the current mayor’s plans and practices continue to center policing as a primary strategy for reducing violence in our communities, despite the lack of evidence supporting the long-term efficacy of proactive policing on crime reduction within cities or even within precincts (National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, 2018). In addition, research continues to illustrate the multiple adverse effects of policing, as well as the ways policing enacts a form of “slow violence” against Black and Brown communities (Kramer & Remster, 2022).

Cognizant of the historical and contemporary function of US policing to protect and maintain white supremacy, and the unconscionable persistence of police brutality–note that police killings have

remained stable (Arango & Heyward, 2021) since the killing of Mr. George Floyd in 2020, regardless of public proclamations against police violence–the APHA has called for divesting from carceral systems and instead investing in the social determinants of health. We concur with the APHA in calling for investment in the social determinants of health in Black and Latinx communities (2020).

Policing and incarceration are also public health crises that cluster among those who are most directly impacted by structural violence.

Public health scholars have long recognized the countless health-related harms of policing and carceral systems, harms which are clustered in low income Black communities, whose residents are among the most likely to be targeted. Those who experience incarceration are among those most likely to have grown up in structurally violent social conditions characterized by poverty, marginalization, and limited economic and employment opportunities (Acker et al., 2019). In turn, being incarcerated is linked to countless health-related harms (Acker et. al, 2019) including death, and chronic and infectious illnesses like COVID-19 (Covid Prison Project, 2022).

The harms of policing and incarceration transmit through communities The health-related harms of policing and mass incarceration also reverberate throughout communities and impact the loved ones of those directly impacted by the system. The incarceration of a family member is associated with multiple indicators of poor health, including depression, anxiety, sexually transmitted infections, and cardiovascular disease (Wildeman, Goldman & Lee, 2019). Additionally, having a parent incarcerated during childhood is linked with elevated levels of inflammation in adulthood (Austin, White & Kim, 2021).

Communities directly impacted by structural violence are disproportionately targeted and harmed by policing Black communities–particularly those with high levels of poverty–are chronically targeted by policing, so much so that the threat of polic-

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ing is experienced as a ubiquitous stressor (Goffman, 2014). Youth of color, particularly Black youth– including girls– are also criminalized (Geller, 2021; Vansickle & Li, 2021). Unhoused New Yorkers are also disproportionately targeted by policing: 40% of unhoused people residing in heavily policed communities report being stopped and frisked by police and 71% reporting having had their property searched (New York Civil Liberties Union, 2018). The mayor’s plans to increase policing have already worsened this intolerable situation for unhoused New Yorkers: the residents of outdoor encampments have already been targeted and forcibly removed to places many of them deem far less safe, with no clear path to stable and permanent housing (Newman & Gold, 2022).

As Figure 1 illustrates, a third of New Yorkers with mental illnesses have experienced police violence (DeVylder, 2021), and people with untreated mental illness are also targeted: they are 16 times more likely than others to be killed by police (Fuller et al., 2015). As a result, advocates argue that the only way to prevent these tragedies is to reduce police contact between people with mental illnesses and police (Fuller et al., 2015).

Moreover, due to the drug wars, people suspected to have or use drugs are also disproportionately harmed by policing (Drug Policy Alliance, n.d.). Even those simply connected to those suspected to have or use drugs are unfairly targeted. Breonna Taylor was murdered by police who had entered her home with a no-knock warrant authorized because of police claims that her ex-boyfriend may have received drugs there (Drug Policy Alliance, n.d.).

Women – especially those of us who are Black, trans, and LGBTQ – are also increasingly criminalized (Survived & Punished, 2020), although forms of police violence experienced by women are routinely ignored and invisibilized (Ritchie, 2017). Yet, women are often criminalized, policed, and incarcerated for simply defending themselves

against interpersonal violence from which policing provided no safety (Kaba, 2021). Moreover, contact with the police puts survivors at risk of losing their children, being charged, and losing access to housing and work (Interrupting Criminalization, n.d.).

Police violence is a public health crisis in New York City that disproportionately affects people directly impacted by structural violence.

“The Mayor’s new aggressive policing thrust is likely to further intensify feelings of fear of law enforcement throughout our city, which research suggests increases levels of depression and anxiety among adults” Structurally violent social conditions put those directly impacted at higher risk of exposure to arrest and incarceration. And police violence is itself pervasive and harmful. Recent NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) data indicate that Black NYC residents routinely experience police violence and discrimination: 16% of Black NYC residents have been abused or threatened by the police (Thompson et al. 2021). Acts of police violence in turn harm health. Those victimized by the NYPD are nearly three times more likely than others to be in poor physical health (29.4% vs 11.8%), and twice as likely to be in poor mental health (26.7% vs. 13.5%) (Thompson et al., 2021). Similarly, another recent study (DeVlyder, 2021) found that Black and Brown New Yorkers, those with mental illnesses, and those with elevated levels of adverse childhood experiences are also at high risk of police victimization (DeVylder, 2021).

