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FOR A VERSION OF THE LETTER WITH LINKS TO SOURCES, VISIT HERE:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18ut2-YYr3JtvLlGeu_WsLhZwBcM7FJe-/view?usp=sharing

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June 12, 2020

Dear Mayor de Blasio,

We write as current and former staff from the de Blasio Administration and other City agencies who serve and/or identify as gender-based violence survivors. We know firsthand how New York City’s violent system of policing and incarceration has failed survivors time after time. Today, we demand a defunding of the criminal legal system, followed by real investment in health equity to address the root causes of violence.

In New York City, the de Blasio administration claims to understand gender-based violence as a public health issue. Yet, the administration's dependency on police and the criminal legal system "services"-- which frequently fails survivors and often leads to retraumatization and incarceration-- suggests otherwise. This carceral creep in the anti-violence field perpetuates anti-Black narratives that result in police violence and the inhumane crowding of City jails -- jails which continue to be ravaged by COVID-19 even as the Mayor touts “record-low” numbers of infections.

In this moment of calling for racial justice, criminal legal divestment, and community investment, we must uplift the needs of survivors, along with the memories of those who have not survived. We call for a radical shift in how the City supports the diverse, complex, and multifaceted survivor community, many of whom are treated by the system as disposable or “difficult”: survivors who are disabled, trans, queer, Black, undocumented, or criminalized.

The City has poured more and more funding into district attorneys (DAs), police, and even City jail systems in the name of survivors. These budgetary decisions ignore the fact that many survivors experience victimization at the hands of these institutions -- in the form of racist violence, sexual violence, the trauma of incarceration or detention centers, or gross negligence - especially impacting Black trans and cis women and girls. For example, NYPD has had numerous accounts of abusing their families and loved ones, people in their custody, or people who sell sex.

Despite mainstream conceptions of survivorship that center the experiences of middle-class, cis heterosexual women, many survivors without those privileged identities do not experience the police, DAs, or prisons as their protectors.

Note one of the clearest indicators of the current system’s failures for those with the highest need: in New York City, the majority of those killed by domestic violence did not have ANY previous contact with the police. Furthermore, this refusal to imagine building safety outside of the criminal legal system, which preys on the Black community, has resulted in Black women dying from domestic violence at twice the rate of white women.

Budgets are moral documents. They reflect the values and priorities of institutions. To date, the City’s budgets reflect an unwillingness to prioritize the needs of survivors most on the margins- survivors who are distrustful of and traumatized by the police, DAs and courts, and prisons and jails. Survivors who have been trafficked or whose survivorship results in self-defense have been failed all the more so by a system that criminalizes them.

As individuals who are survivors, prison abolitionists, and/or City employees working against GBV and structural racism, we call on the Mayor and Office of Management and Budget to invest in equity and divest from the violent machinery that only puts the most marginalized survivors at GREATER risk.

1) The NYPD as a system has historically terrorized Black, Latinx, and working-class communities. Survivors from these communities have not been exempt from that terror. After working hand in hand with the mainstream GBV movement, the field’s means of holding police accountable is minimal and ultimately deferential. Continuing to pour funds into NYPD specialized units, implicit bias or GBV trainings, and carceral co-location models (ex.CVAP or the City’s Family Justice Centers, housed with NYPD and District Attorney’s Offices) is not meeting the need nor keeping us safer. Furthermore, survivors and their families have been demanding transformative and healing interventions for decades, but the City refuses to listen. Instead of the current funding priorities, the City should invest those funds in small, survivor-led, grassroots organizations for developing projects to create response units and safety in ways that match their needs. Through community participatory budgeting processes, survivors and their communities could decide how to respond to violence, such as investing in restorative justice hubs, non-carceral co-location models, rapid rehousing projects, anti-racist social worker mobile response teams, or neighborhood bystander intervention projects.

2) The District Attorney offices claim to stand with survivors, yet they continually prosecute survivors who act in self-defense. As we were reminded by the tragic death of Layleen Polanco, prosecutors also regularly incarcerate people involved in sex work-- either due to force, choice or coercion-- for not complying with their court-mandated counseling services. Nevertheless, City officials have called for sex work “reforms” that continue to pursue criminalization and diminish individual agency. These policies are antithetical to our objectives as advocates against gender-based violence. As abolitionists, we recognize that this criminalization is particularly nefarious given that incarceration and detention centers are some of the most rampant purveyors of sexual violence (New York City’s compliance with the Prison Rape Elimination Act, for example, is known to be abysmal). Furthermore, numerous scholars have told us that, despite two centuries of reforms, these institutions are irreformable. Rather than continuing to invest funds in prosecutors and human trafficking intervention courts that banish people to institutions of physical and sexual violence, we should divest from these carceral dens and demand the release of all criminalized survivors. Additionally, the Mayor, Office of Management and Budget, and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice should redirect those funds to support criminalized survivors and their families’ healing and basic necessities -- quality and safe housing, non-coercive mental and physical healthcare (including HIV/AIDS prevention and treatment), quality education and low barrier economic supports.

3) Lastly, we know that prisons and jails do NOT serve survivors. First, many Black, Latinx, trans and queer survivors end up criminalized by this system that does not see them as “perfect” victims. We know that Rikers and other City jails do not serve them in their healing but actually extend their torture. In addition, if we recognize prisons and jails as sites of sexual violence, most people incarcerated become survivors while inside, even if they weren’t before they entered jails. We refuse to allow their survivorship to be erased, even if mainstream anti-GBV agencies and service-providers treat the abuse they suffer as inconsequential. Anchored in gender and racial equity, we reject prisons and jails as a solution to GBV and call for their divestment and abolition. Instead of keeping Rikers open or building the City’s new jails, we call for an immediate decarceration and reallocation of those funds to the things survivors tell our agencies they need time after time: quality and stable housing, access to gender-responsive and anti-racist mental and physical healthcare, quality childcare (WITHOUT threat of “failure to protect” child removal) and anti-oppressive education and employment regardless of one’s immigration, public benefits or “criminal” status. We call on the Mayor, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Mayor’s Office of Criminal Justice to divest from Department of Corrections’ facilities, as the first step to abolition, and redirect those funds to local and survivor-led CBOs to develop anti-racist, survivor-centered and low-barrier social safety net supports. These supports should start with increasing stable housing units, which are not contingent on receipt of public benefits that can lock survivors into under-employment, exploitation, and poverty.

We have been energized by the beautiful words of our colleagues who have demanded change from our Mayor and echo many of their observations and demands. Further, we are grounded in the work of feminists of color who have called for abolition feminism and warned against reliance on the criminal legal system for decades.

As we call for disinvestment of the police, we must also commit to building a world where communities are free of fear from violence and abuse. Using a public health and health equity approach, we understand that the root causes that result in an increased risk for GBV are structural and oppressive: heterosexist patriarchy, racism, and capitalism.

Disinvesting from police, District Attorney’s Offices, and prisons and jails is the first step. We must push further to invest in survivors’ neighborhoods, communities, and the tools they need for healing and true safety.

Signed,