The impacts of protests are often profound but unpredictable
Boston with its environs in 1775 & 1776
The scale of the protests against police violence and systemic racism over the past few weeks is unprecedented. Demonstrations are happening in all 50 states, even in small conservative towns with mostly white populations, and something like one in five Americans have participated in one. In Boston, huge crowds have assembled all over the city. And here, as in many places, one of the rallying cries has been to defund the police—or more specifically, to divert police budgets toward underfunded city services that are better suited to deal with social problems than paramilitary units.
This week, Boston had its first opportunity to answer that call, with a Wednesday council vote on the city’s operating budget. The political will seemed to be there for something big to happen. Mayor Marty Walsh has been paying lip service to fighting systemic racism; our new city council is more diverse and progressive than it’s ever been, serving a city that skews left, but is notoriously racist by several measures.
Walsh’s offering under pressure was to carve out $12 million from the police overtime budget to divert to social services, even echoing a progressive rallying cry as he announced it, that “racism is a public health crisis.” At one point, $12 million in funding may have seemed like a bold move, but now, for many, it seemed nowhere near what is necessary.
Ricardo Arroyo, the freshman councilor who represents my district and whose campaign I volunteered on, said as much and more in his testimony during the tense meeting Wednesday. Visibly emotional, he reminded the council of the absurdity of certain budget priorities that have become foregone conclusions, year in year out. A $12 million reallocation may sound like a lot, after all, it represents a 20% cut. To BPD’s overtime budget. The total police budget, on the other hand, remains the city’s second biggest line item at $414 million, four times the budget of say the Boston Public Health Commission.
Arroyo pointed out that cop overtime budget alone, even with the Mayor’s proposed cut, would still be 165% bigger than the community center budget, over 1,000% bigger than the budget to aid seniors, 9,400% bigger than the budget for people with disabilities, 15,000% bigger than the fair housing and equity budget. Hell, the police overtime budget is half the size of the city’s entire public works budget.
Have I made it clear via my aggressive use of command-i that we are still just talking about overtime pay? Where does this $60 million in annual overtime go, you might ask? Well, sometimes it goes to fraud. To the fraud line item. Shockingly large chunks of it go to individual police. In 2016, a 34-year-old cop was the highest paid person at the City of Boston, taking home more than $400,000. Last year, the second-highest-paid city employee was this piece of shit, who has been the subject of 20 internal investigations, six that are currently pending.
“Does this budget reflect my love for my communities? Does it go far enough in providing a much needed hand up to those who are most devastated by this pandemic and centuries of systemic racism?” Arroyo posed to the council. “Is this operations budget just? Is it equitable? The answer for me is no, and so is my vote.”
Other councilors made similar impassioned arguments that the budget was still not nearly good enough, that it did not rise to what the moment was demanding of them. In previous meetings, the councilors had heard hours of testimony from the public similarly asking for cuts to the police budget. The night before, hundreds rallied outside City Hall to call for greater funds to be redirected (groups were asking for 10% of the total police budget), including some protestors who chained themselves together and shut down an intersection. The stars seemed aligned for something big, so surely the mayor’s budget was rejected, right? No, as you may have guessed, it passed with an 8-to-5 vote, thanks to a yes vote from every white city council member, which includes those considered the city’s “old guard” aka guys who look like extras from The Departed.
So yeah, they just weren’t having it. That night it was kind of hard to swallow the outcome after all of the buildup, all of the excitement, all of the news from around the country. Jamie and I were talking about how disappointing it was, but at the same time, knowing Boston politics, how it would have also been a truly remarkable turn of events if the budget had been rejected. You still kind of get this feeling like, if we can’t do something like this now, at a time when the earth feels like it is shaking under our feet with demands for something different, what exactly are we doing here?
The thing I try to remember, though, is that the goal of any protest or social movement is never, or almost never at least, one policy outcome. That’s maybe the biggest misconception about why people protest. You hear it all the time (although I think less often lately) from usually sort of mild-mannered dudes a bit left of center, who just don’t see what protests are trying to accomplish. What, after all, do those Occupy people even want? What are their demands? Not very strategic if you ask me, they say. We heard it from Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who passed a package of police reform legislation, and then announced the need for demonstrations was now over: “You don’t need to protest, you won. You accomplished your goal.”
