Who Opposes Defunding the N.Y.P.D.? These Black Lawmakers

Several Black City Council members have lashed out at progressives, comparing calls to defund the police to “colonization” and “political gentrification.”

By Jeffery C. Mays of The NY Times. Excerpt:

"With New York With New York City on the cusp of cutting $1 billion from the Police Department, a city councilwoman, Vanessa L. Gibson, told her colleagues that enough was enough.

She acknowledged that some Council members, spurred by the movement to defund the police, were seeking to slash even more from the department’s budget. But she pointed out that her constituents did not agree.

They “want to see cops in the community,” Ms. Gibson said.

“They don’t want to see excessive force. They don’t want to see cops putting their knees in our necks,” she said. “But they want to be safe as they go to the store.”

Ms. Gibson is not a conservative politician speaking on behalf of an affluent district. She is a liberal Black Democrat who represents the West Bronx, and her stance reflects a growing ideological rift over policing in one of the country’s liberal bastions.

It is a clash across racial, ideological and generational lines that is dividing Black and Latino council members in New York City. The discord illustrates how complicated the nation’s struggle with its legacy of racial oppression and discriminatory policing has become after the killing of George Floyd and the coronavirus crisis magnified longstanding and widespread racial disparities.

The debate helps explain why the movement in the Council to carry out major cuts to the Police Department has not succeeded.

Laurie Cumbo, a Black councilwoman from Brooklyn who is majority leader, compared calls to defund the police to “colonization” pushed by white progressives. Robert Cornegy Jr., a Black councilman also from Brooklyn, called the movement “political gentrification.”

This divide has widened in big cities across the United States, including in Minneapolis after Mr. Floyd was killed at the hands of the police.

Mayor Ras Baraka of Newark, N.J., called defunding the police a “bourgeois liberal” solution for addressing systemic racism."