The Mayor’s new aggressive policing thrust is likely to further intensify feelings of fear of law enforcement throughout our city, which research suggests increases levels of depression and anxiety among adults (Alang, 2021; DeVylder et al., 2017) and pregnant Black women in particular (Jackson et al., 2017), who are already at high risk of maternal mortality. In NYC, Black women are eight times more likely to die in childbirth than their white counterparts (Butler, 2021).

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Nearly a quarter of Black NYC residents report psychological violence inflicted by the police (DeVylder, 2021). The routinely disrespectful and violent ways in which law enforcement officers interact with Black communities reflects a stable pattern of NYPD behavior for decades (Taylor, 2019). Contrary to popular political rhetoric about “bad apples,” police disrespect and violence is not a behavioral departure from the standards of community engagement. It is the standard of community engagement.

Police violence against LGBT communities is also routine and plans like the Blueprint that intensify policing will inevitably intensify the fears that these communities already have of police. For example, nearly three quarters of trans people feel uncomfortable asking the police for help, often due to prior victimization by police (Interrupting Criminalization, n.d). Trans people are three times more likely than non-trans people to experience police violence, and trans people of color are more than twice as likely as white trans people to experience police violence (New York Civil Liberties Union, 2018).

LGBTQ people residing in heavily policed communities are more than twice as likely as others in their communities to report receiving sexual attention from police — in fact, 1 in 5 LGBTQ people reported that seeing a police officer provoked memories of prior negative experiences with police (New York Civil Liberties Union, 2018).

City budget decisions have favored Black death over Black life Centuries of structural violence have created an extreme polarization of who has access to the resources to survive and who doesn’t. Walk through our neighborhoods and you will see one cluster of blocks that is poor, while the next is affluent. Our streets tell a story about structural violence and anti-Black racism that all too accurately predicts who will thrive, and who will suffer, entangled in the unforgiving gears of organized abandonment and systemic violence (Gilmore, 2015).

Of course, none of these contemporary patterns have emerged out of thin air. Instead, they are the legacy of anti-Black policies like redlining (Rothstein, 2017) and the wars on drugs and crime that intentionally targeted Black communities for violent disinvestment and criminalization (Hinton, 2016). Human rights movements have demanded Black access to the social determinants of health and that which sustains life for decades: including affordable and high quality housing, living wage work, and high quality education.

Yet, instead of investing in Black access to these resources, our communities were and continue to be targeted with disinvestment and criminalization (Hinton, 2016). Formerly racialized white ethnic groups were able to accumulate wealth for their families and descendants because they were the beneficiaries of sweeping government programs like the New Deal that enabled access to high quality housing, education and wealth-building opportunities (Rolley, 2020). Yet Black communities were intentionally excluded from many of these programs and opportunities.

The long-term solution to these crises is investment in the social determinants of health We are fighting the health effects of generational public disinvestment in resources that cultivate Black life, like citywide restorative justice practices, health & mental health services, affordable housing and more. This disinvestment has occurred simultaneously with exponential increases in investments in policing and incarceration, which by contrast are institutions that have been shown to undermine community safety, increase health inequities, and ultimately lead to Black suffering and death.

In a January 2022 report, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the University of California at San Francisco named that, “Once in place, however, systemic racism is often self-perpetuating, with damaging effects on health even after the original explicitly discriminatory measure is no longer in force or has even become illegal.” In the face of these lingering effects of decades of budget violence against Black and Brown, low-income & working class communities of color,

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our elected officials bear the responsibility for leading 21st century funding models that repair and restore the harms done to their constituents.

Yet these are hardly new claims. We stand here on the shoulders of Black movement leaders of eras past to demand access to these resources as well. Less than a century ago at the 1951 United Nations Genocide Convention, the Civil Rights Congress charged federal, state and municipal U.S. governments with genocide of Black Americans, in a document entitled We Charge Genocide. Signed by scholars and leaders such as Paul Robeson, W. E. B. DuBois, and Mary Church Terrell, the report described state-sanctioned racial violence that ranged from police killings to economic violence to denial of voting rights.

It is within this human rights tradition that we look to end the status quo that enables a twenty-year gap in life expectancy between Brownsville and Upper East Side residents. We too are America (Hughes, 1926) and we too require the resources and investments – the social determinants of health – that enable safety, thriving, and well-being.

Decades of research affirms that what all people need to thrive is access to the basic resources necessary for physical and mental health, generally referred to as the social determinants of health (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, n.d.). Researchers and practitioners at our own NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene have shown tremendous leadership in making explicit that forms of structural violence like anti-Black racism are root causes of inequities in health in NYC (NYC Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2022). Structural factors including the racial wealth gap, mass incarceration, discrimination, and immigration status also shape the unconscionable inequities in human suffering caused by COVID-19. Take for example the fact that Black New Yorkers were twice as likely as whites to be hospitalized due to COVID-19 during the 2021 Omicron wave (NYC DOHMH, 2022).

