In New York City’s last citywide elections in 2017, Cy Vance ran virtually unopposed for reelection as Manhattan DA. Though Vance claims to be a progressive prosecutor, he actually has run a severely punitive office. Despite Manhattan having fewer people than Brooklyn and Queens, his office has sent more New Yorkers to Rikers Island than any of the other city DAs. In fact, over one-third of the city’s jail population comes from Manhattan.
By sharp contrast, in this year’s campaign to replace the retiring Vance, three of the eight candidates — Tahanie Abousie, Eliza Orlins and Dan Quart — promote a substantive progressive agenda, promising, for example, to decline to prosecute many, if not all, low-level arrests that result from the NYPD’s “broken windows” policing strategy targeting mainly poor Black and Brown New Yorkers for minor offenses, such as petty larceny, fare evasion and drug possession.
Four of the remaining five candidates also, rather dubiously, lay claim to the progressive mantle because, it seems, embracing that identity is electorally advantageous in this political moment. For instance, even Tali Farhadian Weinstein, an ex-prosecutor that one public defender’s organization, Five Boro Defenders, has called “especially dangerous” in its voter education guide, is arranging to have flyers placed in our mailboxes promoting her record as a criminal justice reformer.
This shift in public discourse regarding law enforcement and justice issues is not confined to the Manhattan DA’s race. We see it in the contest for our city’s next mayor.
Four years ago, the Democratic primary came down to incumbent Bill de Blasio and challenger Sal Albanese. Though de Blasio has repeatedly irked cops, advocates were, and still are, harshly critical of the mayor’s police reform efforts, calling them out as tweaks around the edges at best. Albanese, an honorable politician, was to the right of de Blasio on law enforcement issues, not confronting the mayor, for example, on his refusal to sanction abusive cops or his vocal support for “broken windows” tactics. Consequently, in 2017 there was literally no mainstream candidate critical of NYPD practices.
In this year’s campaign, many candidates in a crowded field of mayoral hopefuls have called for significant changes in policing policies. For example, five of the leading eight leading contenders for the Democratic Party nomination back removing final discipline authority in cases of alleged officer misconduct from the police commissioner.
Five candidates — not the same five, but including the current leader in the polls, Andrew Yang — also support eliminating police contact with either unhoused or mentally troubled New Yorkers. In addition, several candidates back cutting the NYPD by $1 billion and reallocating the money saved to programs and services that would benefit the mainly low-income communities of color that have borne the brunt of the NYPD’s needlessly punitive practices.
Four of the six contestants who have spoken publicly on the matter support removing NYPD school safety agents from NYC’s public schools and returning the responsibility for school safety to the educators who run the system. Two candidates — Dianne Morales, a leader from the city’s nonprofit service community and Controller Scott Stringer — have called for fully decriminalizing sex work, while others back partial decriminalization.
Morales stands out by urging a $3 billion cut to NYPD funding, half the department’s operating budget, as the most effective means for significantly curbing abusive policing tactics. Such a stance from a credible mayoral candidate would have seemed unlikely, if not shocking, a few years ago.
Candidates for City Council seats are also proposing far-reaching changes in policing policies. A leader in this trend is Tiffany Cabán, a 33-year-old former public defender who almost scored a major upset in the 2019 race for Queens district attorney. Says she: “My goal at the end of the day is to ultimately get to a place where we are no longer funding police — period.”
This impressive shift in the political landscape regarding policing issues has been a long time coming as people in New York and the country have become more aware of how deeply abusive and racist policing practices are in local jurisdictions throughout America and how severely those practices have compromised the lives of people of color.
While we obviously do not know what the specific outcome of this year’s elections will be in NYC, we can already conclude by the positions of many of the candidates for office that, as Bob Dylan sang in 1964 about another turbulent time in America, “The Times They Are A-Changin.’ ” For the better.
Gangi is executive director of the Police Reform Organizing Project.
