Opinion: Another Groundhog Day for public safety as Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams tout their budget proposals

Carl Hamad-Lipscombe is the executive director of Envision Freedom Fund. Photo via Envision Freedom Fund

By Carl Hamad-Lipscombe

Much like Bill Murray's character in Groundhog Day, New Yorkers find themselves trapped in a cycle of unchanging circumstances, courtesy of Governor Kathy Hochul and Mayor Eric Adams' misguided budget priorities. Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams continue to fund the same failed strategies for public safety and delusionally expect a new result: thriving communities. While they acknowledge that affordable housing, mental health care and support for newly arrived New Yorkers are necessary for our safety and well-being, you wouldn’t know it from their budgets. Instead, any positive effects that may be gleaned are erased by the billions of dollars they intend to pour into harmful institutions like police, prosecution and prisons. 

Growing up in the South Bronx during the 1990s, I’m no stranger to the antiquated “law and order” policies that have destabilized and impoverished communities, and then also punished them for this poverty. I remember watching in horror as homeless people were harassed by police for sleeping on a bench or asking for food; as youth, like my cousin and his friends, were arrested en masse for playing basketball in a park after hours; and as four police officers killed my neighbor Amadou Diallo while he entered his apartment building. These events have crystallized for me that we must find another path toward public safety. 

Unfortunately, the budgets proposed by the mayor and governor remain mired in the disproven idea that prosecution, punishment, and neglect will get us there. They are on autopilot, once again funding the same harmful policies while cutting the essential services that actually support public safety and address the root causes of crime. 

The NYPD’s budget has steadily grown each year, even though this reliance on police by the city and state is not shared by the public. Research shows that 52 percent of crime in the U.S. is unreported to police, often because survivors believe that police could not or would not do anything to help. This means the people who need support the most are looking somewhere else for help or not getting it at all. Not to mention that one in 20 gun homicides are committed by police. As Adams and Hochul direct billions of dollars towards policing, alternatives that have been proven effective —such as community crisis response teams and violence interruption — remain seriously underfunded.

Retail theft and domestic violence were also at the top of Mayor Adams and Governor Hochul’s agendas this year. Hochul’s plan adds new and more severe criminal penalties for people charged with retail theft, despite evidence that increasing the severity of punishment has no real deterrence effect. Retail theft is a clear manifestation of poverty that can only be solved by improving peoples’ material conditions. Rather than meeting these needs, Adams wants to further cut the Department of Social Services budget, which administers the city’s social services and cash assistance programs, by $8.4 million.

Hochul also plans to give nearly $36 million to prosecutors to focus on domestic violence. Domestic violence affects millions of people in the U.S. each year, but prosecution and incarceration doesn’t address the wants and needs of many survivors of domestic violence or survivors of crime more broadly. Studies reveal that 72 percent of survivors of crime prefer to hold the person who harmed them accountable through options beyond prison, such as rehabilitation, drug treatment, or restorative justice. And 77 percent prefer mental health treatment over investments in jails and prisons. Last year, the governor poured $170 million into district attorney offices and amended existing legislation to make it easier for judges to incarcerate people. Responses to crime that rely on prosecution and punishment, instead of care and healing, are all too familiar and all too ineffective. We won’t prosecute our way to safety.  

We can’t afford to keep waking up in a vicious Groundhog Day déjà vu. With 30 deaths at Rikers Island since Mayor Adams took office, the stakes are too high and the consequences too dire. Bringing New York into the future means breaking free from failed policies of the past and adopting new, effective safety strategies. 

But this requires our city and state legislators to reject these harmful budget proposals and courageously stand up for the communities they represent. It requires everyday New Yorkers to call their representatives and to show up at public hearings to make their voices heard. And it requires bold alternatives to our current policing and punishment systems. Because New York, a state of dreamers and doers, has the tenacity to envision something new and enact something better. 

Carl Hamad-Lipscombe is the executive director of Envision Freedom Fund.