CPD IN THE NEWS

A new report fleshes out the controversial demand to cut police department budgets and reallocate those funds into healthcare, housing, jobs, and schools. Will that make communities of color safer?

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Charlotte Observer - July 6, 2014, by Mark Price - The creation of an official Charlotte ID card is still only a proposal, but critics are already lining up, including a national political action group that claims the city’s plan will “aid and abet illegal immigrants.”

Two immigration reform groups – the national Americans for Legal Immigration PAC and NC Listen – say they will press North Carolina legislators to stop cities from creating IDs, which are of most benefit to people who don’t have Social Security numbers.

In Charlotte, that population is made up largely of immigrants of all nationalities who are not in the country legally. They can’t get a Social Security number or apply for a driver’s license, and they are subject to arrest and deportation.

About a half-dozen U.S. cities have already created municipal IDs, which experts see as a way of dealing locally with immigration issues that aren’t being solved on a national level.

Charlotte, like many of those other cities, has an immigrant population that is outpacing the growth rate of both whites and blacks, leading to entire neighborhoods and schools where foreign-born people are in the majority.

City leaders say that accepting them as residents is a practical matter. However, the ID proposal remains controversial and critics question whether it’s legal.

“It’s against federal law to aid and abet people in the country illegally and if this isn’t aiding and abetting, I don’t know what is,” said Ron Woodard of NC Listen.

William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration PAC is more blunt. “We will ask the General Assembly to stop any North Carolina city from helping illegal immigrants,” he said.

Charlotte Mayor Dan Clodfelter met with the city’s Immigrant Integration Task Force last month and asked the group to research a city ID program that can be used by all citizens to access community services.

The task force was created to craft policies that will make Charlotte more welcoming to immigrants of all nationalities, particularly those interested in starting businesses.

Recommendations – including whether to adopt a municipal ID program – are scheduled to be presented to the City Council in February.

Background checks at school

The idea of creating a city ID emerged in response to complaints from undocumented immigrant parents that they can’t interact with their own children in school classrooms.

Charlotte-Mecklenburg Schools requires a Social Security number so it can do criminal background checks daily on people who want to do volunteer work in schools. The district recently announced a team is exploring alternative forms of identification that can be used to perform those criminal background checks. It may complete its work later this year.

CMS is independent from city government and would not be required to accept a municipal ID.

Still, Clodfelter said he hoped the new ID might help undocumented parents gain greater access to schools.

“This is a question for the entire community,” Clodfelter said in a statement. “The city, county, school system, law enforcement, community based nonprofits and other agencies need to work together on a review of the options to explore what may be feasible at the local level.”

Hector Vaca of the immigrant advocacy group ActionNC says he has doubts a city ID could be easily used for criminal background checks. To do that, he says the city would have to share ID card specifics with state and federal law enforcement databases – and that’s not necessarily something undocumented immigrants want to see happen.

ActionNC supports municipal IDs, he said, but is waiting to see what Charlotte leaders propose.

“This is another way to identify people, which is something even the police have said would be a good thing,” Vaca said. “I think it’s contradictory when anti-immigrant groups say we need to better identify the people who are in this country, and yet when you give them another tool that helps identify people, those critics say they don’t want it.”

Uses for municipal IDs

The Immigrant Integration Task Force intends to study municipal IDs created by other cities, including a program adopted last month by New York City. That program, which goes into effect at the end of the year, allows any New Yorker, “regardless of immigration status,” to get a government-issued photo identification card from the city. The cards are predicted to cost about $10 per person.

Proponents of such programs say the IDs can accomplish a lot of good, including making communities safer.

A study by the Center for Popular Democracy notes that immigrants who don’t have IDs are often unable to open bank accounts, which makes them easy targets for thieves. Such immigrants are also reluctant to report crimes and/or to visit doctors for conditions that might pose a community health threat, the report says.

Charlotte police say the IDs could also be useful in identifying victims of crimes.

Emily Tucker of Center for Popular Democracy says criticism of ID programs is often based on a mistaken belief that it is all about helping undocumented immigrants. In New York, city leaders are negotiating with museums, sports venues, businesses and banks to have benefits associated with city ID cards.

“Undocumented people may have been the inspiration initially, but I think it undercuts that effectiveness of (winning support for) the card,” she said.

“In New York, we decided to market it to a cross section of New Yorkers, including the LGBT community, homeless advocates, and even the American Civil Liberties Union, which wanted a form of ID with privacy protections: Something people wouldn’t be afraid to apply for.”