Promising public health responses to the public health crisis of violence So how do we address fears about safety and violence? The American Public Health Association explicitly states that continued investments in carceral systems and policing are not the answer (2020) – not only because they inflict slow violence (Kramer & Rester, 2022), sowing the seeds of suffering in Black and Brown communities, but also because there are solutions to violence that are both life affirming for the community at large and more effective.

For example, the APHA recommends taking a primary prevention approach to increasing safety through access to quality housing, education, jobs, and healthcare (2020). Moreover, clinicians and scientists show us that conceptualizing violence as due to “bad people” or even “bad choices” reflects scientifically ungrounded thinking which only exacerbates violence (Slutkin, 2017). Their research has also identified promising and effective community-based responses to violence (Slutkin, 2017). Like other conditions that affect health, violence is most effectively and accurately understood from a public health perspective, one that grasps the undeniable fact that violence is transmitted through communities by means of highly contagious and preventable processes (Slutkin, 2017). The good news is that with scientifically-grounded evidence, violence – like infectious disease – is preventable.

Violence interruption programs that are grounded within communities and are focused on preventing and treating violence without relying on policing have been shown to be effective. For example, researchers found that community-based, non-punitive approaches like Ceasefire substantially reduced shootings in Chicago (Skogan et al., 2009), and that Cure Violence programs have also had success in reducing gun violence in New York City (Delgado et al., 2017).

Unfortunately, community-centered, non-carceral approaches have been shockingly underfunded and un-centered (Kaba, 2022), despite research showing effectiveness and promise.

Enough. It is time to heed the scientific evidence and acknowledge

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that what we need is a new pathway forward that provides enriched life-affirming soil in our communities. Science has given us the evidence base, now our leaders just need to heed it by finally choosing to invest in the resources that sustain life and create the conditions of thriving in Black and Brown communities.

- Divad Durant,

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Like too many others. I’ve been targeted for unjust tickets and arrests, including one arrest for exercising my constitutional right to document police activity. As a young person rather than turning to the police, I relied on the social fabric of my community for safety. A social fabric that is constantly under attack - by the NYPD by the way the City allocates resources.

Justice Committee member

Images and quotes courtesy of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR)

NYC 2022: The Current Context “Exposure to structural violence shapes the conditions, length, and quality of life across New York City.”

The pandemic worsened already existing inequities in NYC Mayor Adams’ policing plans are taking hold in a New York City that has been devastated by over two years of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Gains in personal income and business taxes have contributed $1.6B more to NYC’s budget than what was originally forecast for this current fiscal year (Mayor’s Office of Management and Budget, 2022), yet New York’s Black and Latinx communities continue to suffer through a profound economic crisis.

New York City still has half as many jobs as it did before the pandemic hit and 2021’s fourth quarter unemployment rate for Black New Yorkers was 15.2 percent, more than twice the unemployment rate for white residents (Parrott, 2022; David, 2022). As the below graph published in The City illustrates, as NYC has struggled to dig itself out of the pandemic’s economic hole, the proportion of Black residents unemployed has risen, while the proportion of white residents unemployed has steadily decreased.

Even before the pandemic, over half of adult Black and Latinx New Yorkers lived in poverty or were low-income (Poverty Tracker Research Group at Columbia University, 2021).

Between 2015 and 2019, 64% of Black New Yorkers

spent at least one year battling material hardship: struggling to pay for food, housing, and other basic needs (Poverty Tracker Research Group at Columbia University, 2021).

Policing solutions to public health continually fail in NYC Black and Brown communities were struggling with the structural violence of racism and poverty long before the pandemic struck and thus were positioned to be the most brutalized by policing approaches to public health problems. This was clear from the earliest days of the pandemic. From March 16-May 5, 2020, the failure of policing approaches to public health problems was reflected in social distancing enforcement: Black and Latinx people were 90% of those arrested, despite representing only 51% of NYC’s population (CBS NY News, 2020; NYC Department of Planning, n.d.).

Black and Latinx New Yorkers continue to suffer due to COVID-19 at among the highest rates, while countless have endured hospitalization, trauma, lost wages, and housing insecurity (NYC Health, n,d.).

As established by clinicians and scholars, just like infectious illnesses, interpersonal violence is also best understood from a public health perspective: it transmits through communities and can be prevented through understanding and responding to the factors that cause it (Slutkin, 2017). Yet, the Mayor’s Blueprint disregards this evidence base and instead aggressively targets 30 largely Black and Latinx neighborhoods with a policing approach to violence like those eschewed by organizations like the American Public Health Association (APHA), because of the harms they perpetuate (APHA, 2020). The communities targeted include those which have already suffered from aggressive policing, concentrated poverty, and illness for decades, including but not limited to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Crown Heights, Brownsville, East New York, Central Harlem, Williamsbridge/Baychester, Mott Haven, Hunts Point, St. Albans and Jamaica, Queens Village, and Stapleton.

