Dear friends,
This week, one of my classes did an exercise I call Everyone Deserves. Each student made a list of three or more things that everyone deserves. We went around the circle twice.
Respect
Safety
A good education
Love
food
A dog
community
To know their rights
Health
A day off
Money
To be treated like a human — a living, breathing person
The Senate needs a push to pass a bill to fund partnerships between public schools and mental health professionals to provide services in schools.
Petition your Senators to support the Mental Health Services for Students Act. This 15-second action comes from the NEA.
Three people have died in custody at Rikers Island since January 1.
Ask your councilmember to support the bill to ensure medical care to people who are incarcerated! This 1-minute action is ready-made.
We are once again embroiled in a heated public discussion of bail reform. Earlier this month, Scott Hechinger wrote an excellent analysis of the relationship between the decarceration that resulted from bail reform and crime rates in NYC. Using the NYPD’s own crime data, Hechinger found that
Historic decarceration paralleled historic drops in crime. In every year between 2000-2011, NYC jails averaged around 14,000 people detained, predominantly Black and Brown New Yorkers, and the vast majority there pretrial, presumed innocent on unaffordable bail. Then, in 2013, the Rikers population began to decline. For the six years leading up to bail reform in 2020, the city’s jail population plummeted from an average of around 14,000 per year to under 6,000. Over that time period, all major crimes also plummeted. By 2020 and 2021, the years after bail reform was implemented, 57% fewer people were jailed — and yet there were substantially fewer serious felony arrests across the board.
Bail reform was accompanied by a decrease in major felonies. The total number of major felonies in 2020 — 95,593 — the year after bail reform took effect, was fewer than every year between 2000-2019, before bail reform. In 2021, the total number of major felonies — 102,741 — was less than every year between 2000-2015. By way of comparison, the year 2000 had 184,652 major felonies at a time when the NYC jail population was highest.
Hechinger acknowledges the increase in homicides in the city in 2021, which followed the national trend. He points out that homicides were at an all-time low in the period between 2017 and 2019, which
meant that any increase at all — even to the already historically low average annual homicides of 323 from 2013-2019 — would be [an] increase that police, prosecutors and leaders like Adams could then seize on to suit their purposes.
I’ve reached my article limit with The Daily News, and so I didn’t read the op-ed by Governor Hochul and Lieutenant Governor Brian Benjamin. On Tuesday night, Assembly Democrats vigorously debated their proposal to rollback some bail reforms .
“The Democratic conference is divided, though more favor no changes than those who favor changes,” one member said.
Those who opposed any changes include Assemblywoman Latrice Walker (D-Brooklyn), who on Tuesday said she was prepared to go on a hunger strike to try to block Hochul’s proposals.
Contact your state legislators to let them know that bail reform has made New York City safer. This is a 1-minute ready-made action.
More of what we deserve, according to sixth-graders:
To have a friend
An elevator
a Doctor
an ID
A healthy relationship
A home
A long spring break
Freedom
Gifts
No COVID-19
Just as the mayor is planning to lift vaccine mandates on athletes and performing artists — a move that may place mandates on other workers in legal jeopardy, the schools are seeing an increase in COVID cases.
The city Department of Education reported 1,422 infections in the seven-day period ending March 22, more than twice as many cases as reported in the seven-day period a month ago – while also marking the fourth consecutive weekly gain, DOE statistics show.
Mayor Adams has announced plans to remove the mask mandate for the smalls (age 5 and under) in city schools on April 4.
Take a few minutes to let the mayor know your thoughts about eliminating masking without requiring vaccinations.
When I was reading about the Ukrainian city of Chernihiv, which has been cut off from drinking water, heat, and electricity by Putin’s forces, I was fully freaked out by all of the things that people of Chernihiv deserve that they don’t have.
Help
Fun
Life
A happy, worry-free childhood
Warmth, literally and figuratively
A job
comfort
Happiness
shelter
Peace
On Thursdays, we review actions and issues that need fresh attention. As war jeopardizes global efforts to forestall climate catastrophe, we need to pay attention to the home front in the climate struggle.
Postmaster Louis DeJoy decided to purchase $6 billion worth of new gas-powered mail trucks. These trucks would point us in the wrong direction.
Tell Congress: Block DeJoy’s Bad Deal! The USPS contract must require at least 75% electric trucks. This ready-made action from the National Campaign for Transit Justice will take less than a minute!
There are young people in the US who are organizing to salvage our society, which is not war-torn, but is increasingly fragile. One group is called Generation Vote, which has created Movement School in order to
train the next generation of voting rights warriors. As we travel around the country to invite people into the movement, we will equip GenVoters with the tools that they need to talk to anyone and everyone about our generation’s democratic crisis and our plans to fight for a just democracy for all.
They are recruiting from high schools and colleges, churches, mosques, and synagogues, in both rural and urban areas.
They are throwing a launch party this Friday in downtown Brooklyn, for (vaccinated) young people and allies. Perhaps you remember parties.
Go to a party tomorrow night and support Generation Vote. Pass the invitation along to young people you know.
I’m going to make one more plug for the Windfall Profits Tax legislation, which
delivers the right political medicine for the moment and speaks to the anger many Americans are feeling about the current state of the economy. The public understands that when Biden and Democrats injected stimulus checks into their pockets last year, large powerful corporations came around to steal them back in the form of predatory pricing.
The current price gouging by oil companies is obscene. Historically, when the price of crude oil was at the same levels it is currently (roughly $100/barrel), the price of gas was actually a dollar cheaper per gallon at the pump. And we know that when gas prices rise, the most painful burdens are felt by working-class people living paycheck to paycheck.
This will not prevent fossil fuel companies from profiting, but it will take a bite out of their profits, while helping people whose economic situation is most precarious.
Call on Congress to pass a windfall profits tax on Big Oil profiteers. This 15-second(!) action is from Fossil Free Media (scroll down on the landing page to get to the petition).
Tomorrow, we strike for the future, here and around the nation and the world. Fridays For the Future originated with Greta Thunberg’s school strike.
Check out the press release from FFF (NYC) and come out this Friday! Use the map to find actions outside NYC.
On the advice of my sixth-graders, I’m going to take a day off from writing tomorrow. I will see you in the streets.
with love,
L