Opinion: Real public safety starts with funding public goods, not police

This budget season, New Yorkers have an opportunity to build a program of economic justice that creates truly safe and healthy communities for all. For too long, politicians in both parties have stoked the flames of resentment to convince us that only emergency measures rooted in criminalization can address problems of insecurity, crime and disorder. As one of the richest places on earth, we have the capacity to address these issues in ways that support all New Yorkers, repair past harms and create broad based opportunities for economic growth and real public safety. To do this, we need state and local budgets that invest in public goods, not more policing. 

Ever since the fiscal crisis of the 1970s, New York has used public funds to subsidize Wall Street and real estate in the hopes of boosting the economy – and it’s paid for this with cuts to the social safety net and the workforce that provides it. The result has been a massive increase in inequality that has produced mass homelessness, displacement, untreated mental health and substance use problems, youth unemployment, and high levels of economic insecurity. 

According to the Economic Policy Institute, New York is the most unequal state in the country, where the richest 1% take home 31% of all income. (Nationwide, the richest 1% take home 21% of all income.) Rather than directly addressing the need for stable housing, incomes, and health care, we've seen these basic services replaced by ever more intensive and invasive policing: stop-and-frisk, quotas, abusive anti-crime units, homeless sweeps and the broad criminalization of young people of color.

Mayor Eric Adams and Gov. Kathy Hochul have no real plan to address homelessness, a massive opioid crisis, the absence of basic mental health services and the lack of decent full-time jobs with a living wage. Instead, they have fallen back on calls for “get tough” criminalization strategies like increasing pretrial detention for the poor, criminalizing homelessness, and unleashing more undercover “jump out squads” in our poorest communities. 

It doesn’t have to be this way. New York state's economy is the tenth-largest in the world. It is the center of global finance, corporate headquarters, entertainment and global tourism. We need to leverage those resources to create the kind of broad-based economic security that the “trickle-down” economics of the last 40 years has failed to deliver.

A more progressive tax code would give us the resources we need to create more middle-class jobs, increase supportive housing, provide better public transit, improve education and childcare services, and give young people a reason to be hopeful about their futures. Greater tax revenue would also allow us to invest in proven programs to actually reduce incarceration, such as the diversion courts and community-based treatment programs proposed under the Treatment Not Jail Act, which Phara is sponsoring in the Assembly. The results would be lower crime and disorder, stable housing markets, and more vibrant neighborhoods.

A recent study from the University of Chicago shows what we have known all along: “improving and expanding social welfare programs, and stemming inequality, is a more effective crime-fighting policy than throwing money at police departments.” During his run for mayor, Adams acknowledged that “New York needs more supportive housing and services for people confronting mental illness and addiction, rather than allowing these vulnerable individuals to languish in subway stations.” But instead of expanding spending in these areas, he has turned the problem over to the police, at costs of an additional $20 million a month in police overtime. 

A January 2023 poll showed 70% of New Yorkers support measures to tax the wealthy and 84% support taxing billionaires. New York City’s democratic socialists have a plan for tax equity that will target the very richest New Yorkers and make them pay what they owe. This Tax The Rich package of bills – which Phara is co-sponsoring – provides concrete measures to move New York forward. It calls for raising $40 billion from the richest corporations and individuals to increase the supply of affordable housing, fund publicly-owned clean energy, improve public transit and establish free universal childcare and higher education.

While politicians and corporate lobbyists relentlessly claim that taxing the wealthy will drive them away, this just isn’t true. Studies consistently fail to find such an effect. Instead, we see working class New Yorkers, especially African Americans, leaving the city because they can’t afford to live here. The 2020 Census showed an overall reduction in the size of the African American community in New York City despite increases in the overall population. 

It is time that our elected officials quit using the smokescreen of crime and disorder to deny us the resources that will allow communities to put in place the investments we know will make us safer and more secure.