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Structural violence creates public health crises in NYC Structural violence refers to the simultaneous and systematic deprivation of the social, economic, and environmental resources necessary for life and health, alongside systematic hyper-exposure to that which annihilates life (Farmer, 2004). Communities harmed by structural violence are deprived of the social determinants of health, including quality and stable housing, quality education, and healthy food, and are also bombarded by toxic exposures like surveillance, aggressive policing, and mass incarceration. Exposure to structural violence shapes the conditions, length, and quality of life across New York City. Black communities in our city and this country have been exposed to structural violence for centuries, due to anti-Black systems and policies like enslavement, segregation, redlining, policing, and the wars on crime and drugs. Structural violence manifests as systemic, structural and institutional racism. We recognize that under our current system of capitalism, racialized structural violence is deeply intertwined with (and often indistinguishable from) class oppression.

Source: Levels of Racism: A Theoretic Framework and a Gardener’s Tale

Dr. Camara Jones, former president of the American Public Health Association, uses an allegory of a garden to illustrate how racialized policies and practices cultivate, perpetuate and exacerbate health inequities impacting Black communities in the United States (Jones, 2000).

She describes planting seeds from the same packet into two boxes of soil. The seeds planted in the box with new, enriched soil flourished from generation to generation, while the seeds sown in the poor quality, rocky soil struggled from generation to generation.

While the progeny of seeds in the healthy soil also grew in well-nourished soil, the progeny of seeds in the rocky soil struggled just to survive from generation to generation, since they were left to grow in the same life-annihilating soil as the first generation.

The allegory of the garden illustrates how exposure to structural

violence shapes all aspects of the lives that individuals and communities are able to live. Structural and physical violence continue to be concentrated in Black neighborhoods, and are driven by social policies that continue to disregard our lives and well-being.

To better illustrate how institutionalized racism manifests differently in the presence and absence of generational wealth and meaningful access to resources, we will compare the health of an under-resourced Black and Latinx community, Brownsville, with one that is mostly white and affluent, the Upper East Side. As you will see, the consequences of exposure to structural violence in areas like Brownsville are countless and extend over the life-course and across generations. Similarly, higher levels of exposure to structural investment and opportunity in communities like the Upper East Side cultivate healthy lives, generation over generation.

Working-class Black communities are targeted with structural violence Children in Brownsville experience profound harms far less common among children in the Upper East Side. 20% of children in Brownsville’s Community School District 23 are unhoused (Advocates for Children of New York, 2019). 47% of children in Brownsville live in poverty (Citizens’ Committee for Children, 2019), and children in Brownsville have elevated rates of exposure to the criminal legal system: the rate of incarceration in Brownsville is 24 times the rate of incarceration in the Upper East Side (The NYC DOHMH, 2018), and in Brownsville, 30% of people have a family member who has spent time in a correctional facility (Citizens’ Committee for Children, 2017).

It is no wonder that the reading proficiency of children in public schools of Brownsville’s Community School District 23 is far below statewide levels (Public School Review, 2022). The average income in Brownsville is only $30,000, whereas the average income in the Upper East Side is $125,000 (Social Explorer, 2019). While 80% of Upper East Side residents have a bachelor’s degree or higher, only 15% of Brownsville residents do (Social Explorer, 2019).

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Racial Demographics of Brownsville v.s. Upper East Side White 1%

Other

Other Asian

2%

2%

Black 3%

10%

Latinx 7%

Latinx 20%

Black 76% White 78%

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To sustain good health and quality of life also requires access to healthy food, which is also shaped by spatial and structural violence.

For example, the ratio of supermarkets to bodegas is five times higher in the Upper East Side, as compared to Brownsville (The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2019). This lack of access to healthy food further increases racial inequities in the risk of chronic illness.

Children who grow up on the Upper East Side are more likely to reside in high income, more resourced households, which automatically and powerfully shields them from the traumatic stressors that shape Brownsville children’s lives: hunger, poverty, and homelessness.

Although children in each of these neighborhoods are born with the same potential for brilliance, creativity, and joy, the circumstances of life on the Upper East Side nourish these possibilities, whereas the structural circumstances of life in Brownsville do not.

Targeted forms of structural violence shape risk of illness and death in NYC Mental and physical well-being, health, and quality of life require access to healthy food, which is also shaped by structural violence: access to healthy food is far greater in the Upper East Side than in Brownsville (The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2019). This lack of access to affordable healthy food directly shapes high rates of obesity and premature mortality in Brownsville, embodying the harms of racial inequities (NYC DOHMH, 2019).

