Dear friends,
Here it is, the Ides of March. Cuomo should be nervous, as he is increasingly isolated. There’s no danger of assassination, to my knowledge, but the man certainly knows how to make enemies. Democrats are gathering to discuss how best to foreclose the possibility that he will run again.
Cyrus Vance’s announcement that he will not run again to be Manhattan DA means that there’s a wide open race. Unlike the elections for council members, comptroller, and mayor, this race does not involve ranked choice voting. How a DAs understands justice is very important:
[A] staff of hundreds of assistant district attorneys…conduct investigations and prosecutions in more than two dozen specialized units. The DA has wide latitude on what and how to prosecute, whether to seek bail and in what manner plea bargains are made. The DA can also seize property as part of prosecution. In Manhattan, that’s led to Vance controlling a sizable forfeiture fund.
Read up on the race for Manhattan DA. Here’s a second source for you!
I was excited to learn from a friend about an opportunity to work for justice by court watching:
Court Watch NYC harnesses the power of New Yorkers to organize for transformative change toward [prison] abolition. We watch court proceedings, shift power in the courtroom, report what we see, and hold court actors accountable to ending the injustices in the criminal legal system that target Black, brown, indigenous, immigrant/migrant, queer and TGNC [trans and gender nonconforming] communities.
The program is designed to bring members of the public into courtrooms as observers and to document and compare the behavior of prosecutors to stated policies and official reports from the DA’s office.
Register to participate in a Brooklyn Community Bail Fund court watching training on Thursday, 3/18.
Saturday marked the sad anniversary of the murder of Breonna Taylor by the police in Louisville. The forcible entry into her home with a no-knock warrant and the excessive police response to the single shot fired by her boyfriend in response to the late-night intrusion led to her death. If there is to be any justice, the actions of police everywhere must be subject to independent review. The courts have failed to punish the police who caused Taylor’s death, and her boyfriend is now suing in civil court for Fourth Amendment violations.
Here in NYC, the power of the police commissioner to reverse the findings of the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB) has primarily functioned to excuse the excessive use of force by police. The new disciplinary matrix for officers does not provide a meaningful correction to the abuses. The New York Civil Liberties Union has been calling for true independence of the CCRB since 2007.
Christopher Dunn, the NYCLU’s legal director [explains]: “Genuine accountability for police misconduct requires genuine independence to make final disciplinary decisions, and everyone understands that the police commissioner is not independent but in fact is a central figure in the system that generates police abuse.”
Journalists at The City are documenting police misconduct. If you or someone you know has had an encounter with the police or experienced a pattern of harassment or excessive force — even if no complaint has been filed — they want to hear about it.
Report police excesses to The City.
I got a political email the other day that included this quote from Rebecca Solnit, an important and prolific American writer:
Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth's treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal... To hope is to give yourself to the future - and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.
So, here’s to an actionable definition of hope!
Have a great day!
with love,
L