As Critics United, Stalled Battle Against Frisking Tactic Took Off
The New York Times - August 13, 2013, by J. David Goodman - As the Police Department performed a mounting number of stops on New York streets, voices of opposition, slow and scattershot,...
The New York Times - August 13, 2013, by J. David Goodman - As the Police Department performed a mounting number of stops on New York streets, voices of opposition, slow and scattershot, struggled to be heard.
Complaints, mostly from minority areas, never quite coalesced into a movement. Police officials and city leaders casually dismissed opponents, denying that the stops were race-based and pointing to the plummeting crime rate as justification for the tactics.
The stops continued to rise by the tens of thousands, as police officials pushed to drive crime levels even lower. And although the dialogue never changed, the slow unmaking of the stop-and-frisk strategy had quietly begun.
In a 16th-floor conference room in TriBeCa, roughly 40 different groups of researchers, lawyers and community activists gathered in June 2011 to plan a unified political attack on the policing practice to go along with the one being mounted in the federal courts.
The groups coalesced under one name, Communities United for Police Reform, fanning out into neighborhoods with heavy police activity and becoming a regular and loud presence at rallies on the steps of City Hall and outside the federal courthouse in Manhattan. The mantra: Change the Police Department.
Their efforts, backed by $2.2 million in grants from George Soros’s Open Society Foundations, set the stage for a stunning repudiation of what has become the department’s signature street-level tactic, long defended by successive mayoral administrations.
In the City Council in late June and in a federal court on Monday, the Police Department suffered severe setbacks to its crime policy, and is now facing a court-ordered monitor,two police oversight bills and the possibility that its perceived legacy of a significant decline in crime may come with an asterisk.
“They redefined it successfully,” said Paul J. Browne, the department’s chief spokesman, crediting advocates from the Communities United for Police Reform, which includes the civil liberties group, the Center for Constitutional Rights, that brought the federal suit, Floyd v. City of New York.
“By using data we’re required to produce,” Mr. Browne said, the advocates managed to reframe the debate over the stop-and-frisk policy as a numbers-oriented calculation of how often the police interactions resulted in arrests or summonses.
In a vast majority of the recorded stops, officers cited a reason other than fitting the description of a suspect as being the basis. And in nearly 90 percent of the cases, the person stopped was neither arrested nor given a summons.
“Stop-and-frisk isn’t stopping criminals,” said Donna Lieberman, the executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. “It is stopping innocent people.”
The battle over police stops in New York has many origins, but most see its beginnings in the killing of Amadou Diallo by a team of specialized police officers, who shot the man as he stood in the vestibule of his Bronx apartment building in 1999. That violent encounter — in the course of a stop on a darkened street — led to a report by Eliot Spitzer, then the state attorney general, titled “The New York City Police Department’s ‘Stop and Frisk’ Practices.”
“Obviously the killing of Diallo was a flash point,” said Andrew G. Celli Jr., who as the head of the civil rights bureau under Mr. Spitzer worked on the report. “But underneath it was a seething sense that people were living in a police state.”
The report shined a light on an area of policing that remained largely cloaked during the administration of Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, a time when data about police stops were not public, and advocates sparred more often with the department over individual actions by officers than over broad policy.
Once it became clear that the department collected detailed data on stops — from the UF-250 forms filled out by officers for each interaction — a push began for more access. The Council passed a law in 2001 requiring the department to release data on stops, including by race.
“I don’t think anybody understood at the time how important that legislation was,” said Ms. Lieberman, of the civil liberties union. “But this is a classic example of how a fight over transparency supports a campaign for reform.”
The first release of data, for stops in 2002, showed that a little more than 50 percent of the stops were of blacks and about 31 percent were of Hispanics, roughly the same as during the period studied in the Spitzer report.
To the department, those numbers made sense, because they roughly matched the racial breakdown of suspects identified by witnesses or victims of crimes. It is an argument still made forcefully by Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, as it was by Mr. Giuliani when he was mayor.
Yet after taking office, Mr. Bloomberg and his police commissioner, Raymond W. Kelly, seemed willing to move past the issue. The city settled a lawsuit, brought shortly after the Diallo killing by the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the unit responsible for the shooting was dissolved. Under terms of the settlement, it modified the UF-250 form and created a written policy against racial profiling.