The infant mortality rate in Brownsville is also three times that of the Upper East Side and psychiatric hospitalization rates are six times higher in Brownsville than in the Upper East Side (The New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, 2019). The impact of exposure to structural violence also extends from birth to death: whereas a child born in census tract 144.1 of the Upper East Side can expect to live until about age 90, a child born in census tract 906 in Brownsville can expect to live twenty fewer years, to age 70, 3 years shorter than children born in El Salvador, and 3 years shorter than

children born in the West Bank and Gaza (The World Bank Group, 2019).

Black & Latinx communities throughout NYC are targeted by the public health crises of violence, policing and ill-health Sociologists have shown for decades that structural disadvantage is a key predictor of exposure to violence (Sampson, Wilson and Katz, 2018; Peterson & Krivo, 2005). Following this pattern, maps 1 and 2 show that NYC neighborhoods – outlined in blue – with stark levels of exposure to low income (an indicator of structural violence) are also among those with the highest levels of crime, and highest proportions of Black & Latinx residents. These are also the areas which have been selected by the mayor’s plan for heightened surveillance, aggressive policing, and criminalization.

Incarceration Economically Destabilizes Communities

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Incarceration is another aspect of the spatial (and in this case temporal) nature of structural violence. The punitive approach put forward by the Mayor and pro-policing advocates associates violence with individuals, but arresting and jailing residents merely shifts dysfunction spatially — out of neighborhoods, and into prisons — and temporally, into the near future. Funding policing (and by proxy, incarceration) as the solution to violent crime is a short term expedient that creates long term harm.

A 2018 Brookings study tells a story that links unemployment and underemployment with incarceration. It shows an average sharp decline in employment in the 1-3 years before incarceration, with over 50% of incarcerated people having no income 3 years before incarceration. If we broaden out to two years post-incarceration, what we are the effects of the carceral system’s deadly cycle: Nearly one in two formerly incarcerated people have no earnings two years after incarceration.

The cycle of economic instability, crime, arrest, and more extreme post-release economic instability is a key driver of New York State’s approximately 40% 3-year recidivism rate, and the approximately 70% national 5-year rate (Bureau of Justice Assistance, 2014; Benecchi, 2021). Given the increasing percentage of people with mental health conditions in New York City jails, we can expect more people with untreated or under-treated mental illness to be released into our communities as well.

The reality is that carceral approaches cannot solve a structural problem, they inexorably make it worse. The city residents we arrest today will return to our communities tomorrow more traumatized, less able to earn a living, with less access to housing, and too often, with health and mental health issues that have gone under-treated for months or years.

Until our elected leaders contend with the structural inequities that create violence in the first place, we will continue to rack up a debt — measured in racism, trauma, and immiseration — that we cannot pay off.

Now that we have closely examined:

1. How exposure to structural violence fuels the public health crises of violence, policing and illness, and

2. the inability of policing and incarceration to sustainably reduce

violence without creating their own harmful public health crises

We can compare these findings with the policies advocated by Mayor Adams in his Blueprint to End Gun Violence.

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For nearly three decades, I have joined with other families of New Yorkers killed by the NYPD to call on each administration to stop the NYPD’s violent and heavy-handed approach to public safety, especially in Black and Latinx communities. We don’t want any more families to join this club that none of us ever wanted to be in. Yet, here we go, again.

- Iris Baez,

Mother of Anthony Baez, who was killed by the NYPD in 1994

Images and quotes courtesy of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR)

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Where is the blueprint on ending police violence?

What Mayor Adams Gets Right — and Wrong Gun Violence As A Public Health Issue The Blueprint was issued on January 24, 2022 and was reportedly rushed in response to the killing of NYPD officers Jason Rivera and Wilbert Mora over the previous weekend. The report asserts that gun violence is a public health issue (Kurshid & Max, 2022). While this is a concept not previously espoused by a New York City mayor, it is hardly an original or novel one in the field of public health.

Public health researchers and practitioners have spent decades exploring effective solutions to the problem of gun violence. We are long overdue to be included in a meaningful citywide conversation about the public policies necessary to address gun violence as a public health issue. Unfortunately, the Blueprint doesn’t reflect the many years of existing public health research to justify its core public safety solution to gun violence: flooding 30 largely Black & Latinx, low-income and working class neighborhoods with more NYPD officers, described as “precision policing.”

The Blueprint is in conflict with non-police public health approaches like Cure Violence. Ultimately, the Blueprint relegates public health scholarship to rhetoric. Public health language is used to shield criticism of Adams’ policy solutions to gun violence, rather than meaningfully inform them.

Politically, the Blueprint is a knee-jerk response to target Black & Latinx people with increased policing as a reaction to violence against police. Truly addressing gun violence as a public health issue would require resourcing communities with the social determinants of health – quality housing, living wage jobs, education, and food – and also working closely with communities to identify, prevent, and inter-

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rupt the proximate risk factors of violence.

Besides its initial assertion that gun violence is a public health issue, what the Blueprint gets right is increasing funding for social services.

