This college town may actually abolish police | Will Bunch Newsletter

One year ago today, I was waking up in a Los Angeles hotel room with visions of Super Tuesday dancing in my head, and the roars of a packed (and, of course, maskless) room of 20,000 Bernie Sanders’ fans ringing in my ears. A lot can change in 365 days, no? Did someone forward you this email? Sign up to receive this newsletter weekly at inquirer.com/bunch — because God only knows what we’ll be talking about one year from now.

In the tumultuous year of 2020, the phrase “abolish the police” became a popular rallying cry as millions marched in all 50 states against racial injustice — and then became a political “third rail” that electrified any politician who dared wander onto the tracks and touch it. That’s because the bumper-sticker slogan meant radically different things depending on who uttered it.

To Republican candidates and their consultants, the phrases “abolish the police” or “defund the police” were a millstone to hang around the necks of any liberal who’d voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement, conjuring up images of rising murder rates, urban looting or roving bands of antifa vandalists. And, to be fair, proponents of radical police reform fell short in explaining that they do support public safety — but in a new environment in which armed, poorly trained officers aren’t responding on issues like mental health and homelessness, with totally revamped departments that hire and train new personnel to weed out racists and replace warrior cops with civic guardians.

“If you think American cities need to experiment with new ways of policing, Ithaca might be the perfect lab.”

As the calendar flipped to 2021 and some of the momentum from the George Floyd protests dissipated, the bigger problem with the complicated and nuanced “abolish/defund the police” arguments is that no one seemed to have the political courage to try them.

Until a 33-year-old political whiz kid named Svante Myrick stepped up to the plate. When he was just 24 and newly graduated from Cornell University, Myrick was elected mayor of Ithaca, N.Y., a beautiful hillside college town (which I got to know, somewhat, when my son attended Ithaca College in the mid-2010s) of 30,000 at the foot of the Finger Lakes. When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo (before folks realized that he’s awful and needs to resign) issued an executive order last year mandating that police departments study restructuring, Myrick and the Ithaca community took it to heart.

Their review panel’s plan, endorsed by the mayor, is stunningly bold. If approved, Ithaca would replace its traditional police department with a new Department of Community Solutions and Public Safety that would be led by a civilian. The unit would feature both armed and unarmed first responders, who would be called to tackle social problems like mental-health emergencies that are not criminal in nature. In starting over, current Ithaca police officers would need to apply for jobs in a brand-new department.

Myrick told NPR last week that “the community was saying, we don’t want public safety to go away. We all want to feel safe. But we, too, want to see a different kind of public safety.” Thus, the mayor explained, an emphasis on visible responders walking the community beat — who aren’t necessarily uniformed cops with firearms. “But the presence of guns, the presence of a militarized force triggers people who are carrying past traumas,” Myrick said in the interview, explaining that the task force convinced him that Ithaca needs to “start over.”

If you think American cities need to experiment with new ways of policing, Ithaca might be the perfect lab. A politically progressive oasis — thanks to an economy dominated by two colleges and a regional medical center — in the heart of rural upstate New York, Ithaca has its share of property crimes and issues around drugs but a low rate of murder or other violent crimes. But this isn’t the first time that Myrick’s bold ideas — he was an early advocate for a heroin safe-injection site — have collided with political reality.

The Ithaca plan was called “radical” by the current police chief, and not surprisingly the local police union leader went farther in blasting the idea as union-busting, adding, “to say that we feel betrayed and that we are angry is an understatement.” The city council members have taken a wait-and-see attitude for now.

Yet it’s increasingly impossible to argue that the current status quo is working. Across the Finger Lakes, the city of Rochester is still reeling from the case of Daniel Prude, a Black man who was suffering a psychotic episode and was killed when police officers placed a mesh hood over his head and pinned him down. Here in Philadelphia — where the push for police reform after the George Floyd protests has been underwhelming — officers last October shot and killed a man named Walter Wallace Jr. who was also experiencing a mental-health breakdown.

It doesn’t have to be that way. In Denver, an experimental program sending a medic and a clinician to emergency calls around mental health, depression, poverty, homelessness, or substance abuse — previously answered by police — has successfully intervened in hundreds of cases without an arrest, let alone a shooting. That seems like a win for everybody, including overworked cops who have more time to deal with actual crimes.

I truly hope that Myrick and his fellow advocates for police reform overcome the political opportunists and the reactionaries of the status quo and can attempt something truly radical in Ithaca, so balky cities like Philadelphia can better see what works and what doesn’t. The alternative is more George Floyds, Daniel Prudes, and Walter Wallaces, and that is intolerable.

Question: What does Joe Manchin want, and would he switch parties to get it? — Via @Gooddoghowell on Twitter

Answer: The West Virginian — who, as swing vote in a 50-50 Senate, seems the most powerful man in D.C. right now — is on a lot of readers’ minds this week. At the end of the day, the center-right Democrat is about what’s good for the public persona — and the political self-preservation — of Joe Manchin, which he believes means “owning the libs” every few weeks. That’s often dumb — his constituents in Appalachia desperately need the $15 wage he seems to be blocking. He does, however, want the West Virginia jobs that come with a $3 trillion infrastructure package that President Biden is working on. If POTUS has any political savvy, he’ll dangle that pork-barrel carrot to pressure Manchin to suspend the filibuster to save our voting rights, and salvage our democracy.

One of the many things I love about the newsletter format is that it’s a great way to keep a conversation going from week to week, especially when folks have more to say about a controversial topic. I knew when I started writing about the Democrats’ looming Pennsylvania Senate primary in 2022 and frontrunners Lt. Gov. John Fetterman and state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta, some folks would probably get mad. And some did — none more so than Philadelphia Magazine editor-at-large Ernest Owens, who took to Twitter to argue the framing of this piece was “a sad racist trope,” that “implying that Black voters aren’t the same as working-class voters is tired.” You can read his full critique here.

My views on the ever-changing lines between race, class and politics, in Pennsylvania and in America, are a lot more complicated and nuanced than I laid out in last week’s newsletter. Not only am I am aware that Black people are the bulwark of today’s broad, multi-racial working class — as longtime readers will remember, I devoted an entire column in November to the risk for Democrats of losing the Black (and Latino) working class by taking it for granted. I’ve also covered the split between older African Americans who went for Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden and their kids who loved Bernie Sanders. But upon reflection, I understand how it may have come across, particularly to readers who only encountered my views in one column, that I saw the Black vote as “monolithic.” I don’t and I’ll be more nuanced in my writing in the future.

But what I see in this particular Senate race is a) a special candidate in Kenyatta who seems to appeal to those differing Black constituencies, especially when Fetterman is having a rough 2021 around a race-based controversy and b) a candidate in Fetterman who’s open in his belief that a progressive can win back the white working class. Political writers will stop writing about racial or ethnic or religious voting blocs on the day when candidates stop making blatant plays for them. But please keep the feedback coming, because I always want to hear from you.