At the same time, the number of stops quietly rose each year.
The police shooting of Sean Bell, in 2006, set the stage for a new confrontation with advocates, who began asking again about data on stops. The New York Civil Liberties Union found that the department had not released it to the Council in years.
When the new stop data were finally released in 2007, the numbers were startling: 508,540 stops in 2006, up from 97,296 four years earlier. Civil rights lawyers filed the Floyd suit the next year. (The suit takes its name from David Floyd, a Bronx man who said he had been stopped more than once by the police and who served as lead plaintiff in the class action.)
Advocates from different groups — including, among others, the Legal Aid Society, Make the Road New York, the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, and the Center on Race, Crime and Justice at John Jay College of Criminal Justice — began meeting informally.
But it was not until the first large meeting in June 2011 at 75 Varick Street, and the creation of the single coalition, that momentum began to gather, said Joo-Hyun Kang, the coalition’s director. “We’re talking about a year and a half, which is not a long time period to pass what I’d call landmark legislation,” she said, referring to a pair of oversight bills passed by the Council. (The bills were vetoed by Mr. Bloomberg; an override vote is planned for this month.)
For Mr. Celli, the former state civil rights lawyer, the Police Department missed several opportunities to change itself in ways that might have avoided a public backlash.
“They should have embraced the I.G. and sought to frame exactly what the person’s powers would be,” he said, referring to one of the bills creating an inspector general for the police. The other, a more direct response to the stop-and-frisk policy, would expand the ability of New Yorkers to sue the department over bias-based profiling.
The federal judge in the stop-and-frisk case, Shira A. Scheindlin of Federal District Court in Manhattan, was more critical of the police, finding the department to be “deliberately indifferent to the discriminatory application of stop and frisk.”
Nonetheless, by last year, the department began to change, significantly dropping the number of stops. Commissioner Kelly denied that political pressure or the court case led to the decline, saying it had been the result of redeployment and better training.
Whatever the explanation, after record highs in the first quarter of 2012, the number of stops plummeted to near record lows by early 2013.
Jeffrey A. Fagan, a Columbia University law professor who testified against the city in the Floyd case, said the Police Department did not open itself up for self-criticism on the issue of stops.
“They became defiant about sticking to the story,” he said. “And they dismissed any questioning as being grumpy old civil rights advocates.”
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Working Class Black, Latino Communities of Wichita to Challenge Kansas City Fed President Esther George’s Economic Perspective
03.29.2016
This Tuesday Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George will visit Wichita to meet with the Fed Up Coalition, led by Sunflower Community...
03.29.2016
This Tuesday Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George will visit Wichita to meet with the Fed Up Coalition, led by Sunflower Community Action and a coalition of labor and community allies. In an election year where jobs and wages take center stage, President George is one of the most powerful policy makers in the American economy, who arguably will have more influence over American jobs and wages than our next president. At the March meeting of the Federal Open Market Committee, Esther George dissented from the decision to not raise rates, arguing that a rate hike – and the resulting slowing wage growth – is necessary. The Fed Up Coalition campaigns for the Federal Reserve to adopt pro-worker policies, and argues that the economy has not fully recovered for low-income people, communities of colors, and workers across Kansas and across the country. In a rare public appearance open to the media, President George will engage with the low-income workers, elected officials, and economists Fed Up Coalition who disagree with George’s prescription for higher interest rates.
Who: Low-income community leaders from the Fed Up Coalition and Sunflower Community Action in Wichita Kansas, Josh Bivens of the Economic Policy Institute, Representative Gail Finney, 89th District, State of Kansas, and Kansas City Federal Reserve Bank President Esther George
What: A chance for low-income people in Wichita, Kansas to have a discussion about their experiences and a conversation about monetary policy with one of the most powerful economic policymakers in the world. This is a rare opportunity where members of the public can engage with the President with media present.
Where: Wichita Marriott, Salon A-C, 9100 Corporate Hills Drive, Wichita KS, 67207
When: Tuesday March 29, 10 – 11 am
# # #
www.whatrecovery.com
Fed Up is a coalition of community organizations and labor unions across the country, campaigning for the Federal Reserve to adopt pro-worker policies for the rest of us. The Fed can keep interest rates low, give the economy a fair chance to recover, and prioritize full employment and rising wages.
