The new frontiers in the fight over local policing

This is my newish Substack post about how to build successful social justice campaigns. Check out the Introduction to the Gameplan and previous posts. 

Pregame announcement: With hundreds of billions of dollars committed to clean energy through last year’s IRA bill, a major question is going to be how we put those funds to use and actually build a green energy infrastructure. If you’ve got experience on the Hill working on climate policy, check out this Federal Policy Director position working with me at Dream.Org. 

Pregame announcement #2: Since my last post, President Biden sold out the people of Washington, D.C. and the criminal justice movement in one fell swoop. Biden’s decision not to veto a Republican bill overturning D.C.’s exhaustive criminal justice reforms caught many people by surprise, and shows a regression to the Drug War architect we knew for so many years in the Senate. This decision was wrong on policy and wrong on politics. That doesn’t mean we give up on the Biden administration, which is full of competing internal agendas, some of which are still sympathetic to criminal justice reform. But not their finest moment. 

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My most vivid experience being stopped and frisked came as a senior in high school. I was on my way home from a college visit. I swiped my student Metrocard at the Port Authority subway stop, and right after the turnstiles two large men grabbed me and pushed me against the pillar, demanding to know where I’d gotten my student Metrocard from. They dumped the contents of my duffle bag on the ground, emptied my pockets, and after eventually finding my student ID - and nothing illegal - they let me go without so much as an apology. That wasn’t my only negative incident with police growing up, and it left a lifelong impression

Multiply my experience by literally millions of questionable or illegal stops of Black and brown people, along with the imperious violence with which the NYPD has historically treated protesters, and you can understand why New York City’s communities of color and progressive left are distrustful of the police. NYC is one of several cities undergoing another serious debate on the future of policing. 

A few weeks ago, we focused on the national police reform conversation, with an emphasis on how to reduce police involvement in traffic stops. That’s a profoundly important issue that you could organize around nationally. But as I noted, most policing issues are decided locally. The leftward political identity of most major cities, like New York City, should mean that bolder changes in police policies could happen there. But they really haven’t. Let’s look at why not, and how this time could be different. 

Here’s my gameplan for holding the NYPD accountable. 

Scouting Report: The summer of 2020, when massive protests followed the killing of George Floyd, was the apex for popular support to hold police departments more accountable. But the police didn’t get to their powerful position in American culture by accident, and they have fought back furiously, using many of the strategies we talk about here - organizing, messaging, political strategy. By the 2022 midterms, there was a misleading narrative that crime was out of control because “police weren’t allowed to do their jobs”, and we’re still stuck in that conversation today, especially in New York City. 

The good news is there is a stronger base of people in liberal cities who have had enough of unaccountable police departments, whether in New York, Chicago, Atlanta, or elsewhere. They don’t have the numbers to win elections or pass legislation, but we’ve come a long way from the not distant past, when calling police officers anything but heroes was considered sacrilege. 

Keys to the Game: If we want to hold police accountable, we must out-organize, out-strategize, and out-message police forces that are utterly hostile to reform.That starts with recognizing how the NYPD amassed such an impenetrable position in our local politics, assessing what past strategies have successfully held the NYPD accountable and opening new frontiers in the fight for police reform. The NYPD is a challenging foe, with their billions of dollars, guns, and arrest power, but surprisingly they haven’t faced a vigorous challenge on several of their greatest shortcomings or been challenged in important civic arenas. Shifting the “what” and “where” of the policing debate is a path to change, and in the Drawing Up Plays section we’ll look at two ways to do that. 

Part 1: How does the NYPD have so much power?

Organizing: In organizing we always talk about building a base, and when you’ve got 56,000 NYPD employees, their families, plus thousands of working age “retirees” who likely moved to other security professions, that’s substantial. NYPD police officers boast multiple police unions, with the PBA most notoriously mobilizing rank and file officers against anything that smells like police accountability. The PBA is open to a variety of tactics, from the violent riot that shook the Dinkins administration to the silent protest that unnerved the de Blasio administration, to intentional work slowdowns that have characterized the NYPD post-George Floyd.

Political Strategy: The NYPD hasn’t been afraid to exercise their own political agenda in ways no other city agency would dare. During the debates over bail reform, for example, the NYPD would take anti-reform position at direct odds with the de Blasio administration they ostensibly worked for. The NYPD has also disrespected the City Council for years, refusing to attend oversight hearings, or brushing off questions when they do. Just a few weeks ago the NYPD no-showed a hearing about the Strategic Response Group, the unit responsible for brutalizing protesters and violating civil rights during the summer of 2020. 

