Now, they’re occupying an idea

The push to cut $1 billion from the NYPD budget

The occupiers are back, at City Hall Park now, and this time no one is asking “but what do they want?” They want Mayor de Blasio to cut at least $1 billion from the NYPD’s $6 billion budget, and they intend to stay in the park at least until a budget deal is due at the end of the month. That protest, of course, doubles as a recruiting, training and staging ground for new activists.

There are loads of cops there, and loads more at night surrounding an empty Zuccotti Park to ensure it stays empty. I was at Zuccotti in 2001, when the Burger King across the street from the west side of the park nearly collapsed when I was sleeping in it a day or so after the Towers collapsed. And in 2011, charging my phone at the McDonald’s diagonally across from the northeast side of the park while reporting on its occupation.

Today’s occupiers are the descendants of 2011’s Bloombergville, when a couple hundred protesters, about 50 of them sleeping outside of City Hall, drew international attention to their “no cuts, no layoffs, no compromise” demands as Mayor Mike ritually threatened to fire 4,000 teachers and close 20 fire companies before striking a deal with the City Council that averted his cuts.

That summer event proved to be the prelude to Occupy’s fall. In the winter, Bloomberg dispatched the “seventh biggest army in the world” to violently evict the occupiers under cover of night.

I rushed to Zuccotti to cover that, but the NYPD had set up a perimeter to keep the press and everyone else out. I ended up trudging north with a group of angry, scared and utterly harmless occupiers as cops on horses and on foot and in helicopters herded them onward until they found shelter inside of Judson Memorial Church. It felt like some sci-fi B-movie twist on the story of Christmas.

Back then, de Blasio put in with the occupiers and vowed he’d make spaces for dialogue with them should he become mayor. Now, he’s the mayor who’s hiding from them.

“I understand deeply the impulse,” de Blasio said as the occupiers found him on the phone during his weekly WNYC appearance, but “I just think there’s a better way to do it than going into a crowd of 500 people. When you’re mayor is different than what I’ve been in the past.”

Turns out there’s a lot of common ground between Bloombergville and de Blasiotown.

Like de Blasio, I’ve been mostly watching from a distance. On the first night of the Floyd protests here, my parents finally made it back to Brooklyn after being stranded in California for months by the virus, and I’ve tried to maintain social distance so that we can see each other without killing each other. But I know firsthand that what you see when you’re on the scene is always very different than what you see on TV, or in the papers, or even on livestreams.

Amidst paranoid talk in all directions, about fireworks as a prelude to an urban occupation and about tearing down statues as akin to tearing down civilization, a second wave is looming of a virus that’s already killed more people here than have been murdered in the new millennium, including on 9/11. And gun violence is dramatically, distressingly up.

But the NYPD has had such an ugly run of resisting civilian oversight, culminating in the violent police response to the protests about police violence along with a string of bogus police claims about violent protesters, that they’ve squandered credibility. Few public figures want much to do with the NYPD now, Commissioner Dermot Shea has lamented while warning about the violent “iceberg directly in front of us.” Meantime, the people outside of City Hall and all across New York City taking to the streets and supporting insurgent candidates are, in a serious and literal way, participating in our politics, whether the mayor likes it or not, and demanding changes and accountability from a system that’s resisted both for much too long.