This strategy is also aligned with public health scholarship, but Adams’ execution fumbles the potential impacts this funding can have.

A Drop In the Bucket The Blueprint alludes to funding for social services and implies modest impacts to the social determinants of health. It suggests an expansion of the City’s Summer Youth Employment Program (SYEP), the Administration for Children’s Services’ Fair Futures Initiative, and the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene’s Hospital-Based Violence Intervention Program (HVIP).

The scope of the resources it will bring to communities pales in comparison to the Blueprint’s emphasis on policing. The Administration’s $236M investment in the City’s Summer Youth Employment Program is not even a tenth of the NYPD’s over $11B total expense and fringe budget. Furthermore, baselining 100,000 jobs only meets a fraction of the average demand for summer youth employment, which even the Blueprint estimates at 250,000.

If we consider summer youth employment a life-affirming resource that contributes to undoing neighborhood-level structural violence and deters individuals from interpersonal violence, then we have to ask: why is the City funding Black life at only a fraction of the identified need? Furthermore, if we consider policing a harm that leads to poor health outcomes for communities, we have to also ask: why is the City funding Black illness and death at exponentially higher rates than Black life?

Beyond underfunding youth employment needs, the Blueprint attacks New York State’s Raise the Age law, passed to ensure that young people can receive the support they need even when caught in a cycle of violence. The plan’s recommendation to try young people with gun charges as adults to deter gun violence discounts

the violence these young people themselves face. In an August 2020 report, the Center for Court Innovation reported that 88% of youth they surveyed had a family member or friend who had been shot.

It is worth noting these surveys occurred in three of the neighborhoods being targeted by the Blueprint (Morrisania, Brownsville, and East Harlem).

That the mayor would advocate for sending these youth to adult jails as opposed to juvenile facilities shows a lack of regard for trauma-informed care and life-affirming services for New Yorkers who experience violence. Young people in adult jails are beaten by staff at twice the rate of youth in juvenile facilities; they’re five times as likely to endure a sexual assault, 36 times as likely to commit suicide, and 50 percent more likely to be attacked with a weapon than their peers in juvenile facilities (Schiraldi & Zeidenberg, 1997).

A Bad Look: Carceral Solutions for Public Health Problems While the Blueprint initially serves up a public health diagnosis for the city’s gun violence crisis, its proposed remedies disregard that policing and mass incarceration are themselves public health crises.

Its policies are erroneously centered around increasing the NYPD’s scope and power. Furthermore, it regurgitates ineffective policing strategies of past NYC Mayors, like broken windows policing, while ignoring calls to hold accountable those very same systems for gross abuse and misconduct.

In a 2018 policy statement, the American Public Health Association details the problem: “Evidence of continued law enforcement violence shows that U.S. policing has failed to equitably deliver safety, placing an inequitable burden of mental and physical harm on socially and economically marginalized populations…. Community-centered strategies for addressing harm and violence can increase

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public safety without the violence associated with policing” (2018).

The Blueprint’s call to revive and rebrand the NYPD’s much criticized plainclothes Anti-Crime Unit, its push to increase patrol officers, and its proposed use of unchecked surveillance technologies, are examples of its police-first approach.

The NYPD’s Anti-Crime Unit, which was disbanded in 2020 after officers were criticized for the use of reckless tactics, racial profiling, and a pattern of abusive policing has been rebranded under Mayor Adams as “Neighborhood Safety Teams.” Stories of misconduct (Geneva, 2022) of these units show a through line of officer abuse that is anything but “precision policing.” These officers often act on suspicion, a blunt policing tool that lends easily to racial discrimination and bias, followed by aggressive tactics that have resulted in brutalization and death for those being policed. They have been disproportionately deployed in low-income neighborhoods of color, where their transgressions against community members often include unconstitutional stops and excessive use of force.

Dozens of plainclothes officers in Mayor Bloomberg’s Anti-Crime Unit and its predecessor, the Giuliani-era Street Crime Unit, are responsible for killing dozens of New Yorkers spanning three decades, from Amadou Diallo in 1999 to Antonio Williams in 2019. The contradiction between the “kinder, gentler” characterization of the Neighborhood Safety Teams and the brutal history and mandate of the Anti-Crime Unit was highlighted in City Council Speaker Adrienne Adams’ January 24, 2022 statement, when the Speaker said “concerns have been raised in communities about the plain clothes unit’s ability to reduce violence, given its past history of initiating undue violence.”

Although data regarding Civilian Complaint Review Board complaints shows that about 30% of complaints filed against plainclothes officers (NYCLU, n.d.) are related to use of force, the Blueprint makes no mention of police discipline or accountability. As the unit has been rebranded, much of the NYPD’s communications about what is changing with the unit has been focused on their attire (McCarthy, 2022), as opposed to setting accountability standards

for officers. With the recent rollout of Neighborhood Safety Teams, Mayor Adams follows in the footsteps of NYC mayors who have rebranded, rather than abolished, the abusive policing practices of these aggressive units.