Press Contact: Anita Jain, ajain@populardemocracy.org, 347-636-9761 Asya Pikovsky, apikovsky@populardemocracy.org, 207-522-2442
Groups launch 'people's filibuster' against GOP health bill
More than a dozen groups opposing the Senate GOP's healthcare bill will hold a "people's filibuster" for two days on the lawn of the Capitol.
Activists and Democratic lawmakers will speak...
More than a dozen groups opposing the Senate GOP's healthcare bill will hold a "people's filibuster" for two days on the lawn of the Capitol.
Activists and Democratic lawmakers will speak out against the ObamaCare repeal bill Monday and Tuesday and possibly later in the week.
Read the full article here.
Conservatives May Control State Governments, But Progressives Are Rising
Common Dreams - March 13, 2015, by George Goehl, Ana María Archila, and Fred Azcarate - In November, conservatives swept not only Congress, but a majority of statehouses. While gridlock in...
Common Dreams - March 13, 2015, by George Goehl, Ana María Archila, and Fred Azcarate - In November, conservatives swept not only Congress, but a majority of statehouses. While gridlock in Washington is frustrating, the rightward lurch of statehouses could be devastating. Reveling in their newfound power, state lawmakers and their corporate allies are writing regressive policies that could hurt families by exacerbating inequality, further curtailing an already weakened democracy, and worsening an environmental crisis of global proportions.
From a law that would censor public university professors in Kansas to a governor who prohibits state officials from using the term “climate change” in Florida, ideologues in state capitols are wasting little time when it comes to enacting an extreme agenda. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Wisconsin officially enacted right to work legislation on Monday, a policy that’s shown to lower wages and benefits by weakening the power of unions. Missouri, New Mexico, West Virginia, Kentucky, and Illinois are all entertaining various versions of the law. In states like New York and Ohio, legislators are considering severe cuts to public education, while vastly expanding charter schools.
Of course, a look at key 2014 ballot initiatives shows voters held progressive values on issues like the minimum wage, paid sick days, and a millionaires tax. And just 36.4 percent of eligible voters cast their ballots in 2014, meaning that there is surely a silent majority sitting on the sidelines.
The path to policies that put families first is not short, but a bold coalition across the country took an aggressive step forward this week.
On March 11th, under the banner “We Rise,” thousands of people joined more than 28 actions in 16 states to awaken that silent majority and call their legislators to account. A joint project of National People’s Action, Center for Popular Democracy, USAction and other allies across the country, the message of the day was simple: our cities and states belong to us, not big corporations and the wealthy. We can work together and push our legislators to enact an agenda that puts people and the planet before profits. And at each local action, leaders unveiled their proposals for what that agenda would look like in their cities and states.
In Minnesota, grassroots leaders are fighting for a proposal to re-enfranchise over 44,000 formerly incarcerated people. In Nevada, our allies are agitating for a $15 minimum wage. In Illinois, we are organizing for closing corporate tax loopholes and a financial transaction tax (a “LaSalle Street tax”) that would help plug the state’s budget hole. With each of these proposals, we are moving from defense to offense and changing the conversation about race, democracy and our economy.
We’ve seen over and over again in American history, change starts close to home – in our towns, cities and states. On March 11th, we saw a fresh reminder of the power of local change. Our families and communities are defining this new front in American public life, and we will continue rising to challenge corporate power and win the policies that put people and planet first - not last.
If November was a wave election, then this Spring will be a wave of bottom-up people power activism. What starts with defending people and our democracy from an extreme corporate conservative agenda, will pivot to offense as grassroots organizations across the country fight to fundamentally reshape our government and our economy from the bottom up. Expect an unabashedly bold agenda that holds the potential for awakening the progressive majority and ushering in a new era in America, an era where our country works for everyone, not just the wealthy and well connected.
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Disney, PacSun, and Other Major Retailers Give Surprise Christmas Present to Employees
Disney, PacSun, and Other Major Retailers Give Surprise Christmas Present to Employees
This season, nearly 50,000 employees at six major retailers nationwide are getting a gift that will reduce their work stress and get them some holiday cheer: An end to on-call scheduling.
...
This season, nearly 50,000 employees at six major retailers nationwide are getting a gift that will reduce their work stress and get them some holiday cheer: An end to on-call scheduling.
