- July 2024 / Commentaries
NYPD, Public Libraries, and the Continued Threat to American Education By: Zeena Hamed
At the end of 2023, New York City Mayor Eric Adams declared a 5% budget cut for civil departments, affecting the police department, educational services, libraries, and public sanitation. Miraculously, at the turn of the new year, the budget for the NYPD was restored; Mayor Adams declared that 600 recruits would be added, enlarging the already abrasive and behemothic size of the police state in the city.
Meanwhile, services in education like Universal Pre-K and Summer School and services in public libraries are expected to move forward with increasingly limited funding. The Education Department is being cut by $1 Billion over two years, while Libraries are being forced to stay closed on Sundays, with possible Saturday closures looming on the horizon.
To truly understand the magnitude of this, we must position education as a framework for liberation. We must position libraries and school-funded programs as a safe space for youth. We must position education as a combatant against crime and poverty, especially for marginalized youth, people of color, and people of culture. We must remember the magnitude of the accessibility of learning in the critical ages of a child’s development; programs like Universal Pre-K and Summer programs are essential to the continued fostering of neural pathways and a future passion for learning.
The current state of Over-Policing and Under-Educating ingrained in the politics of New York City is a larger reflection of a system that values capital over humanity. The youth and programs specific to fostering educational opportunities for the youth are forced to take a backseat in this system, while a burgeoning police budget continues to swallow the city’s resources whole. This is not a problem specific to New York City, it is one that systematically impacts communities of color across the country. Our next steps to the future must aim at dismantling these systems and pouring into our children and their education, not into archaic systems of control.
References:
Cramer, Maria. “N.Y.P.D. Will Not Face Budget Cuts after All, Adams Says.” The New York Times, 10 Jan. 2024, www.nytimes.com/2024/01/10/nyregion/budget-adams-nypd.html .