The Mayor’s plan also calls for increased surveillance of communities. While the allure of high tech crime-fighting and promises of “responsible use” may be appealing, the use of surveillance technologies like facial recognition is questionable in its effectiveness. In their groundbreaking 2018 paper in the Proceedings of Machine Learning Research, researchers established that facial recognition systems had error rates of up to 34.7% when searching for darker-complexioned people, especially those presenting as women, compared to an error rate of just 0.08% when matching lighter-skinned men (Buolamwini & Gebru, 2018).

Research findings such as these led the world’s largest educational and scientific computing society, the Association for Computing Machinery, to issue a policy statement urging, “immediate suspension of the current and future private and governmental use of facial recognition technologies in all circumstances known or reasonably foreseeable to be prejudicial to established human and legal rights” (Association for Computing Machinery, 2020). Given the NYPD’s continued inability to do its job without racial bias, using technologies that are racially discriminatory in the most literal sense as the basis of their enforcement will only result in New Yorkers being subject to unnecessary and illegal encounters, and an increased likelihood of police violence (Speri, 2021; Southall, 2020).

The Blueprint favors solutions that center policing, surveillance, and mass incarceration over less punitive alternatives that have been shown to work. This includes its overreach into the court system in calling for New York State to institute a standard of “dangerousness” that has never existed here with regards to how bail is set. The Blueprint goes on to call for transparency for individual judges, rather than system-wide accountability. On January 24, 2022, NYC public defenders said in a unified statement, “The proposal to upend New York’s decades-old bail system by attempting to predict a person’s

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risk of future ‘dangerousness’ invites racial discrimination into our courtrooms and will lead to an unprincipled and unwarranted increase in pretrial jail population, as it has done in several other states” (Haskins et al., 2022).

The Blueprint recommends regressive bail reforms despite the fact that those released as a result of bail reforms are not responsible for recent increases in gun violence (Center for Court Innovation, 2021).

In July 2020, using the NYPD’s data, the New York Post admitted that “despite the insistence of department brass to the contrary,” “state bail reform and coronavirus-related releases are not driving recent surges in shootings” (McCarthy, Campanile & Feis, 2020).

Meanwhile studies show that jail actually increases the risk that an individual will reoffend once pretrial detention ends (Leslie & Pope, 2021). According to the Center for Court Innovation, “incarceration has well-known ‘criminogenic effects’: disrupting people’s family and work lives (including their long-term earning potential) along with access to housing and any treatment they might be receiving, and exposing them to the dehumanizing and traumatizing effects of jail” (Center for Court Innovation, 2021). The Mayor’s plan directly subverts the ongoing effort to close the Rikers Island Complex by feeding, rather than decreasing, our jail population and our already dysfunctional court system (Fandos & Bromwich, 2021).

The Mayor advocates for the broadest wholesale expansion of the criminal legal system we’ve seen in New York City since 9/11, yet it remains unclear what the value added will be for ending gun violence.

Considering the detrimental health impacts of gun violence itself, communities suffering need solutions that will actually work. The most certain outcomes from implementing the Blueprint are more policing and incarceration, not more safety.

A Bleak Future: Negative Health Impacts and Continued Structural Violence Against Communities While the Blueprint speaks to addressing the root causes of violence, it fails to provide policy solutions that address those root causes.

The Mayor’s focus on the expansion of the police state with tokenized community investments will inevitably increase inequality in our city by narrowly placing the burden for the aftermath of the COVID crisis on the communities that have already been most devastated by it. A just, equitable, and rational response to the rise in gun violence would be to dramatically resource these communities, not target them with increased policing.

Ultimately what the Mayor’s safety plans get wrong is not acknowledging that structural violence is at the root of gun violence. We need concurrent strategies to disrupt both; research has confirmed that we cannot meaningfully reduce gun violence without meaningfully addressing structural violence. Ending the decades-old scourge of gun violence in NYC requires changing the status quo of inequity and racialized disinvestment in New York City. We have to level the playing field, not just for New Yorkers struggling today but for future generations of New Yorkers whose lives are in our hands now.

The next generation of New Yorkers shouldn’t have to guess if they’ll actually receive mental health services when they call for an emergency response, whether they’ll be sufficiently employed to meet their families’ needs, or where they will sleep at night. Substantial public investments now, in the future of New York, can radically shift the landscape for us all.

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“With the Mayor’s “Neighborhood Safety Teams” now flooding into our communities, other young Black and Latinx New Yorkers will be killed - just like Antonio was.”

- Shawn Williams,

Father of Antonio Williams, who was killed by the NYPD in 2019

Images and quotes courtesy of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR)

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Real safety comes from firing abusive cops

Recommendations “ We see a two-pronged funding strategy as the path forward: an immediate triaging of gun violence, followed by long-term community reinvestment.”