But they are not stopping. Because the goal, as we talked about a couple weeks ago, is to create a world in which what once seemed like common sense now seems like nonsense. Where progress that previously seemed impossible now seems inevitable. On Wednesday, a clear line was drawn between the city’s leaders who realize they are living in that emerging world, and those who still think they are living in the old one.
If mass protest doesn’t bring about change to something structural and movable like a city budget, you still might wonder if it really does anything at all. For that question, I will turn to this must-read article from Zeynep Tufekci, “Do Protests Even Work?” I highly recommend Tufekci’s 2017 book Twitter and Tear Gas, but she covers a lot of her points from that book in this terse essay that came out this week.
The answer is, yes, of course protests work, but usually not in the way and timeframe that many people think. Protests sometimes look like failures in the short term, but much of the power of protests is in their long-term effects, on both the protesters themselves and the rest of society.
She points out that the impacts of protests are often profound, but unpredictable, in a few ways. They change people’s minds. They change culture. They change individuals’ lives, hooking them on activism for a lifetime. And, maybe most importantly, they erode the legitimacy of power structures.
The Boston old guard is slow to change, but they are slipping behind. A recent poll found that 84% of Massachusetts residents support the Black Lives Matter movement. Similar majorities support broad police reforms. Half of respondents now say police budgets should be reduced and diverted. On that last point, one telling quote came from a white Franklin resident who said, “I find it kind of silly we haven’t done it yet.”
That’s what a social movement does. And if it’s strong enough, even the most entrenched power structures eventually crumble beneath it.
Pretty nice sunset in the neighborhood the other night.
Links
- Captain John “Jack” Danilecki, aka Pepper Jack, is known for his brutality and has six active investigations against him. He was also the second-highest paid city employee last year, taking home $350,000.
- Target, Google, Bank of America and Microsoft fund police through private donations to police foundations.
- The advocate who tells the stories of people killed by hit-and-runs.
- Thirteen states have criminalized protests against new fossil fuel infrastructure.
- It’s going to be very hot all summer.
- Climate change is increasing risks during pregnancy, and Black mothers and babies are harmed at much higher rates.
- Saguaro cactuses are threatened by climate change, drought, invasive plants like buffelgrass and stinknet, and various human impacts. One gem from this story: saguaros are starting to grow on northern-facing slopes for the first time to avoid the heat.
- Don’t be afraid to love what you love, even if it’s “live, laugh, love.”
- If you just want to read someone saying nice things about someone they love, I recommend this Roxane Gay essay.
- Since its rushed reopening in late May, Arizona has become an epicenter of the pandemic. “No state has seen its rate of hospitalizations increase more rapidly since Memorial Day,” with record use of inpatient beds and ventilators. More per capita cases than recorded by any country in Europe or even hard-hit Brazil. Until recently, the state had prohibited cities from requiring masks, but now city councils are all scrambling to stop the bleeding with state government MIA.
Listening
Teardrops, Cory Wong and Jon Batiste
I’m not a comics journalist or connected to the industry or anything like that, but for some reason it feels necessary to point out that Warren Ellis, a writer I’ve been a huge fan of for years and whose work I’ve recommended here before, has been using his status to coerce women into sexual relationships for years, according to many people who recently came forward. This is the first time one of the many revelations about abusive men in power has come about concerning someone whose work holds a really big place in my life. And it is horrible and very sad.
Horrible mostly for the women he treated terribly, for the careers he meddled with and those he likely ruined or discouraged. It’s horrible because he was known for challenging people in power in his work, championing young writers and artists, and supporting women creators. But there was clearly an abusive side to all of that, and his awful behavior is a betrayal to so, so many people, of which I am just one very tiny casualty. I don’t have much else to say, except I guess remember that men in power do awful things, and even when they mean a lot to us, especially then, they don’t get a pass.
Watching
Sopranos S3. Some good episodes, but the show noticeably declined in this season. Lot of gabagool. Solid mental health advice from Carmine Lupertazzi though:
I take pictures of the TV while I’m watching it.
Stay safe and healthy out there especially if you are in Arizona good god. A lot of stuff opening up here and our numbers are looking better but I still don’t think a restaurant or bar is in my near-term future. We are planning a trip to Western Massachusetts in August as kind of a consolation vacation, where we will sit in a cabin in the woods instead of our living room for 10 days despite all of the scary books and movies that have taught me that this is a bad idea. I think it will be fine though.
Get some air if you can. Do some more of the kind of zooms you like and not as many of the kind of zooms you don’t like. Be a better friend to yourself.
Tate