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By: Jaisal Noor | June 5, 2020
https://therealnews.com/columns/cities-gain-momentum-to-defund-police-remove-them-from-schools
On June 3, Derek Chauvin, who pinned down George Floyd and kneeled into his neck for almost nine minutes, had his charges upgraded from third to second degree murder. The three additional Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) officers involved in Floyd’s death were newly charged with aiding and abetting murder.
That has not stopped the cities across the country from taking to the streets to protest against police killing of George Floyd. This time, charging police involved in the death of a black man will not be enough.
“We need to demolish the entire system,” said Markia Smith, who marched in Baltimore this week. “And rebuild from the top.”
Protesters are calling for fundamental changes in the relationship between law enforcement and communities they serve and large scale changes such as defunding the police to free up resources for schools and social services: “Funding should be going to making people better, not suppressing and oppressing them,” Smith added.
This week, Minneapolis Ward 3 Councilman Steve Fletcher tweeted, “several of us on the council are working on finding out, what it would take to disband the MPD and start fresh with a community-oriented, non-violent public safety and outreach capacity.” The Minneapolis Public School board terminated its $1.1 million contract with the MPD.
“We cannot continue to be in partnership with an organization that has the culture of violence and racism that the Minneapolis police department has historically demonstrated,” school board member Nelson Inz told The Guardian. On Thursday, Portland Public Schools Superintendent Guadalupe Guerrero announced via Twitter additional investments in student supports like social workers and counselors and “discontinuing” the use of school police. Districts in Arizona, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin are reportedly weighing similar moves.
Cities like Los Angeles and New York—whose repression of protests has been especially brutal—have faced calls to reduce their police budgets. After a week of protests, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti announced cuts of more than $250 million to the Los Angeles Police Department’s $1.86 billion budget to fund schools, jobs and healthcare. New York City Comptroller Scott M. Stringer requested $1.1 billion in cuts to the New York Police Department’s $6 billion annual budget over four years.
“Breaking down structural racism in New York City will require long-term, lasting change—and that must include reducing the NYPD’s budget.” Stringer said in a press release. “It is unconscionable that services for Black and Brown New Yorkers are on the chopping block while the NYPD’s budget remains almost entirely untouched.” The economic downturn sparked by COVID-19 resulted in the layoffs of 469,000 public school employees in April alone, Reuters reported.
Such disparities are especially stark in Baltimore, which spends the most per capita on police among large cities. For the 2020 fiscal year the city budgeted $536 million for the Baltimore Police Department (BPD) versus $278 million for public education.
Ryan Dorsey@ElectRyanDorsey
Budget hearings begin Monday morning.
Here’s a quick sampling of how your money is proposed to be spent.
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Mayor Jack Young—who had a poor showing in preliminary results from Maryland’s June 2 Democratic primary, has yet to indicate whether he will shift funds from the police budget to schools or other social services. While the council can cut spending, only Baltimore’s mayor currently has the power to appropriate funds. A proposed City Charter amendment would give that power to the council.
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Kristerfer B@CouncilmanKB
So I’m expecting to have an email inbox full of advocacy for budget cuts to BPD — which I plan to vote in favor of. However, I want to remind all of that the Council lacks the authority to re-allocate funds elsewhere. So please don’t forgot to email/call the Mayor as well! 
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8:49 AM - Jun 5, 2020
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A Baltimore City High School student among the thousands who took part in Monday’s youth-led protest in Baltimore—who requested not to be named— said the city’s priorities “need to change immediately,” noting many of Baltimore’s aging school buildings lack adequate climate control.
“So many kids don’t have air conditioning in their schools, and we need to fix that. Obviously the police don’t need more funding because they are going to use that to buy more guns and kill Black people,” the student said.
The official statement from organizers of the massive Baltimore protest, identifying themselves collectively as The Youth, called for “a complete decolonization of the state on every level,” and criticized Maryland’s Republican Gov. Larry Hogan, who has continually denied funding to city schools. On May 8, Hogan vetoed a proposal to increase funding for public schools, formulated by the bipartisan Kirwan Commission. State-commissioned analysis found Baltimore’s schools are underfunded by hundreds of millions of dollars annually.
High School sophomore Mychaell Farmer, who helped organize Monday’s youth march in Baltimore, said she believes now is the time for schools to reevaluate their relationship with police: “For me personally, I think we should. I wouldn’t want to support a group that targets a group of people,” Farmer said. “If them speaking up will cost them their jobs maybe it the job isn’t meant to be.”