But the NYPD also engages in plenty of political strategy that uses tools available to people who want to hold them accountable. For example, the NYPD has three reps on the Civilian Complaint Review Board, versus five for the Mayor and five for the Council Speaker. Their appointments are usually zealous, pro-police advocates who show up prepared for cases; the City Council struggles to even fill its appointments. 

The NYPD shows up to nearly every Community Board meeting, including certain committee meetings. They show up to civic association meetings and to meet with other neighborhood groups. They give community leaders their personal phone numbers. They even have “Precinct Community Councils” that give a veneer of public support to all they do locally. In these spaces, their officers repeat talking points on how their hands are tied by “pro-criminal laws” passed by our representatives and how defunding prevents them from patrolling the neighborhood. These conversations are taking place in plain sight, in public forums, using taxpayer dollars, and it’s giving NYPD access to unfiltered messaging in important political spaces. 

Messaging of Police: The keys to effective messaging are simplicity and repetition. The NYPD keeps it basic: “There are a lot of bad guys out there who police are bravely trying to stop. Only they can’t because of “defund” and their hands being tied by “pro-criminal laws” like bail reform.” In addition to repeating these talking points ad nauseam in community spaces, they take to the airwaves. 

Like most police departments, the NYPD has many media outlets carrying water for them, including The NY Post and local news broadcasts. Activists often critique the media as being mere stenographers for police PR departments, and that’s half true. For example, when I was at the CCRB I wrote a report on NYPD TASER misuse that gave recommendations for improved training. City Hall requested that we share an embargoed copy with the NYPD, who in turn leaked it to the Post, which then published an entirely pro-police article about how bad the CCRB report was. City Hall then said that “due to bad press”, they were shelving our report. 

Yes, the police have an easy time getting their oft-misleading framing into articles and they certainly have their allies in the press. But the “stenographer” critique is only half-correct because much of journalism, across industries, is little more than stenography, as overworked reporters crank out content. It is the effectiveness of the well-funded police PR machines that gets these warped stories written as much as a pro-police bias, meaning a sophisticated counter-narrative operation should have no problem getting stories placed. We just have never had one.

Indeed, stories of NYPD malfeasance do get out regularly (illegal racial quotas, kidnapping a whistleblower, framing people for murder, e.g.), but they aren’t hammered at repeatedly like “defund” or “bail reform.” The story least often published, probably because people are scared to speak on the record, is that when people do try to speak up within the department and initiate change from the inside - people like Captain Derby St. Fort and Juanita Holmes - they are punished internally.

In the face of the media juggernaut that the NYPD wields, we have to be more sophisticated than “defund.” We’ve long been waiting for an organization to take up that banner.

Part 2: Shifting the conversation on policing 

Given the mammoth structural, historical, and financial advantages enjoyed by the NYPD, how can we hold them accountable?

The best example of the NYPD being held accountable involves the multi-pronged effort to end “Stop & Frisk” from a decade ago. There was a time when the NYPD was making nearly 700,000 street stops a year, and a lot of them looked like the personal story I shared at the top of this piece. In addition to the usual suite of organizing and protests, this campaign also turned to the courts, legislation and the ballot box. In 2013, the coalition won a major federal lawsuit (Floyd v. City of New York) that declared the City’s approach to stop & frisk unconstitutional. The timing of the decision, just before the mayoral election, allowed the coalition to hammer the issue in the Democratic primary, and all the frontrunners, including Public Advocate de Blasio, adopted the coalition’s critique of the practice. To his credit, under Mayor Bill de Blasio stop & frisk declined considerably, though it remains racially discriminatory.  Meanwhile, the coalition got the City Council to adopt modest accountability legislation in 2017. Not a bad set of outcomes.

A decade later, we should look at how we can mix organizing, messaging, and political strategies to put the NYPD on the defensive and shift the narrative.

Organizing: The massive 2020 protests were a missed organizing opportunity. Tens of thousands in the streets, with hardly anyone collecting contact information for future mobilization. This has actually been a shortcoming of decentralized protests in general since 2011. I asserted earlier that the base of New Yorkers ready for radical change to policing is the biggest it's ever been. But they need to be organized. 