New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and eight other attorneys general announced this week that Disney, PacSun, Aeropostale, Carter's, David's Tea, and Zumiez have agreed to stop using on-call scheduling after an investigation was opened into the welfare concerns of this business model.
The six retailers said they have migrated to a "pool arrangement system."
On-call scheduling forces employees to call the store they work at one to two hours ahead of their schedules to find out if they will or won't be needed at work that day. Companies have used this system to keep labor costs low over the years.
"On-call shifts are not a business necessity and should be a thing of the past," said Schneiderman in a statement. "People should not have to keep the day open, arrange for child care, and give up other opportunities without being compensated for their time."
"I am pleased that these companies have stepped up to the plate and agreed to stop using this unfair method of scheduling," he said.
"When working parents are forced to hold large parts of their days up until the last minute — with no guarantee of work or pay — it is impossible for them to plan ahead for things like spending time at the dinner table or helping [kids] out with homework," said Elianne Farhat, Deputy Campaign Director in the Fair Workweek Initiative at Popular Democracy. "The research is clear that when employees have reliable schedules with adequate hours, retention and productivity go up."
Related: Shift Change: Just-in-Time Scheduling Creates Chaos for Workers
In April 2015, Schneiderman's office sent letters to 15 major retailers, including Abercrombie & Fitch, Forever 21, American Eagle, Uniqlo, Vans, Coach, and BCBG Max Azria, addressing his concern over the welfare of on-call workers and the legal wage in certain states like New York, where employers must pay employees at least four hours of pay for being on call.
The letters and investigation prompted Abercrombie & Fitch, Gap, J.Crew, Urban Outfitters, Pier 1 Imports, and L Brands (parent company of Bath & Body Works and Victoria's Secret) to swiftly end their on-call practices.
Social media users celebrated Schneiderman's announcement with appropriate holiday spirit, thanking him for giving "a voice" to those who struggled to be heard, and ending a "horrible practice."
The letters were signed and supported by the attorneys general of California, Connecticut, the District of Columbia, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York, and Rhode Island
by DAKSHAYANI SHANKAR
Source
Harvard's Endowment Is Profiting From Puerto Rico's Debt As The Island's Schools Face Crippling Cuts
Harvard's Endowment Is Profiting From Puerto Rico's Debt As The Island's Schools Face Crippling Cuts
Bearing a large banner reading “Harvard Divest from Baupost,” hundreds of activists marched at Harvard Yard on Wednesday. Members of the Harvard Student Labor Action Movement participated in the...
Bearing a large banner reading “Harvard Divest from Baupost,” hundreds of activists marched at Harvard Yard on Wednesday. Members of the Harvard Student Labor Action Movement participated in the protest, along with union groups, community organizers affiliated with the Center for Popular Democracy, and anti-hedge fund activists with the coalition Hedge Clippers.
Read the full article here.
U.S. Department of Education Launches Crackdown on Ohio Charters
U.S. Department of Education Launches Crackdown on Ohio Charters
Charter Schools are defined by their freedom from regulation and oversight, but that freedom has been so regularly abused by unscrupulous operators that it seems the U.S. Department of Education...
Charter Schools are defined by their freedom from regulation and oversight, but that freedom has been so regularly abused by unscrupulous operators that it seems the U.S. Department of Education is finally deciding to crack down, under pressure in this case from Ohio’s U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown.
Three months ago, on June 20, 2016, Senator Brown wrote a letter to John King, now U.S. Secretary of Education, demanding increased oversight of a large grant—$71 million—the federal Department of Education made to Ohio on September 28, 2015 to expand charter schools. The grant application had been written by David Hansen, who, by September, had already been fired by the Ohio Department of Education for hiding the abysmal academic record of the state’s so-called “dropout recovery schools” and omitting their scores from a system he was creating as the Ohio Department prepared to begin holding charter schools more accountable. Hansen had also bragged in his federal grant application that Ohio had already begun more aggressively regulating charters. After the U.S. Department of Education awarded Ohio the $71 million grant at the end of September 2015, however, it was pointed out that the Ohio legislature had not yet passed the regulations for which Hansen (in July) had given the state credit. (The Ohio Legislature later adopted the most basic and minimal charter school oversight when it passed Ohio House Bill 2 on October 7, 2015).
