Mayor Bill de Blasio was exposed for having lied about defunding the NYPD by $1 billion, which could have been one source of possible funding for NYCHA

Mayor Bill de Blasio said he would use $1 billion in cuts to the NYPD budget to advance social justice. He lied. Now, NBC News has caught him increasing the NYPD budget by $200 million.

Mayor Bill de Blasio (WFP-New York City) was busted by NBC News in an investigation one year after the “defund the police” movement led to his promise to cut $1 billion from the budget of the New York Police Department and to use that funding stream, instead, to make “some transformative changes at the department,” in the words of Mayor de Blasio’s chief enabler, Council Speaker Corey Johnson (D-Chelsea).

Not only did the $1 billion cut made in June 2020 never materialise, but an additional $200 million was added to the NYPD budget in June 2021, according to NBC News.

Last year, outgoing Mayor Bill de Blasio and the city council moved to cut roughly $1 billion from the police’s $6 billion budget and invest it in youth and social services. De Blasio wrote in a tweet then that “Our young people need to be reached, not policed.” But just a year later, officials adopted the city’s largest budget ever, at $98.7 billion, for fiscal year 2022, which included a $200 million increase for police spending.

Mayor de Blasio has given lip service to the promise to promote racial and social justice.

In New York City, the #DefundTheNYPD movement, like respective movements across the nation, grew out of the George Floyd anti-racism protests in 2020. Mayor de Blasio promised to use the money to help youths and other social service programs. As Mayor de Blasio’s term in office comes to an end, nobody knows what happened to his broken promises for funding racial and social justice.

Mayor de Blasio has been accused of using his bi-racial family to co-opt the language of social movements and as a political cover to defend or expand race-based policing — even as he has rejected calls to hold the NYPD accountable for homicides and other acts of brutality committed by the police. As NBC News noted, Mayor de Blasio said, “Our young people need to be reached, not policed.” But that turned out to be another one of his lies. In a review of Mayor de Blasio’s two terms in office, the New York Daily News reported that Mayor de Blasio leaves behind a legacy of corruption and neglect on housing issues.

Fight For NYCHA have long argued that sources of Government funding could be found to fully-fund NYCHA. For decades, the racist divestment of public housing led to a gargantuan deficit in NYCHA’s capital repairs budget. Our funding ideas were workshopped and packaged as a People’s Budget that has been updated over time. One of the items in our People’s Budget was to defund the NYPD by $2 billion and to use that money to bond the capital repairs at NYCHA.

Duplicitous politicians and nonprofit groups continue to say they care about NYCHA, but then they corruptly take advantage of the lack of funding to benefit their donors. As Mayor de Blasio begins to reportedly wage a campaign for New York governor, he has awarded the RAD/PACT conversion at Fulton Houses and Elliott-Chelsea to the Trump billionaire backer and Hudson Yards developer, Stephen Ross.

Anonymous Message to NYCHA Residents

No Vaccine Passports until public housing is fully-funded by passage of H.R. 235

We are not going to go along with the reopening of the economy, only to return to the racial disparities that got us here.

Mayor Bill de Blasio (WFP-New York City) and Gov. Andrew Cuomo (D-NY) are only interested in reopening the economy before the end of the Coronavirus pandemic so that they can please their Big Business donors. Not only is this dangerous, because new variants of the Coronavirus are unleashing death and suffering in India. We’re not going along with that, especially since they have are doing nothing to end the racial disparities that brought the New York City Housing Authority to the brink of Federal receivership and, thus, to the dangerous push for privatisation. We’re not going back to the era of racist divestment as a pretexte for selling-out strategic public assets !

Mayor de Blasio and Gov. Cuomo ignored science and placed our lives in jeopardy at the start of the pandemic, and we’re not about to let them again place our lives — and our housing — in jeopardy in order to manufacture a false end to the pandemic.

Until public housing is fully-funded and a moratorium is placed on all RAD/PACT conversions, we will not participate in any Government scheme that reopens the economy until all racial and economic disparities come to an end at NYCHA.

In order to begin to address the racism that public housing residents, accountability and reform must be brought to the New York Police Department. This means that NYPD Commissioner Dermot Shea must resign for deploying the dystopian Robot Dog to public housing. It’s not enough that the military contract for the Robot Dog with Boston Dynamics was cancelled early. There must be accountability for racist over-policing at NYCHA. To ensure structural reform at the NYPD, there must be a pattern and practise civil rights investigation of the troubled police department.

And most importantly, the Public Housing Emergency Response Act (H.R. 235) must be passed and signed into law, which will fund all backlog capital repairs for public housing authorities. Passage of this bill will end the era of racist divestment of public housing. With sponsorship by U.S. Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY 07) and support by Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY), this bill represents a renewal of the New Deal promise of public housing. This is a structural reform that is long over-due. And this is progressivism at perhaps its highest ideal.

We are not going back to the systemic racism and racial disparities of the de Blasio and Cuomo administrations without structural reforms. We are not participating in any economy that leads to our own exploitation and discrimination.