The current New York Police Department (NYPD) budget is a colossal $5.6 BILLION. While the city's overall proposed budget for the 2021 fiscal year includes cuts due to the effects of the pandemic, the proposed budgetary cuts for the NYPD will only amount to an approximate 0.3 percent. That is not enough! In the wake of decades of racially disparate law enforcement tactics and shockingly arrogant police misconduct with essentially zero accountability, it is not only logical but also necessary to penalize the NYPD where it will hurt the most - their economic livelihood.

The majority of the NYPD budget is derived from tax revenue from the public, the public who the police are sworn to PROTECT and SERVE. But this is far from the truth - as a significant portion of the public are instead harassed and brutalized by the NYPD with no meaningful resolutions on either side. It is only right then that the public's money should be redirected towards objectives that uphold justice and encourage change; otherwise we are all made complicit in progressing hate.

Police - as any other profession - should be judged by their ability to perform their job at the highest set standards. And these standards must be set higher every year. An easy starting plan to reduce the NYPD budget is by overseeing a mass layoff of officers who have an excessive amount of police misconduct reports filed against them. These police are clearly not upstanding officers of the law and even if only one officer conducts themselves reprehensibly AND gets away with it, the whole department becomes tainted by association. Bad behavior MUST have repercussions and the discipline must fit the infraction. Even a small 5% cut to NYPD funding would free up $300 million in 2021, which would undoubtedly provide more utility to the black community in their direct possession rather than in the coffers of the NYPD. It is not enough to only defund the NYPD; we must also redistribute their funds to SPECIFICALLY serve the black community.

Why specifically the black community? According to the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, the median wealth of white households is $163,000 compared to only $16,000 for black households. This means black families have 10 times LESS wealth than whites. This is not just some unfortunate coincidence; this is by intentional design. Therefore it is important that we educate ourselves and STRATEGICALLY - via concrete legal avenues - reimagine this design in order to draw a different composition. Enact real change.

Historically speaking white wealth and systemic power in the US is irrefutably the product of black labor, oppression, and murder; we cannot conveniently ignore this fact just because it makes us feel any type of way. Maybe this is how we as a society SHOULD be feeling right now - hideously flawed - as we hold the mirror up to our own thoughts and actions and stare hard at the reflection. The large economic gap between whites and blacks is ultimately used and exploited to allow the police, our criminal justice systems, and various other legal institutions to reinforce structural inequality - to further prevent the accumulation of black wealth and social equity, leaving whites to predictably reap the most rewards.

A crash course in US history reveals that even after slavery was abolished in 1865 there were still massive and DELIBERATE attempts to oppress black communities: all the way from indentured servitude and segregation under Jim Crow laws to the 1921 destruction of Black Wall Street (an all-black lucrative business district that was burnt and bombed, tens of millions of dollars of black wealth destroyed or stolen in the course of only 16 hours) to redlining practices which resulted in denying loans and insurance to majority-black neighborhoods (to this day these practices still impede black business ventures, devalue black property, and allow predominantly black neighborhoods to exist in disrepair) to more recently - in the last 45 years - black men being stopped and arrested by police at a higher rate than white men, leading to permanent criminal records (impacting black men's ability to obtain employment or lines of credit and leading to harsher criminal sentencing for second and third offenses) even if eventually they are never convicted of the initial "offense." 

What we have learned from these cruel practices is that while economic disadvantage obviously plays a role in ones circumstances and choices in life, it is only a rough draft of a much grander scheme: the calculated systematic suppression of wealth-building opportunities of black communities with the motive to better benefit whites. The very essence of encouraging hopelessness. Police, choosing to better protect and serve only certain groups in our society, are inherently complicit in this structural racism.

And now in the year 2020, 155 years post-slavery, whether due to explicit or implicit racial bias on the part of individual officers, improper training and education across the board, or because of the shortcomings of the systems they foster and belong to, it is an embarrassing fact that the NYPD still disproportionately targets, harasses, beats, and arrests black people regardless of an actual crime being committed - with zero accountability. Power that runs unchecked insidiously slips itself into dynamics that intensify already deep-rooted emotions about police corruption, especially in a country where the racial wounds of the past are still very much bleeding. Lets check that power and heal the cuts.

My petition seeks to funnel redistributed funds from the NYPD budget to the black men, women, and children of New York. This can be achieved through various straightforward initiatives - from lump sum grants with the purpose to help jump start black-owned small businesses to education grants and scholarships aimed to advance the learning opportunities of black students to vouchers for health and wellness care services for black moms to even setting up a trust to develop the ideas and dreams of black entrepreneurs in and out of school. It should not only be a symbolic gesture, but a committed long-term economic investment in the black community that will build trust and compassion and nurture inclusion by closing the substantial racial wealth gap, leveling a playing field that has from the very beginning been warped, and - most importantly - using repurposed police funds to do that.