When Ohio Senator Brown wrote to U.S. Secretary John King in June, 2016, the $71 million Ohio grant had been put on hold for months, as the U.S. Department of Education investigated Ohio’s dealings with charter schools. In his June 20 letter, Senator Brown wrote:
“In your November 2015 response letter to the members of the Ohio Congressional delegation, you outlined a number of steps ED has taken and will continue to take to verify the accuracy and completeness of ODE’s grant application. I appreciate these steps, but more must be done to provide order to the state’s chaotic charter school sector. In light of this report, I ask that you examine the performance of Ohio charter schools who have received CSP (federal Charter Schools Program) grants to determine whether grant recipients are failing or closing at a higher rate than those in other states and how the academic performance of CSP grant recipients in Ohio compares to CSP grant recipients nationwide. I further ask that when Ohio has satisfied all necessary conditions for this grant money to be released that you appoint a special monitor to review every expenditure made pursuant to this grant in order to ensure that all funds are being spent for their intended purpose. Ohio’s current lack of oversight wastes taxpayer’s money and undermines the ostensible goal of charters: providing more high-quality educational opportunities for children. There exists a pattern of waste, fraud, and abuse that is far too common and requires extra scrutiny.”
Last Wednesday, September 14, 2016, the U.S. Department of Education finally released the $71 million grant, but, as Patrick O’Donnell reports for the Plain Dealer, there are now many conditions:
“In a letter to the Ohio Department of Education today, the grant was declared ‘high risk’ because of the poor academic performance of the state’s charters and the struggles the state has had in implementing portions of House Bill 2, the state’s charter reform bill passed last fall by the state legislature… The letter states: ‘As part of this high-risk designation, we are imposing certain High-Risk Special Conditions on ODE’s CSP (Charter Schools Program) SEA (State Education Agency) grant that will help ODE and the Department more clearly determine ODE’s ongoing compliance with applicable requirements’ so that it will be more transparent and so that any issues can be identified and fixed quickly.”
Here are the conditions as reported by O’Donnell:
• “(T)he state cannot give out grants to schools as it has in the past. It must have prior approval from the U.S. Department of Education before transferring any money.
• “The department must evaluate dropout recovery schools better.
• “The state must report its progress four times each year.
• “ODE must hire an independent monitor of the grant program.
• “The state must create a Grant Implementation Advisory Committee.
• “And it must do demanding ratings of the oversight agencies known as ‘sponsors’ in Ohio, but as ‘authorizers’ in most other states.”
Ohio’s problems with the controversial $71 million Charter Schools Program grant are not the first time anyone has noticed the federal Department of Education’s failure to oversee the Charter Schools Program. A year ago in June, 2015, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools—a coalition of national organizations including the American Federation of Teachers, Alliance for Educational Justice, Annenberg Institute for School Reform at Brown University, Center for Popular Democracy, Gamaliel, Journey for Justice Alliance, National Education Association, National Opportunity to Learn Campaign, and Service Employees International Union—sent a letter to then-Secretary of Education Arne Duncan complaining that while the Department had granted $1.7 billion to states for expansion of charter schools since 2009, the Department of Education’s own Inspector General had been raising alarms about the Department’s own lack of any kind of quality control.
The Alliance’s letter to Arne Duncan cited formal audits from 2010 and 2012 in which the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General (OIG), “raised concerns about transparency and competency in the administration of the federal Charter Schools Program.” The OIG’s 2012 audit, the members of the Alliance explain, discovered that the Department of Education’s Office of Innovation and Improvement, which administers the Charter Schools Program, and the State Education Agencies, which disburse the majority of the federal funds, are ill equipped to keep adequate records or put in place even minimal oversight. The State Education Agencies that lack capacity to manage the programs are the 50 state departments of education.
In the June 2015 letter to Arne Duncan, the Alliance to Reclaim Our Schools enumerates the problems discovered by the Department of Education’s own Office of Inspector General: that the Office of Innovation and Improvement (OII) did not maintain records of the charter schools funded through grants to states, that OII “lacked internal controls and adequate training in fiscal and program monitoring,” that none of the three states selected as samples for investigation by the Office of Inspector General—Arizona, California, and Florida—sufficiently monitored the charter schools funded through the Department of Education’s State Education Agency grants, that 26 charter schools in these three states were shown by the Office of Inspector General to have closed after being awarded $7 million, and that even when the schools closed, nobody tracked “what happened to assets that had been purchased with federal funds.”
