Mass March to Defund the NYPD, Tax the Rich, and Stop the Layoffs

Start: Saturday, October 17, 2020• 2:00 PM

At the end of June, the NYC City Council passed a budget which Mayor DeBlasio and Speaker Corey Johnson claimed defunded the NYPD and met the demands raised by protestors and those encamped at City Hall. This claim was a blatant lie: money was shuffled around, but not a single cop will lose their job. Instead, the budget puts the jobs of 22,000 city workers on the chopping block amid crises of unemployment, economic decline and COVID-19.

Not only are our elected representatives slashing public services like housing, education, transportation, and medical care while refusing to touch the NYPD's bloated budget and police force — in trying to close the budget gap caused by the coronavirus pandemic, Mayor de Blasio and Governor Cuomo are now haggling over whether to enrich the super rich further by borrowing from them, or merely by inflicting brutal austerity on the rest of us.

The budget gap could easily be filled by taxing the super wealthy, who have made billions upon billions during the pandemic, but the state legislature and Governor Cuomo have refused to hear us. In the spirit of resistance that drove this summer's protests toward justice for George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and others murdered by the police a coalition of the city's labor and community activists are planning a mass march for October 17 and are inviting all other social justice organizations to join us in turn in out as many NYers as possible.

We need our teachers and counselors; our nurses and emergency medical workers; our housing lawyers, homeless outreach workers, sanitation workers, and countless others to ensure our safety and wellbeing. We are safe when we have affordable housing, and policies that adequately protect us against eviction. We are safe when our jobs and livelihoods are no longer considered “nice-to-haves” in an immoral budget. We are safe when all of our children have access to quality public education, with practices that mitigate the spread of COVID-19 amongst our loved ones. We are safe when our community health programs are strengthened, with a non-police mental health and drug crisis response program and adequately-funded hospitals. We keep us safe.

The path forward is indisputable, though the unelected elite will say otherwise: We must defund the police and tax the rich — and reinvest those direly needed funds back into our communities. Social services must become permanent fixtures of our city, immune from efforts to whittle them down at the expense of millions of New Yorkers. Our Mayor may paint “Black Lives Matter” on our roads, but until he and our elected leaders do what is necessary to protect Black lives, we must continue to agitate for change, through mass movements and sustained political action. Our collective future depends on a meaningful defunding of the NYPD, legislation that compels the wealthiest figures of our city to pay their fair share, and protection against mass layoffs.