There's very little power for the citizens to actually do anything. The NYPD holds tremendous political power, and wields it aggressively. They even _publicly threatened_ the children of the previous mayor.
I'm curious to learn more. Do you have a source?
So it would appear that Business Insider's headline was sensationalist and not well supported.
This is typically considered a threat by most well adjusted people, and most definitely an extreme level of harassment.
How much effort did you expend before declaring that change is futile? The NYPD has political power because they worked to establish relationships with politicians and spent money to hire lobbyists that keep these these politicians accountable to their interests. On the other hand, most people would have trouble to name a single city councilor.
The entire system came down hard on those protests, from nearly every angle. The democrats refused to endorse or support the goal, and the risks & costs of continuing or escalating were too high. So it stopped, failed.
The public turned on the movement when the movement turned on the public. Minneapolis neighborhoods were faced with turning into food deserts after looting caused enough damage to force the grocery stores to close for nearly a year (smoke and water damage).
Some stores partner with non-governmental community peace organizations (i.e. civilized gangs) to reduce the need for police presence, and it is slowly working.
Others haven't been so lucky. A Walmart recent closed in a suburb because it needed to call police nearly 6,500 times over the course of 5 years. That was after other local retail outlets had also closed.
Social fabric in some areas is just fundamentally torn, and there's nobody with a good solution.
Cities that increased funding are also experiencing the crime spike. It's a national phenomenon. Also one that apparently police can't prevent because, again, more police haven't prevented it.
That's a misleading way of talking about those numbers, and in fact the source linked within the article shows the exact opposite.
For example, it cites New York as an example of a city which "reduced" police funding. Except New York famously didn't - they simply moved SROs to the Department of Education instead. Total funding for police actually increased - it just was reported on a different line in the budget.
This is factually incorrect. Every major city in the country increased funding for police between 2019-2021. None defunded the police. Some made temporary adjustments in 2020 due to pandemic changes, but every single one was reversed by a subsequent increase over baseline levels for the 202-2021 or 2021-2022 cycle, depending on when the city's fiscal year falls.
Minneapolis is the only one which even voted to permanently defunded the police, but that was reversed before it went into effect.
The image of a CNN anchor in a respirator standing in front of a burning building calling things peaceful was when the movement lost it.
It's hard to sympathize with an angry mob that's burning down cities and looting stores.
Making it hard to sympathize with protestors is an important role of the news, and a significant part of why those protests failed.
I've seen astounding violence from police, before during and after those protests. Look at the thread we're in! Look at the one yesterday about them smuggling fentanyl! Look at the one from last week about the LA county sheriff gangs! Protesters don't carry a responsibility to uphold the law, they are a reaction to the police refusing to do so.
same with michael brown etc. a lot of ppl wish he had his hands up but he just didn’t. sorry.
And it's actually ok to be upset by people being killed. Good even. If it doesn't bother you your soul is weak and cowardly, as much as you might try to frame it as some inevitable result of objective facts or whatever.
It's important to remember that it's the cops with the deadly weapons, its the cops with the chemical weapons, and its the cops depriving access to medicine when they hurt protestors.
One of the greatest disservices in American education is how they teach about activism. The narrative goes that if you can get a million people to complain on the streets, this will magically drive political reform. What doesn't get talked about are the intense lobbying and legal challenges that actually kept the government accountable.
(Unarmed populace -> Corrupt cops)
Power dynamic changes a bit, taking one down a few pegs when everyone else in the room is packing iron without having to get a blessing from the Police.
Not even a bit. If the officer is never held accountable, they can threaten with their gun and the civilian who wants to pull theirs in response is just going to be legally shot by the threatening officer (and if not, found guilty of murder by a vengeful police department). This really is a problem of accountability, which guns don't bring except in a revolution.
There's nobody in the city that seems to dare hold them accountable, because past experience has thought them they will get completely owned by Pat Lynch.
He also had police reform as a key part of his platform, although at this point his dedication to that seems questionable at best.
I wouldn't exactly call his win a mandate for policing.
Adams barely won the primary, and that was only after literally four other forerunners all either dropped out for personal reasons or became embroiled in campaign-ending personal scandals (e.g. sexual harassment allegations).
> I wouldn't exactly call his win a mandate for policing.
The media reported it as if it were one, but that was an incredibly lazy and dishonest interpretation of the election results. There were many other citywide and local races on the same ballot, and more progressive candidates pretty consistently swept all of those races. The mayoral race was the one exception, making it quite obvious that was an accident of circumstance rather than an affirmation of Adams specifically.
If anything, the 2021 NYC elections were a clear mandate for reigning in the NYPD: when given the option of a candidate who wanted to reign in NYPD power and didn't have objectively disqualifying personal behavior, voters pretty consistently chose that candidate for nearly every single race in every single level of government and in every district.
Unfortunately, because of the series of scandals that marred the mayoral primary, it made it easy for national media to ignore the entire context and focus entirely on the end result of one single race, rather than the causes of that race, or the many other candidates that people voted for on literally the exact same ballot.
Really? The George Floyd protests were the largest protests in US history. That summer in NYC was extremely tense between the NYPD and regular residents (I have plenty of stories). Maybe I lived in an NYC bubble, but nearly everyone I knew was extremely upset with the NYPD, and remains upset.