Thank you, Senator Sherrod Brown for doggedly demanding that the U.S. Department of Education improve oversight of the federal Charter Schools Program. Please keep on keeping on.
By Jan Resseger
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CPD's Josie Duffy on Why NY Needs the Scaffold Law
NY1 - August 28, 2014 - CPD's Josie Duffy joins Liz Benjamin on NY1 to discuss why workers need the Scaffold Law.
...
NY1 - August 28, 2014 - CPD's Josie Duffy joins Liz Benjamin on NY1 to discuss why workers need the Scaffold Law.
Latinos make up majority of fatal falls at construction sites in NY
Al Jazeera America – October 24, 2013, by Dexter Mullins and Roxana Saberi -
Latino and immigrant workers are at a disproportionate risk of dying from construction-site accidents in New...
Al Jazeera America – October 24, 2013, by Dexter Mullins and Roxana Saberi -
Latino and immigrant workers are at a disproportionate risk of dying from construction-site accidents in New York, according to a new report conducted by the Center for Popular Democracy.
The report, “Fatal Inequality: Workplace Safety Eludes Construction Workers of Color in New York State,” is based on investigations from the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) from 2003 to 2011 that analyze fatalities from falls at construction sites.
According to the findings, 60 percent of the 136 fall-related fatalities in New York state were Latinos or immigrants. In New York City, the number was 74 percent. Queens and Brooklyn were the two most dangerous boroughs to work in during the years studied. In Queens 88 percent of those who died were Latinos or immigrants, and in Brooklyn 87 percent of those who fell were Latinos or immigrants.
Latinos comprise only about 35 percent of all construction workers in New York City.
“Latino workers are the most vulnerable workers in the nation, and we’ve been talking about this for a number of years,” Hector Sanchez of the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement told Al Jazeera. “This report is a reminder of what is happening and why Latino workers are the ones who suffer the most from deaths and injuries in the workplace. It’s important to understand what the consequences of this are and why they are happening.”
The vast majority, 86 percent, of the Latino or immigrant workers’ deaths were at sites run by nonunion employers, where workers often are reluctant to report safety violations out of fear of retaliation from contractors. The report also says that Latinos are more likely to work at nonunion sites, which have more safety violations.
A New York state law requires contractors and construction company owners to provide all necessary equipment to keep workers on site safe or be held fully liable if lack of safety measures result in the injury or death of a worker. According to the report, construction and insurance companies are trying to have the law amended so that workplace safety would be the responsibility of the workers.
OSHA, which is tasked with inspecting work sites, has 113 inspectors in New York state. According to the report, if OSHA were to inspect every construction site in the state, it would take the workers 107 years to visit each site once. At 85 percent of sites where a worker fell and died, OSHA found there was a “serious, gravity 10″ violation of workplace safety standards.
The Center for Popular Democracy is pushing for construction companies to do more to improve worker safety and has also called on OSHA to hire and train more inspectors and stiffen penalties for safety violations.
Source
Meet the Group of Feisty Urban Progressives Who Want to Transform the Country One City at a Time
The Nation - December 10, 2014, by Steve Early - A century ago, working-class radicals frustrated with the pace of change often scoffed at their more patient comrades in city government, calling...
The Nation - December 10, 2014, by Steve Early - A century ago, working-class radicals frustrated with the pace of change often scoffed at their more patient comrades in city government, calling them “sewer socialists.” The latter, however, numbered in the hundreds, and, in their heyday, were quite influential in cities both large and small. After being elected to municipal positions on the Socialist Party ticket, they labored mightily to improve local services, from public sanitation to street repair. They even encroached on private markets by expanding public housing and experimenting with municipal ownership of utilities.
The national expansion of popular democracy sought by these left-wing reformers was, sadly, never achieved under their party banner. But several decades later, their many ideas for putting government to work for the people found traction during the New Deal. Programs to promote social equality and economic opportunity first tested at the state or local level became a Depression-era lifeline for millions of Americans nationwide.