In 2016, two Baltimore officers were charged with assault after a video emerged of them attacking a student. In the wake of the incident, The Real News hosted a debate between the Baltimore police union and members of the Baltimore Algebra Project, a youth-run organization tutoring and advocacy organization that works to end the school to prison pipeline.
In an email, a spokesperson for the Baltimore City Schools declined to say whether the system is considering ending its relationship with law enforcement.
Police presence in schools in Baltimore remains controversial. The school system has a memorandum of understanding (MOU) with BPD, and spends $7 million annually on its own police force in Baltimore City Schools.
“All of us should be reevaluating the role of police inside school buildings,” Dana Vickers Shelley, executive director of the ACLU of Maryland, said in an email. “Black children are overpoliced. Of the 14,000 complaints made against youth of color filed from FY 2017-2019, 90% of complaints against Black children are filed by the police (including school police and school resource officers).”
“There must be safe spaces for our children to learn and prepare for success,” the ACLU’s Shelley said. “The school system must focus instead on restorative practices, and securing supports for wraparound services, counselors, social workers, and school psychologists.”
In a statement, Baltimore City Schools did note a recent update to its policies regarding police in schools to prevent the arrest of students for incidents that did not occur on school grounds, “except in exigent circumstances.”
“Through restorative practices and other classroom and in-school strategies that maintain a positive learning environment and afford students opportunities to learn from their mistakes,” the Baltimore City Public Schools statement read.
In 2019, the Baltimore School board rejected a plan to arm police during the school day.
In March of 2020, a Republican lawmaker in Annapolis reintroduced the proposal.
Understanding the long-term danger of the president’s push to militarily invade America's cities
David Sirota
Jun 5 
One of the inherent safeguards against the rise of totalitarian fascism in America is our multilayered system of government. We don’t just have one national government, and nothing else. Power is dispersed across overlapping layers of authority -- municipal, county, state and federal.
Over the years, that has unfortunately slowed national progress on important causes (think: the anti-civil-rights cry of “states’ rights!” or governors refusing to expand Medicaid), but it also makes it somewhat more difficult for a tyrannical president to comprehensively weaponize the state for a political agenda -- because there is no one single state.
But this safeguard is now in jeopardy. President Trump and Sen. Tom Cotton are floating the idea of militarily occupying American cities — and the idea is being normalized by the New York Times and some pundits. That kind of escalation would not only exacerbate tensions and likely result in a further curtailing of democratic rights, it could also undermine one of the key structural safeguards against presidential authoritarianism.
In real-world terms: Trump would go from being the president, to also being cities’ mayor and police chief, only with even less potential for local democratic accountability, pressure and control.
This dynamic hasn’t been discussed very much. Instead, there has been an oversimplified “law and order” narrative. As in the lead up to most major wars in the last half century, this kind of framing tends to depict military intervention as a reliable way to stabilize a chaotic situation, when often it ends up being the opposite. And that “law and order” discourse — which amplifies a similar discourse going back decades — has now resulted in at least one poll showing majority support for a domestic military invasion.
Clearly, many Americans are looking out at scenes of chaos and violence and feeling desperate for a quick path to tranquility and stability -- and military intervention is being portrayed as that path. However, the long-term dangers of a Trump-led military occupation cannot be overstated. It could create precisely the conditions that have preceded fascist takeovers of other nations in the past: martial law directed by a single distant regime leader wielding one unified national paramilitary police apparatus against the people.
Now sure, Trump’s federal government already has its own array of domestic security forces -- from the FBI, to the Park Police, to federal marshals to the unidentified soldiers now patrolling Washington, D.C. But that is just one (albeit large and powerful) level of government. Up until this point, most of the security forces patrolling our communities are governed by mayors, county commissioners and governors -- which means those elected officials have the power to start deeseclating things right now.
That is to say: in our federated multilayered system of government, the local officials we have the most democratic control over still have the power to do the opposite of what Trump wants to do.
That would change under a Trump-led military invasion. In that scenario, local communities would have less of that power -- and that’s downright scary. It’s so terrifying, in fact, that this specific issue -- whether a president can domestically deploy the military -- has long been one of the most delicate issues in all of American politics throughout our nation’s entire history.
Trump Would Be Intervening To Curtail Rights, Not Protect Them
Debates and tensions over that power have resulted in the Insurrection Act and the Posse Comitatus Act -- as well as the exceptions to those laws.
