23 February 2021
GQ, 22 February 2021.
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"It’s been nine months since the George Floyd protests thrust “Defund the Police'' and other abolitionist rhetoric into mainstream political discourse, yet the results have been meager so far. While some municipalities have sliced significant chunks from their police budgets—$150 million in both Los Angeles and Austin, Texas—a Bloomberg News review found that about half of the nation’s largest cities saw their 2021 police budgets either increase or stay the same. Of those departments that have cut back police funding, the Associated Press found, defunding has been modest, not monumental.
Yet even as mainstream political operatives have declared the concept a political loser—just last week President Biden reiterated his opposition to defunding during a CNN town hall—a handful of cities have significantly reexamined the role of their police. In Berkeley, Ca., armed officers no longer conduct traffic stops or respond to mental health and homelessness calls. Portland ended the deployment of “school resource officers,” long linked to the criminalization of Black and brown youth and the so-called school-to-prison pipeline.
And now, in a proposal announced today, the mayor of Ithaca, NY will attempt the most radical reimagining of policing in the post-George Floyd era so far: abolishing the city’s police department as currently constructed and replacing it with a reimagined city agency.
In a nearly 100-page report obtained by GQ, Mayor Svante Myrick will propose replacing the city’s current 63-officer, $12.5 million a year department with a “Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety” which would include armed “public safety workers” and unarmed “community solution workers,” all of whom will report to a civilian director of public safety instead of a police chief. Under the proposal, all current officers would have to re-apply for a position with the new department."
Source: GQ, 22 February 2021
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