In the twenty-first century, many on the left still yearn for economic and policy victories on the scale of the 1930s and the emergence at the federal level of a counter-force that might one again curb the influence of corporate America. While waiting for that second coming, progressive activists have, like the “sewer socialists” of old, been forced to grapple with serious problems—national and even global in nature—at the municipal level instead.
Some of the bravest (or most ambitious) among them have sought and won local elected office. So, in city halls across the country, they are now trying to deploy the limited resources of local government to fight poverty, inequality and environmental degradation at a moment when higher levels of government have failed to address such problems or made them worse. To maintain public support, these reform-minded mayors, city councilors, county commissioners and allied civil servants must be as concerned about street paving and policing as saving the planet from global warming.
Until recently, most of these “pothole progressives” have toiled largely in isolation. They chipped away at local injustice or city hall dysfunction in ad hoc fashion with little national infrastructure to sustain or support them. But as their ranks have swelled in recent years, several networks have developed to promote greater coordination of this difficult work through systematic sharing of information, ideas, and technical expertise.
From December 4 to 6, the only of these groups to focus exclusively on cities, Local Progress, hosted a lively and racially diverse “convening” in New York City to celebrate recent municipal election victories and progressive policy wins, while laying the groundwork for more. Local Progress is funded by several national unions and social-change foundations. Its individual and organizational affiliates profess a “shared commitment to a strong middle and working class, equal justice under law, sustainable and livable cities, and good government that serves the public interest effectively.” Its mission? “To drive public policy at the local level—an area of governance that is too often ignored by the progressive movement.”
Among the “electeds” gathered in New York City for the Local Progress third annual meeting, there was little moping about the Democratic Party’s now much weakened condition in various state capitols and Washington, DC, as a result of last month’s midterm elections. Instead, they and their larger supporting cast of labor and community organizers, public policy advocates and social-change funders all resolved to expand their influence at the local level, where reform is still possible. To hasten this goal, the organizers distributed a sixty-page compilation of “case studies and best practices” from around the country, co-produced with the Center for Popular Democracy. This dense, well-documented guide provides an ambitious blueprint for improving local labor standards, housing and education, policing practices, environmental sustainability, treatment of immigrants, voting rights and financing of elections.
Local Progress has recruited 400 members in forty states; about a third turned up for its latest annual meeting, with impressive representation from the city councils of San Diego, San Francisco, Seattle, Tacoma, Denver, New Orleans, New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Mayoral participants included everyone from the high-profile chief executive of the host city, Bill de Blasio, to his far less well-known, but equally feisty, West Coast counterpart, Meghan Sahli-Wells. She hails from Culver City, California, a Los Angeles County enclave with a population smaller than some New York City neighborhoods.
But that difference in scale hasn’t stopped Sahli-Wells from making waves of her own, as an enviro-oriented “bike mayor” who helped secure a ban on single-use plastic bags and has been working tirelessly to ban fracking as well. Now her talk about property tax reform has local realtors organizing against her and wishing she had never been chosen by her council peers to be the city’s part-time mayor. “My Chamber of Commerce hates me,” she reported, but expressed confidence that “harnessing the power of community” would enable her to overcome business opposition to some of her future plans.
De Blasio welcomed such diverse colleagues amid the ornate surroundings of the New York City Council chamber. He was joined by Council Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito and Brooklyn councilmember Brad Lander, who both described the salutary effect of having a Progressive Caucus of nineteen in the city’s fifty-one-member leadership body.
The Big Apple’s affable, lanky mayor quickly gave what an alarmed New York Post called, the next day, “a fawning shout-out to Seattle.” And indeed, de Blasio did hail Seattle city councilmember Nick Licata, chair of Local Progress, and others from “the Left Coast,” for their leading role in the nationwide minimum-wage campaign that has now bettered the pay of seven million workers. “We all reference each other,” de Blasio noted. “We all build on each other’s work…. Every time we succeed, it builds momentum for other cities.”
The job of Local Progress members, the mayor argued, is to be organizers, not just elected officials. As a result of the group’s collective efforts, “change is coming from the grassroots and working its way up—real, sustained and lasting change.”
In the smaller strategy sessions that followed, participants shared information and ideas on a wide range of topics. These included “participatory budgeting”—an experiment now underway in New York City to solicit neighborhood input on spending priorities—and multi-state efforts to expand public financing of candidates for local and county office. According to Emmanuel Caicedo, state affairs manager for Demos who spoke at the conference, this election reform was a key factor in making progressives more competitive electorally in New York City and enabling them, once in office, to expand the reach of paid sick day legislation. “Without this matching funds system, councilmembers would not be able to do the right thing for their constituents, “ he said.