Policy: The left has no shortage of ideas for building alternative approaches to public safety. What it lacks is working models, especially in dense, diverse cities like New York.  The good news is that New York’s vast service provider infrastructure has the capacity to build those programs if they can get momentum behind them. One prominent foundation is planning to invest a considerable amount of funding to support alternatives like violence interruption and non-911 emergency responses, with the goal of fortifying an area that has an influx of federal dollars coming. New York-based organizations should be ready to hit those funding sources.

We also have to decide what form police oversight should take. Some activists call for the CCRB to be elected. I’ve long argued that the NYPD Commissioner having the final say over penalties is what makes the CCRB so toothless. Give the Board the ability to punish misconduct, and the current CCRB structure, under an administration that cared about accountability, could actually work fine. 

Political Strategy: There are, for the first time I can remember, a significant number of elected officials in city and state government who are willing to ask the NYPD tough questions and even vote against their interests. They need to be supported by people who say they want to take on the NYPD! That means donating to their campaigns. That means cutting them some slack when they might get a different issue wrong, instead of denouncing them as sell-outs. We talk all the time about “message discipline”, but the left in New York could use some “political discipline” too. When every elected official is one vote away from being an apostate, it’s pretty hard to build political momentum. 

It’s also valid to ask whether any police reform is possible in New York City under Mayor Eric Adams? If there isn’t, then unifying behind a progressive alternative in 2025 (a campaign that would start next year) is paramount. And should that effort fall short, candidates in 2029 that will surely be pandering on this issue should be judged by their record during the 2020s, not campaign promises. 

Drawing Up Plays: Karl Rove’s strategy is to attack an opponent’s strengths. The NYPD has worked exhaustively to promote itself as “the finest police force in the world.” But any regular New Yorker who thinks about it hard enough knows that can’t be right. What about a demand to Audit the NYPD and expose their weaknesses? Prove that the $6 billion a year is being used wastefully and generating poor results, by their own standards.

 We’ve all seen legions of cops playing Candy Crush at subway entrances. Whenever there is a local incident, however small, it’s not unusual to see three or four squad cars show up. Meanwhile, 911 response times are slow, and non-emergency precinct phones go unanswered. Our clearance rates are below the national average - only 32% of major crimes were solved in 2020, and that’s considering that certain crimes come with a known identity of the offender. This comports with my personal experience; in 2015 I witnessed a deadly assault outside a bar from across the street while eating a slice of pizza. My repeated calls and voicemails for the detective on the case went unanswered, and the bouncer who threw the punch was never prosecuted. 

Fortunately, there are two elected officials perfectly positioned to audit the NYPD: Comptroller Brad Lander and Public Advocate Jumaane Williams. One function of the NYC Comptroller is to audit the financial performance of city agencies. Meanwhile, the Public Advocate’s role, as described in the NYC Charter, is to investigate citizen complaints about city agencies and provide broader oversight of their performance.  These two roles are complimentary - Lander following the money, Williams assessing the operations. 

The results of these findings could generate months of media stories and hearings that could dent the public mystique of the NYPD. 

The second play is Organize Everywhere. Activists have built a strong echo chamber, especially on Twitter. But the NYPD is winning the messaging war throughout the City. The new frontiers for the police accountability conversation need to be at Community Boards, civic associations, and local Democratic clubs. Yes, these constituencies skew older, whiter, and more affluent than the city as a whole. But they are also more politically engaged, and politicians know this. These spaces will require patience, messaging discipline, and talking points that are easy to understand. The great thing about this play is that anyone can do it. You can join up with an organization that is committed to police accountability, like CPR, NYCLU, or VOCAL, but the truth is any one of you can show up to a meeting and make sure your voice is heard, or that there is someone to push back on misleading police rhetoric. 

Postgame Reflections: There are so many New Yorkers ready for the NYPD to be held accountable. Likewise, go across the country and you’ll find people of all different backgrounds tired of police abusing their power and not doing enough to help people. With the right approach, police can be held accountable everywhere. 

Further Reading: The biggest policing showdown in the country right now is playing out in Atlanta, as activists are protecting a forest from being demolished for the construction of the “Cop City” training complex. Read about it here. In Chicago, the run-off for mayor between Brandon Johnson and Paul Vallas could not be more stark a contrast in candidates, especially on the issue of policing and public safety.  Read about it here.

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Next on the Schedule: It’s getting to that time when we need to talk about Rikers. Stay tuned.

Janos Marton is the Vice President for Political Strategy and National Director of the Justice program at Dream.Org. Janos previously ran the #CLOSErikers campaign, managed state campaigns for the ACLU, and ran for Manhattan District Attorney, among other adventures.