New York City votes to cut $1BILLION from the NYPD budget – after cops clash with protesters outside ‘City Hall Autonomous Zone’ for a seventh day as demonstrators say the move is not enough

New York City - which has been gripped by weeks of protests that has seen stores looted, fireworks set off, statues daubed with paint and rising crime including shootings – has voted to slash $1billion from the NYPD budget.

The cut, which comes amid a $9billion shortfall in city revenues due to coronavirus lockdown, will cancel the recruitment of 1,163 new officers, strip $484million from the overtime budget and transfer $354million to other services – including handing control of school safety officers from the NYPD to the Department of Education.

The contentious budget passed with 32 votes in favor and an unusually large 17 votes against just ahead of the midnight deadline following hours of delays – leading to criticism from all sides.

Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, a representative for parts of the Bronx and Queens, said the policing cut amounts to ‘funny math’ and does not go far enough in reducing the force’s $6billion annual budget – which activists want to reinvest in community services instead.  

But council member I. Daneek Miller, co-chairman of the Council’s Black, Latino and Asian Caucus, bitterly opposed the move, saying it makes no sense to cut funding at a time when crime is on the rise. 

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‘Black folks want to be safe like everyone else, we just want to be respected,’ he said, according to the New York Times. ‘We can’t allow folks from outside our community to lecture us about Black lives and what we need in our communities.’

The budget also includes deep cuts to other services including a hiring freeze for all departments except emergency services, $1billion in ‘labor savings’, scrapping a scheme that reduced transport fares for the underprivileged, and scrapping a composting program.

De Blasio has warned that 22,000 city employees may lose their jobs come October, when a new class of police officers is due to start training despite Tuesday’s cut, if other savings cannot be found.

Asked about criticism of his policing cut from all sides, he told the NYT: ‘Some people are never happy.’ 

Protesters have been camped outside City Hall for a week, demanding the city slash $1billion from the NYPD’s budget amid a nationwide campaign to ‘defund’ the police.

While calls to defund police are years-old, the proposals found new prominence amid a wave of Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the deaths of George Floyd and other Black Americans at the hands of cops. 

Demonstrations continued for a seventh day on Tuesday with thousands gathering outside what they are calling the ‘City Hall Autonomous Zone’, ahead of the vote.  

Video footage shared on social media showed the moment a violent clash broke out between cops and protesters as officers attempted to control the crowds by pushing them towards the sidewalk with their batons. 

In a clip taken four hours before the decision was made, officers are seen yelling at protesters to step back while one protester, who is out of frame, fires back at the cops saying they are ‘not welcome here’ and urging them to leave. 

‘You are dangerous and violent and you are hurting us!’ the female protester shouts.

On early Wednesday morning, critics of the deal said the billion dollar cut wasn’t a billion dollar cut at all. 

Some of the funding reduction, they noted, was merely shifting police functions and they doubted the promised reduction in overtime would ever happen.

City Council Speaker Corey Johnson disputed Mayor Bill de Blasio’s characterization that $1billion was being ‘shifted away’ from the NYPD budget, saying the mayor and some council members refused to agree to a police hiring freeze.

‘I know that there are many who are disappointed,’ he said before the vote. ‘I am disappointed as well. I wanted us to go deeper.’

He nonetheless urged members to pass the budget: ‘Today’s budget agreement is one of necessity,’ he said. 

The proposal also did little to assuage the demonstrators, with many saying they intended to stay outside City Hall indefinitely.

‘We are being gaslit,’ said activist Jawanza James Williams. ‘This movement is about so much more than the $1billion, and this means they don’t understand what we’re saying.’

Activists say the budget needs to make a substantial, not symbolic, difference in advancing racial justice and curbing the size and power of the nation’s largest police force.

Five years ago, the City Council – then as now, overwhelmingly Democratic – added nearly 1,300 additional officers to the NYPD. Now, Johnson has said he was wrong to support the expansion.

Council budget leaders said they needed to balance calls to cut policing with residents’ concerns about safety.

‘Many in my community have supported police and want police. They just want families and young people to be treated fairly,’ said Councilwoman Vanessa Gibson, who represents a Bronx district where over half of residents are Hispanic and about 40 per cent are black. 

Gibson said she’d met Tuesday with relatives of a Bronx 17-year-old who was shot and killed Sunday, days after his high school graduation.

‘I don’t want anyone to misunderstand and think that we don’t care and that we have not been working our behinds off to get to a place of equity,’ while ensuring communities ‘are not left behind with crime, violence, illegal guns in our communities, no programs, no activities, and no hope for a better tomorrow,’ Gibson said.

But some other members said the budget proposal didn’t dig deep enough into police spending. Councilman Brad Lander, who voted no, called it ‘more budget-dancing than meaningful reductions.’

Cuts would come from canceling a nearly 1,200-person police recruiting class set for next month – though another class in October is scheduled to go forward – as well as halving overtime spending, redeploying officers from administrative functions to patrol and ending police responsibility for school crossing guards and homeless outreach.

The police department also would give up control over public school security, which the NYPD took over from the Department of Education in 1998. 

The city has about 5,300 civilian school safety agents. De Blasio said details were being worked out, but the Education Department would train the agents.

Money would go instead to education, social services in communities hit hard by the virus, and summer youth programs for over 100,000 people.

Other cuts are being made to the NYPD’s capital budget, including cancelling plans to build a new police precinct in Queens and instead using the money to build a community center.

‘We all understand that we have to answer the concerns of this moment, that people want to see our society progress,’ de Blasio, a Democrat, said at a news conference. He vowed the changes would not compromise public safety.

Police officials didn’t comment Tuesday. Commissioner Dermot Shea has said he was open to giving up school safety and other cuts, as long as the amount of officers on patrol doesn´t shrink.

The NYPD budget is now around $6billion, plus several billion dollars more in shared city expenses such as pensions.

The new plan calls for an ambitious, nearly $300million cut in police overtime. The department paid out $115million in overtime just during recent protests over Floyd’s May 25 death in Minneapolis.

The city budget totaled nearly $93billion when passed last June. Before the virus hit, de Blasio proposed a more than $95billion spending plan for the budget year that starts Wednesday.