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A year ago, the Federal Reserve, our nation’s most powerful economic policy maker, said that there was nothing it could do about racial disparities. Now, according to the Wall Street Journal, there is "a rising recognition within the Fed that the racial gaps in the economy are becoming more pronounced and that there is a role for monetary policy to play in shrinking those gaps."

That's a major shift in how monetary policy gets made. How did it happen? A grassroots uprising from low-income people of color, the unemployed, and the underemployed pushed issues of racial justice front and center into debates about monetary policy – and they succeeded in changing the conversation at the Federal Reserve.

The Fed Up campaign is a coalition of community-based organizations from across the country, labor unions, policy think tanks, and expert economists who decided to take on the Federal Reserve, long considered immune to outside criticism.

The Great Recession of 2008 brought things to a head. With Congress failing to pass an adequate stimulus in the wake of the crash and authorizing almost nothing since, it’s become clear that the Federal Reserve is the country’s only institution acting to stimulate the economy.

Progressives are concerned about raising wages, getting good jobs for more people, and building the bargaining power of workers to win victories like paid sick days and fair scheduling.

But they didn’t think to target the Federal Reserve, an institution designed to remain as insulated from the public as possible. The Fed system comprises a Board of Governors, whose members are appointed to 14-year terms by the President and approved by the Senate, as well as boards of directors for each of the 12 regional Federal Reserve Banks. These regional boards are overwhelming white and male and draw their membership largely from the corporate and financial sectors, which makes sense as two thirds of them are appointed by commercial banks.

Given the Federal Reserve’s opaque, insular structure designed to keep the influence of regular people at bay, it’s nothing short of remarkable that the Fed Up campaign has altered the conversation as much as it has in two short years.

Since its launch in the summer of 2014 the Fed Up Campaign has released reports on racial disparities in the economy andthe unrepresentative composition of the Fed, met with Fed Chair Janet Yellenface to face as well as 11 out of the 12 regional Bank presidents, conducted protests, and lobbied members of Congressto question Yellen on racial disparities during her semi-annual Humphrey Hawkins testimony before Congress.

Under questioning from Congress in February 2016, Janet Yellen insisted to Congress that she could not do anything about racial disparities. Yet, not even four months later, when Janet Yellen testified at the Humphrey Hawkins hearing in June, something was different.

Yellen began her testimonywith statistics on racial disparities in income and employment among Blacks and Latin@s. This is something the Fed has never done before. By including data on racial disparities, Yellen signaled that the status of communities of color is relevant to the Fed's decisions on the economy and she said that broad-based inclusion in the recovery is a priority..

Yellen made this historic move on racial justice because of the pressure the Fed Up coalition put both on the Fed and on Congress. In May, Fed Up worked with Congress members to send a letter to Yellen urging better public representation and diversity on the 12 regional Banks' boards of directors, which was ultimately signed by 127 senators and representatives.

Then Fed Up released aslate of candidatesfrom more diverse backgrounds who could be appointed to the leadership of the Federal Reserve Regional and a new reportabout potential conflicts of interest among current directors, which received coverage in the Wall Street Journal.

The advocacy with Congress worked. After meeting with Fed Up coalition member Common Good Ohio, Sen. Sherrod Brown (D-OH) urged Yellen at her Congressional hearing to appoint people from more diverse backgrounds to the regional Banks. Sen. Robert Menendez(D-NJ) urged Yellen to improve on diversity, citing the fact that 83% of regional board directors are white – a figure from our February report.

And Sen.Elizabeth Warren(D-MA) echoed Fed Up's callfor reforming the process for selection regional Bank presidents, calling the process "broken" and saying, "I think Congress should take a hard look at reforming the regional Fed's selection process so that we can all benefit from a Fed leadership that reflects a broader array of both backgrounds and interests."

The next day Rep. Terri Sewell (D-AL) echoed Warren's call, asking Yellen whether she'd considered our recommendation to appoint three Class C directors at each regional Bank from backgrounds in academia, labor groups, and community-based organizations.

We still have a long way to go before one of the most powerful, secretive, least democratically accountable, and thoroughly corporate dominated institutions truly represents the public and serves all of the public -- including low-income people and communities of color.

But Janet Yellen’s most recent Humphrey Hawkins testimony does show that the Federal Reserve is not completely insulated from public opinion, and that regular people standing up and demanding to be heard can push even the Federal Reserve to listen.

By Shawn Sebastian

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An investigation into a term that seems to perfectly capture the indignities and absurdities of the modern economy...

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