During the 19th century, federal military intervention was used at times to try to protect civil rights during Reconstruction, but also to crush workers’ basic right to strike and protest. In the modern era, as Bloomberg News notes, the Insurrection Act “has been used very rarely to deploy federal troops domestically without a request from a state government, with examples mostly dating from the Civil Rights era.”
That’s an important point: many of those modern presidential decisions to override our multilayered system of government occurred in order to enforce constitutional rights and protect Americans’ civil liberties against state and local governments that were abrogating those rights and liberties. Those were good, laudable and justifiable decisions by the federal government to be the final, last-resort defender of the most elemental democratic rights.
By contrast, if Trump invoked these same Insurrection Act powers, he would not be sending in federal troops to protect democratic rights and/or to halt police violence against peaceful protesters. He would not be Dwight Eisenhower deploying federal troops to override Arkansas’ state government and make sure African American kids can go to a desegregated school.
Trump would instead be intervening to -- in his own phrasing -- “dominate” our communities, which he refers to as a “battlespace.” Specifically, he would be aiming to weaken the constitutional right to protest, to help local police continue to undermine Americans’ civil liberties, and to consolidate his personal authority to direct that political repression for the long haul.
Military Leaders Object
This is likely why a range of voices from across the political spectrum have been sounding such a particularly loud alarm about Trump’s behavior of late. We’ve seen Trump’s own Secretary of Defense and other top military officials push back on the idea of domestic deployment. Former military officials have also been similarly pushing back. One military scholar warns that Trump’s military invasion plan could be explicitly used “to advance his political agenda.”
Many may disagree with these military leaders on lots of issues -- from defense spending to decisions about launching foreign wars. But they at least seem to understand how this moment existentially jeopardizes our democracy.
Our mayors, our governors, our city councilors and our state legislators must do a better job of deeseclating tensions and cracking down on police violence. At minimum, that would help strip Trump of his public justification for a military invasion. They can also go further -- governors can turn down Trump administration’s attempts to intervene.
Just as important: our representatives in Washington can take concrete steps to prevent the federalization of the situation.
They have the power to stop Trump’s power grab -- we need them to use it right now.
HAMILTON NOLAN
https://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/22566/dc-transit-union-george-floyd-labor-black-lives-matter
The president of the labor union that represents Washington, DC’s transit workers called Monday’s violent breakup of a downtown DC protest to make way for President Trump’s photo-op “appalling,” and said the labor movement needs to do more to support the protesters in the streets of America’s cities.
“Everyone in this country should be appalled at that—putting your citizens in harm’s way for a photo-op,” said Raymond Jackson, president of the 13,000-member ATU Local 689, the union that represents workers who keep the buses and trains running in the nation’s capital. “We’re in the middle of a movement, expressing ourselves. You’re seeing a country full of people that are fed up with systemic racism.”
Transit worker unions have offered some of the most visible support to the ongoing protests. Bus drivers in New York City and Minneapolis have refused to carry protesters that police have arrested, something that NYC transit workers also refused to do during Occupy Wall Street. Bus drivers in Washington DC are now taking the same position.
“That’s not what we were hired to do. We carry passengers. We do not arrest people. We do not transport criminals. We do not take people to jail,” Jackson said. “We shouldn’t be put in those kinds of dangerous situations. [Protesters] are looking at the operator of that bus as part of law enforcement—we don’t need that.”
On Sunday night, protesters in downtown DC smashed windows and set fires at the headquarters of the AFL-CIO, which is located next to the epicenter of the protests in Lafayette Square. On Monday, ATU Local 689 put out a statement in support of the nationwide protests that zeroed in on the labor movement’s role.
“Why did young black and brown workers, frustrated with constant injustice, not view the AFL-CIO as their natural ally with over a century of experience in the struggle for equality? Why did they not recognize that act as burning their own house?” the statement read. “What are we doing over the next few weeks to ensure that these workers out in the streets understand that the labor movement stands with them?”
Jackson emphasized that in previous generations, the civil rights movement and the labor movement were closely intertwined. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated while supporting a sanitation workers’ strike in Memphis. Now, though, Jackson sees less of a connection between the two movements. He urged unions to take a prominent role in the “social injustice movement” that is propelling the current protests—“I’m sure some of my members are down there protesting,” he said—and to “let communities know we’re here for them,” such as when his members pass out free lunches.
It will take a conscious effort by the labor movement to rebuild its connection with the modern version of the civil rights movement, a movement that is now playing out every night amid tear gas and police violence.
“Maybe,” Jackson said, “we just lost touch.”