We offer our City’s elected officials our recommendations for short and long term funding action steps for transforming NYC into a safer, healthier place for all. Two years into a global pandemic, the city’s most recent violence crisis requires a visionary funding approach.

Our proposed funding strategy is aligned with the Movement 4 Black Lives’ Invest-Divest Platform, which calls for investments in the education, health and safety of Black people, instead of investments in the criminalizing, caging, and harming of Black people.

As a society, we need to profoundly interrupt the cycle of community violence in Black & Latinx low-income, working-class neighborhoods by eradicating need while simultaneously creating equity across the city. Many of the programs that are currently aligned with our recommendations, like Cure Violence and the Summer Youth Employment Program, have been funded by the City for decades but with less than enough resources to meet residents’ needs.

Funding Black futures means investing in current and future generations with the goal of one day ending all forms of violence for all New Yorkers. We cannot rest until children born in Black and Brown, low-income neighborhoods like Brownsville have the same life expectancy as children born in mostly white and affluent neighborhoods like the Upper East Side.

Rather than turning to the knee-jerk increased policing and criminalization of the mayor’s Blueprint, we see a two-pronged funding strategy as the path forward: an immediate triaging of gun violence, fol-

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lowed by long-term community reinvestment. Triaging gun violence will take immediate public funding to adequately resource communities and prevent the spread of interpersonal violence more broadly.

Community reinvestments are those that are due to communities to improve residents’ access to the social determinants of health, which will offset the cost of structural violence for future generations of all New Yorkers to thrive.

Triage Gun Violence Our triage approach distinguishes gun violence from the structural violence that drives it to more precisely create impact.

Recommendation 1: Prevent the spread of gun violence Immediately interrupt neighborhood cycles of interpersonal violence with substantial funding to non-police violence crisis prevention and intervention services

1. Increasing funding to violence prevention programs & violence intervention programs, like CURE Violence & Hospital-based Violence Intervention Programs

2. Investing in programs that safely remove guns from our communities, like gun buybacks

3. Resource our everyday New Yorkers as community first

4.

responders. Making trainings available for community mental health & de-escalation as well as resource local community safety teams

Recommendation 2: Meet community needs with adequate resources Immediately increase access to affordable housing, jobs, youth resources, health & mental health services, and public space to decrease the risk of community violence.

1. Take steps to stabilize housing for unhoused and housing insecure people.

2. Increase harm reduction supports for substance users,

including overdose prevention centers and contingency management programs.

3. Increase access to comprehensive community-based

health & mental health programs and services, such as mobile crisis units and programs using patient-centered and peer support care models.

4. Fund public employment programs, including an emphasis on youth year-round employment.

5. Fund resources for youth development &

comprehensive, quality education, including implementing citywide restorative practices.

6. Improve park space & the physical environment, making community investments in clean energy systems.

Any plans moving forward will require deep and intimate knowledge of the harms — and the particular joys — each community experiences, as well as a holistic network of providers united by a common cause and set of values, and the political will to support those most impacted. These solutions will also require deep collaboration between public and private nonprofit direct service providers. These recommendations are by no means inclusive of all possible solutions or approaches, however we believe that any response to violence will necessarily include many of the suggestions listed here.

Invest in Black Futures We want to create opportunities for safe, healthy futures for all. We need to respond to multiple forms of harm, from street violence to health disparities, in proactive and meaningful ways.

This means building systems of support and care that seek to prevent violence before it occurs, address violence when it arises in a meaningful way, and transform the conditions that create violence

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into those that create stability, healing, and accountability.

Recommendation 3: Invest in the future of communities most under-resourced and most directly impacted by structural violence Commit long-range funding to improve quality of life for the next generation of communities most impacted by structural violence

1. Eliminate poverty in New York City by 2050.

2. Ensure access to quality affordable housing for low-income and working-class New Yorkers.

3. Ensure access to quality healthcare services for all.

4. Dismantle the war on drugs in New York.

5. Dismantle broken windows policing practices and structures that perpetuate policing harms.

6. Dismantle infrastructure and programs that increase vulnerable

New Yorkers’ interactions with the criminal legal system, including removing police from social service roles like mental health response, homeless outreach, and youth development & schools.

7. Develop neighborhood safety alternatives to policing and incarceration.

8. Create a fully-funded citywide comprehensive mental health system for preventative, crisis, and follow-up care.

Over-policing and mass incarceration erode the social and economic fabric of communities, which, in turn, pushes community members to engage in survival economies, exacerbating the safety issues we seek to address. Instead, let’s develop a new public safety strategy alongside communities that will ensure that all New Yorkers have the resources we need to thrive.

- Liv Adechi

Justice Committee member

Images and quotes courtesy of Communities United for Police Reform (CPR)

“

“

Flooding our neighborhoods with officers has never been and will never be a real solution.

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