#changethenypd
FIERCE applauds New York City Council and City Council Speaker Melissa Mark-VIverito for taking an important step in ending the criminalization of low level Quality of Life offenses in New York City. However, we believe that we have a long journey ahead of us to end New York City’s practice of punishing and criminalizing the most marginalized communities for not having access to basic human needs. The shift from criminal court summons to civil summons will continue to punish the homeless, people of color, poor to low income people, and LGBTQ youth of color for their lack of access. This shift in policy will continue to create a system where the law is used to force communities away from spaces where they have found safety, resources, and chosen family. This practice leads us to ask: Whose Quality of Life are we protecting?
Quality of Life laws have made a clear statement to the people of New York City: that those with the least amount of access to resources are expendable and should be punished for their audacity to survive with very little. As an organization that has worked with LGBTQ youth of color between the ages of 13 to 24 since the year 2000, we have seen the impacts of these laws on our community, as one of their first uses to push LGBTQ people of color out of Times Square, making way for big developers to transform a place that was once a site of safety and survival into yet another place for economic expansion. These laws were also used to push LGBTQ youth of color out of the West Village and off of the Christopher Street Pier, and to pave the way for gentrification that has systematically displaced those who are most directly impacted by familial violence and homelessness.
The shift that Mark-Viverito falls short in that it will continue to punish the homeless, people of color, poor to low income people, and LGBTQ youth of color by enforcing fines for low level Quality of Life violations. It is unclear if this proposed shift will take individual socioeconomic status into account. However, what is clear is that the burden of monetary fines for low level Quality of Life violations can and will have a tremendous impact on the aforementioned groups of New York City residents. FIERCE vehemently refuses to accept the state of the Quality of Life laws as they stand now, and urges City Council to not only decriminalize this currently proposed short-list of laws now, but to go beyond that to further reimagine ways to maintain a livable quality of life for all New York City residents including, not in spite of, our most marginalized communities.
FIERCE has offered a series of recommendations, both to the Presidential 21st Century Policing task force and to the Our Fair City Report, that we believe are essential components to any conversation to end the detrimental practice of Quality of Life policing.
Those recommendations include, but are not limited to:
1. End Discriminatory Policing Practices
a. Decriminalize all Quality of Life offenses housed in the Administrative Code
b. Ensure that all quality of life violations take into account individual socioeconomic status as well as the impact and disproportionate application of them.
c. End the use of Broken Windows Theory as a basis from which to create and implement police policy.
2. Ensure local police data and statistics are open to the public and disaggregated by age, race, gender, geographic location.
3. Set up a task force to create new procedures to assess LGBTQ youth upon arrest, and to support them in decreasing their interactions with the criminal justice system, ensuring that the needs leading to police interaction in the first place are being addressed.
FIERCE is a membership-based organization building the leadership and power of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) youth of color in New York City.
What is justice in the United States of America? Who does the justice system serve and work to protect? FIERCE, people across the United States, and the world are asking these questions after Monday’s announcement of the grand jury’s decision not to indict white Ferguson Police Officer Darren Wilson in the murder of Michael Brown.
This verdict sent a loud and very clear message about the value placed on the lives of black people. It says, that black lives mean nothing. It says, that it is okay to kill black people just because of the color of their skin. It says, Jim Crow laws and culture are not an era of atrocity in history but a present vicious subversive reality used to continue to imprison, beat, and kill black bodies with no accountability for the anti-black genocide that is being committed in this country.
As LGBTQ youth organizers fighting against police brutality since 2000, we see this as an issue for not only black people but for queer people of color. We are often forced to choose between our Queer identities and our identities as people of color. FIERCE for the past 15 years has been working to bring all our experiences and identities to the table in which to organize from and for. Our complexity and our intersections are the foundation from which we dream and work towards freedom for ourselves, one another and the communities we stand in solidarity with. We took to the streets the past two nights as Queer people of color, as Queer & Trans youth of color to stand in solidarity with the people of Ferguson, Missouri to call an end to the anti-black genocide being committed by those who wear blue and a badge.
We stand strong with Michael Brown’s family, the people of Furgerson, black people, black, women, queer people, trans women, and our allies because we can no longer be silent. Enough is enough! Not one more Black life lost! We are calling on our community and allies to stand strong. We call on you to continue to stand in solidarity to show that black lives matter. Our lives matter! We call on you to demand justice for Mia Henderson, Aniya Parker, Tiffany Edwards, Yaz’min Shancez, Brittany-Nicole Kidd-Stergis, Alejandra Leos, Kandy Hall and all Trans women of color who were murdered this past year and whose lives were treated with complete disregard demonstrated by the lack of justice delivered. As Queer & Trans people of color, we often see and hear stories of black Trans women being brutalized and killed by police. These stories are almost never covered by mainstream media.
For black lives lost from police brutality, we call on you to demand justice for Yvette Smith, Eleanor Bumpurs, Aiyana Stanley-Jones, Tarika Wilson, and all other black women who lost their lives to police brutality. We call on you to demand justice for Eric Garner, Ramarley Graham and for Akai Gurley. We call on you to demand Justice for Mike Brown and to sign the online petitiononcolorofchange.orgcalling for President Obama and Attorney General Holder to bring federal charges against Officer Wilson for the murder of 18 year old, Michael Brown.
FIERCE will continue our critical work of organizing Queer and Trans youth of color led campaigns that work to decriminalize and empower our communities by holding the NYPD accountable for unlawful, abusive and discriminatory policing. As we demand an end to broken windows policing, we demand justice for Mike Brown and all victims of police violence. No Justice! No Peace!