Local Progress workshop turnout and the intensity of discussion were both driven, in part, by the momentum of events unfolding outside the gathering. The latest round of national fast-food worker protests and street demonstrations in Manhattan over the grand jury decision in the Eric Garner case provided an urgent backdrop for brainstorming about workers’ rights and major reform of US police departments.
On the labor front, city officials were reminded by several speakers from the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) and the AFL-CIO that minimum wage hikes, statutory entitlement to paid sick days, and better enforcement of local labor standards still doesn’t give enough Americans the workplace voice that collective bargaining provides. More needs to be done, they argued, to help workers for government contractors or in public facilities, like airports, to win bargaining rights without management interference. “Having a union is necessary to sustain gains,” Héctor Figueroa, president of SEIU Local 32BJ, pointed out.
Few labor allies in Local Progress question the value of unionization—but some did express concern about unions being unhelpful in their own past municipal campaigns. For example, Anders Ibsen, an earnest 28-year-old city councilor from Washington State, sought advice from AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Tefere Gebre about dealing with conservative “business unionists” who’ve tried to thwart progressive initiatives in Tacoma. In the same panel discussion, San Diego councilmember David Alvarez—a recent labor-backed candidate for mayor—recalled the initial opposition he faced from a major AFL-CIO affiliate. According to Alvarez, it took much patient relationship-building to win over this union, despite his strong commitment to local labor causes like taxi-driver organizing.
Before their gathering ended, most of the city officials present endorsed a Local Progress statement criticizing the “excessive use of force” by police officers in Ferguson, Cleveland, and New York City. They urged federal officials to ensure “that cities around the country end discriminatory policing practices and replace them with programs that respect and empower residents…”
Just how to do that, at the local level, was the subject of much debate at a session on “Winning Real Police and Criminal Justice Reform.” Panelists discussed remedies like requiring police body cameras, retraining officers, recruiting more from minority communities, and offering them financial incentives for local residency. Lisa Daugaard, policy director for the Public Defender Association in Seattle, cautioned against quick fixes, including indiscriminate body camera use and training programs unaccompanied by real institutional change. “It’s easy to hold a three-day training session. It’s very difficult to have training change behavior, habits, instincts,” she said.
Daugaard reported on Seattle’s Community Police Commission (CPC), an oversight body, which she co-chairs and includes two active members of the police force. According to Daugaard, the CPC has spurred a “deeply transformative” shift in the treatment of jobless, homeless, addicted, and/or mentally ill residents previously targeted for police round-ups and jailing, with a disproportionate racial impact. By expanding relevant social services and, in effect, decriminalizing vagrancy and low-level drug dealing, Seattle has been able to “re-humanize” at least some “daily interactions between police and the community.”
And just as cities like Seattle can’t arrest their way out of petty crime spawned by poverty and unemployment, Daugaard warned against a singular focus on prosecutions of police misconduct, after the fact. Many such cases are likely to fail, she noted, and, even if successful, don’t transform the departmental culture or quality of police-community relationships. Jumaane Williams, a New York City councilmember from Brooklyn, agreed with Daugaard that community policing done right “works better than the lock-‘em-up strategy” that still prevails in most cities, even some with Local Progress ties. “The problem, “said Williams, “is when we send policemen to do the job that everyone needs to do. Public safety is an everybody kind of thing.”
Turning the overall Local Progress agenda into actual public policy in more places is also “an everybody kind of thing.” As Seattle’s Nick Licata observed, urban progressives “need both an outside and inside game” to win because neither street politics nor electoral victories alone can change the status quo sufficiently. Instead, he said, “you need people on the inside and people protesting on the outside to provide insiders with backbone.”
By bringing both catalysts for change together, in one organizational network, Local Progress is not blazing an entirely new path or one as explicitly anti-capitalist as left movement builders a century ago. But, in a modern political landscape otherwise bereft of many bright spots at the moment, contesting for power locally, in ecumenical fashion, still makes sense for any group of progressives with higher aspirations and longer-term societal goals.
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7 days ago
7 days ago