Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/series/from-the-bureaus/page/6/)
Activists in New York are challenging NYPD Police Commissioner Dermot Shea’s account of a May 30 incident where police in Brooklyn rammed two patrol cruisers into a crowd of protestors and metal barricades, sending demonstrators flying.
After weeks of emotionally charged youth-led protests calling for sweeping reforms to root racism out of the criminal justice system in the streets, the New York City Council passed a package of bills today targeting the New York Police Department for major changes.
It is a question that has been posed to every level of law enforcement in Louisiana. From the city of Westwego, where the 14-year-old boy was shot in the back, to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office whose deputies initiated the chase that led to his shooting, to the Louisiana State Police who are responsible for investigating police shootings.
NEW YORK — After weeks of protest across New York, state and local elected officials are still scrambling to develop plans to divert funding from police departments, and deciding to reallocate the funds toward youth-based social services.
On Friday, Gov. Andrew Cuomo signed an executive order stating funding will be withheld if any local police department — including the New York Police Department — does not implement plans that reinvent and modernize police strategies and programs based on community input, the statement said. In a joint statement released late Friday afternoon, New York City Council leaders, including the co-chairs of the Black, Latino, and Asian Caucus and Speaker Corey Johnson, announced their intentions to “cut over $1 billion dollars, including reducing uniform headcount through attrition, cutting overtime, shifting responsibilities away from the NYPD, finding efficiencies and savings in OTPS [Other Than Personal Service, or nonsalary] spending, and lowering associated fringe expenses.”
Johnson had indicated his willingness to support reforms earlier in the week, and expressed frustration that initial budget cuts forced by coronavirus were not sufficient. “As we have said, a less than one percent cut to the NYPD and a 32% cut to Department of Youth and Community Development is not representative of our values and the City Council will not approve a budget that fails to significantly reduce the NYPD budget and start us on a path to bringing structural change and transformational reforms to the police department,” a statement from Johnson’s office said Wednesday. Reallocating the funding is expected to produce a raucous debate among city officials, no matter how much money is taken from the department, with no clear sense of where the money should go. In a statement, the president of the Police Benevolent Association (PBA) predicted that if the city moved forward with its plan to cut funding, crime could increase as a result.
“For decades, every time a city agency failed at its task, the city’s answer was to take the job away and give it to the NYPD.
SYRACUSE, N.Y. — Pressure is mounting on city lawmakers to change how the Syracuse Police Department operates: The state passed two sets of state-mandated police reforms this week that Syracuse will implement. A still-unresolved contract between the city and the Syracuse Police Benevolent Association will likely head to arbitration. Protest organizers have vowed to march across the city for 40 days, part of the nationwide Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the killing of George Floyd.
On Friday afternoon, day 14 of the protests, another group mounted its pressure. Organizing under the name Cuse Youth Black Lives Matter (CuseYouthBLM), a set of 10 organizers from a local high school had pushed three specific demands from city hall. One would give the Citizens Review Board power by reforming its structure; another would increase transparency in SPD’s new officer hiring process.
After multiple reports of police using excessive force against anti-police brutality protesters in New York and charges filed against only one NYPD officer, activists are questioning whether prosecutors across the city are taking the issue of brutality seriously.
Protests can have peculiar sounds and vibrations. There are sensations that only people who take part in them can feel or talk about, they say. There’s a palpable electricity coursing through the air and the crowd.
For more than a month, as the coronavirus pandemic swept through Louisiana, detained juveniles sat in the nearby juvenile jail while Orleans Parish Juvenile Court’s courtrooms — both virtual and real — sat empty.
Orange County in North Carolina has two school districts. One is much tougher than the other on students caught with marijuana on campus.
It was his first time at a protest. Many thoughts crossed the mind of Eithan Roy, a 16-year-old boy from the Bronx, on the train ride to Brooklyn, Friday afternoon. One of them was the memory of his aunt, who went out and protested the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2012 and told him about it.