Bernie’s Bill de Blasio Problem
For years, grassroots organizers have fought against mass criminalization in New York City. In a city where police brutality and inequality have been the hallmarks of the experience of communities of color, mayors have often been the biggest impediments to justice. Last week, Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders pointed to the racist policing legacy of one of them, Mike Bloomberg, and embraced another, Bill de Blasio, as a surrogate for his campaign.
De Blasio quickly joined the popular Senator on the campaign trail, suggesting the move served as a repudiation of Bloomberg, whose campaign is currently engaged in a war of words with Bernie’s. However, while the Sanders campaign may be signaling a widening of its political tent by including de Blasio within it, it does so by ignoring his own awful record on policing — as well as the (ongoing) grassroots fight against it.
In 2013, Mayor de Blasio campaigned on ending the era of Stop & Frisk. The grossly unconstitutional approach had lost public support amid city-wide protests. Most Democratic candidates for mayor at the time, including de Blasio, came to oppose it. While reported numbers of S&Fs peaked in 2011, the numbers began to decline dramatically — during Bloomberg’s last year. Still, de Blasio as mayor has claimed credit for ending* the tactic (*racially disparate S&F continues under de Blasio, albeit at lower reported figures) as a sign of dramatic reform under his watch.
But that doesn’t tell the true story of policing under de Blasio. One place to start is when candidate de Blasio, the onetime Hillary Clinton campaign manager, signaled his support for one of the most destructive, racist policing philosophies of the modern era: Broken Windows, the neoconservative call for aggressive policing of low-level, “quality-of-life” offenses. Soon after being elected, de Blasio doubled down by making William Bratton — the police commissioner who along with former mayor Rudy Giuliani operationalized Broken Windows in the 90’s — his top cop.
Under Bratton and de Blasio, New York City saw several police controversies, including a sprawling police corruption scandal, police spying of protesters and the NYPD chokehold killing of Eric Garner . The death of Garner, who was killed after police accused him of a “quality-of-life” violation, helped spearhead the Black Lives Matter movement nationally and brought scrutiny to Broken Windows here at home. Garner’s daughter, the late Erica Garner (whom Bernie highlighted in a 2016 campaign video) also called out de Blasio as complicit in denying her family justice for years.
For over six years, de Blasio defended Broken Windows, which was the larger framework of criminalization from which S&F had sprung. Before there were 700,000 racialized stops in a single year under Bloomberg, there was a doubling of low-level racialized arrests beginning in the mid-90s and peaking at almost a quarter million arrests in 2010 — a span that covered the administrations of Giuliani and Bloomberg.
The overwhelming majority of arrests under Broken Windows were of people of color. Police were encouraged to arrest or ticket people for things like dancing on the subway or street vending, but the classic Broken Windows arrest was fare evasion, which topped 55,000 arrests (mostly of New Yorkers of color) in the middle of de Blasio’s first term. In order to pressure the Mayor over fare evasion, which criminalized poverty (most people fare-hop as an economic, not criminal, decision), activists offered free swipes in poor communities of color through the #SwipeItForward campaign.
Mayor de Blasio, a self-proclaimed progressive, rebuffed the notion that fare evasion arrests criminalized poverty by arguing those arrested sometimes have money on them. In other words, when direct action challenged one of the most destructive policing strategies in America (Broken Windows was exported to other urban cities, and even other countries), de Blasio stood with the NYPD — something that would become a theme of his mayoralty as subway performers, subway vendors, and delivery workers who used e-bikes were all criminalized even as S&F reports went down.
The legacy of de Blasio is the legacy of Broken Windows, a deeply racist philosophy which saw mostly New Yorkers of color as “disorder” needed to be policed away — an idea popularized under Republican Giuliani but that continued under independents (Bloomberg) and Democrats (de Blasio) alike. So even as Bernie and many of his supporters correctly state that Bloomberg was terrible for communities of color, we should note that he is not uniquely responsible for the police state many of us live within.
The de Blasio administration, in fact, has also laid the foundation for an arguably more Orwellian police state. “Predictive policing,” the dystopian idea that police could predict crimes and criminals, began under de Blasio. De Blasio’s NYPD expanded a secretive, sprawling “gang database” made up of almost all people of color that has led to militarized and controversial gang sweeps in collaboration with federal agencies. Transparency even took a turn for the worse as the Mayor and the NYPD reinterpreted decades-old law so that police officer misconduct history was shielded from the media and the public.
There are other concerns for those who support Bernie’s politics. Bernie decries money in politics and special interest groups. Meanwhile, de Blasio has been investigated for his cozy relationship with monied political donors who reportedly curried favor with City Hall. Amid concerns that working class communities will be gentrified out of the city, this mayor’s support from real estate donors has been a central criticism from tenant advocates who’ve rejected his affordable housing plan as a trojan horse for gentrification.
Bernie is dead wrong when he tweets that de Blasio is “a mayor fighting every day to improve the lives of New Yorkers.”
But the question of New York City mayors and their legacies isn’t simply which one was worse (Giuliani and Bloomberg and de Blasio were horrible in their own ways), but to which ones we give a pass. By aligning with de Blasio, or at least allowing de Blasio to align with him, Bernie opens the door for the mayor to rebrand himself as change agent. This not only ignores his record and the work of grassroots activists, whom the Bernie campaign would see as its driving force, but also sends the message that transactional, machine Democrats are acceptable allies so as long as they help you win an election.
So when do the politics of the so-called “big tent” encroach on one’s principles? De blasio is a lame duck mayor who tried running for president until that fizzled out. He has everything to gain at Bernie’s side. Is he looking for a cabinet position? An influential role in a progressive organization? Bernie should dump de Blasio and sit down with activists who’ve worked for change despite de Blasio.
