MAYA WILEY’S CHOICES, AND NYC’S

City is at a crossroads on crime, again

When Maya Wiley, the civil rights attorney and former de Blasio counsel who’s running for mayor, put out her first big position paper earlier this month, a gun violence prevention plan, what stood out was what wasn’t there: any productive role for the NYPD.

The other thing conspicuous in its absence was how little attention the plan drew from her rivals in an absurdly crowded primary field, and what that suggests about both the Democratic voters poised to effectively decide our next mayor and the damage that the NYPD and its Trump-endorsing unions have done to their own cause over the last few years, including with their screwed-up response to this summer’s policing protests.

Wiley’s plan defines gun violence — which has roughly doubled in New York City in this most unusual year — as “a public health crisis built on the failure to address racial equality” and interrelated with the coronavirus public health crisis and its economic impact on Black and Latino New Yorkers in particular.

To prevent gun violence, she’s proposing a brand new $18 million Participatory Justice Fund “established with money redirected from the NYPD budget” for “communities identified by their rates of gun violence” to “support a democratic process” to identify and develop their own ideas for “transforming potential perpetrators into community investors and shareholders of public safety” by doing things like “partnering with onthe-ground leaders to negotiate shooting truce/ceasefires (and) coordinating existing city resources to provide job training and relocation.”

And then expanding existing programs to dedicate 5,000 more summer jobs to at-risk youth, and “models that have been shown to reduce violent reoffending by 50%” including “trauma-informed Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and intensive mentorship” along with “community-based violence interruption and hospital-based violence interruption to public health facilities with the largest share of assault and gunshot wound patients,” with those unspecified costs coming from sources that include the police budget.

It’s less of a governing plan than a campaign’s expression of its values, a prospective mayor pointing to a somewhat symbolic $18 million drop in a $90 billion bucket moving away from cops and into communities.

But the fourth and final part of the plan goes further, calling out the “tragic conundrum” of the NYPD as a fundamental threat to community safety:

“We cannot watch another video of police killing an unarmed Black person. We cannot watch as police fail to deescalate a situation and it results in an unnecessary death. We cannot continue to watch state-sponsored violence and look to those same avenues for protection from violent crime. In order to prevent gun violence, we need to return the public back to public safety and commit to actions that genuinely keep people safe in our communities and in our schools and hold officers who abuse their power accountable, while focusing police resources in appropriate areas, like keeping guns out of our communities to begin with.” That tacked-on bit at the end is it in terms of what the plan says the NYPD should be doing about gun violence.

And then it punts: “We need to fix policing in this city, and we will soon be releasing my full policing plan” before concluding with three schools-related “public safety efforts that prevent rather than exacerbate gun violence,” presumably in contrast to policing efforts.

It’s all of a piece with six decades of liberal arguments about how police supposedly have no real role to play in reducing crime or maintaining public safety and how community groups can do both of those things with sufficient public funding.

Wiley, a compelling communicator and prominent participant in the summer’s George Floyd protests, has avoided the “defund” and “abolish” slogans but clearly sees an opening for more radical, and riskier, policing reform or transformation after eight years of the current mayor gesturing toward that and then edging away.

In an interview, she stressed that her plan had been composed in close consultation with victims of gun violence, and noted the overlap between potential victims and perpetrators often in need of the same sorts of help. And she stressed that a budget is a moral document, that “you can’t have public safety in the absence of the public,” and that the people impacted by gun violence “are asking for investments in education, in trauma-informed care, in things that aren’t about what the powers that be think of as public safety, which is policing. And that’s exactly what demonstrators were marching about as well.”

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Then I asked her about the private patrol car where she lives in Prospect Park South, the first and grandest of what became a series of micro-neighborhoods in Flatbush filled with Victorian houses built over a century ago on what had been farmland.

Some of those developments have given way to apartment buildings, but Prospect Park South remains a haven of grand and individually distinctive mostly single-family homes set back from well-tended lawns and a tree-lined mall maintained by the city running down the middle of Albemarle Road from Coney Island Ave. to Buckingham Road (as E. 16th St. is called there), where it’s separated from the apartment buildings to the east by the fenced-off street-level tracks for the B and Q trains.

The original prospectus for Prospect Park South pitched it as a suburb for “people of intelligence and good breeding,” with buyers submitting references to vouch that they were proper WASPs fit for a community

“where a wife and children, in going to and fro, are not subjected to the annoyance of contact with the undesirable elements of society.”

Those screenings are long gone, and for every very rich person or minor celebrity there now, there are many more long-time homeowners (including my parents, a micro-neighborhood over) who invested in the community during the long wave of flight that preceded the more recent wave of gentrification.

But outside of the wonderful Halloween parade, the manors of Albemarle Road have remained one block and a world away from the stores and apartments on bustling Church Ave. Prospect Park West has endured as a place where a family can live without so much “annoyance of contact,” though that’s changed a bit during the pandemic as some New Yorkers have used the mall as a mini-park and some houses have hosted concerts on their porches and