City Workers Will Stop Cop City
[Promotional material from the Autonomous Football League's First Stop Copy City Cup]
Editorial Note: This piece is written by individual Marxist Unity members and may not reflect the views of the caucus as a whole.
In June, Mayor Adams announced a $225 million investment toward expanding the city’s current Police Academy campus in Queens. As part of the Mayor’s broader goal of embedding the NYPD within other parts of city government, this investment will expand the campus’ scope to include training facilities for all of the city’s 18 agencies with enforcement arms. The project is scheduled to begin in 2026 and end in 2030, and organizing against it has already begun.
Many organizers call the site New York City’s own Cop City, invoking the “Cop City” training facility currently under construction in an Atlanta forest. The protests against Atlanta’s Cop City have been some of the most inspiring for the abolitionist movement in recent years, so it is natural for activists to believe that a movement to stop NYC’s Cop City can help reignite the city’s abolitionist movement.
After the powerful George Floyd protests in 2020, abolitionist organizing has stalled out. Cops continue to murder people with impunity, and in many ways are more empowered by a political and media climate that has leaned into a resurgent “crime panic” and “migrant panic” narrative. Meanwhile, street protests are not as big as they once were, and the movement organizations that sprung up in 2020 have been experiencing a decline in participation.
While a campaign to Stop Cop City in NYC holds immense potential to replicate the strength of the Atlanta movement, there are some real difficulties. The historical and geographic resonance is different: NYC’s Cop City is planned on land that is already a police facility, whereas the Atlanta Cop City is being built in an Atlanta forest with cultural significance for the community. The strategic goal of NYC’s Cop City is also different. Whereas the goal of the Atlanta Cop City was to create a site for the police to engage in highly militarized drills, the goal of NYC Cop City is to subordinate the city’s other enforcement agencies to the NYPD, essentially bringing a more carceral logic to groups like Parks rangers, which is a strategic objective that has yet to be deeply theorized by abolitionists. Finally, previous tactics, like agitating in city council, taking to the community boards, taking to the streets and lighting shit on fire, and campaigns like No New Jails, Close Rikers, Occupy City Hall, have all failed at stopping the NYPD’s expansion of power. Even the more abolitionist-leaning Progressive Caucus failed to vote as a bloc against the most recent budget which expanded police resources.
What would it actually take for us to do something about NYC’s Cop City? Of course, we would expect a successful movement to deploy all the tactics it has at its disposal: street protests, advocacy inside the city council, deeper organizing and consciousness-building with our neighbors and coworkers, and beyond. This last tactic is essential to get right for the Stop Cop City campaign in New York. Given that Cop City in NYC is part of a broader strategy to embed the NYPD across all parts of city government, city workers will be on the front lines of resistance.
But are city workers prepared to resist? While New York’s public sector unions have a long history of social movement unionism, public sector union leaders have been model business unionists, acting as willing partners in the city’s governance as it shifts rightward. Leaders like DC 37 President Henry Garrido support budget cuts and healthcare rollbacks while relying on the decline in union participation and the rhetorical power of strong benefits packages for city workers to retain institutional control.
Amongst city workers themselves, consciousness is mixed. Younger city workers tend to hold more radical political views, and are interested in getting organized to fight for these politics, both inside and outside formal union structures. On the other hand, many city workers are not interested in collective action, viewing themselves purely as passive beneficiaries of union leadership’s ability to win them good contracts. Further, there is an ideological conservatism amongst many city workers, who have bought into the “crime and migrant” panic spun up by politicians and the media. And in contrast to a social movement union consciousness that views the interests of city workers and the public as intertwined, many city workers look at the New Yorkers they serve with some hostility and apprehension.
In addition to these general challenges within public sector union leadership and the city worker rank-and-file towards militant political action, Stop Cop City organizers face a novel challenge: whether and how to organize with city workers who are “cops but not cops.” These are the city workers who are not police officers with the NYPD but still play some enforcement role: park rangers, shelter security, even the NYPD’s clerical workers.
On the one hand, these jobs confound a typical conceptualization on the left of “worker” that excludes cops because of their social function (defending private property, enforcing repressive social norms). These “non-cop cops” seem to break at least in part from the culture of the NYPD. We have already seen signs of these “non-cop cops” pushing back against NYPD involvement, with the president of the union representing parks officers opposing the NYPD’s “hardcore” culture and arguing that parks officers are not “primarily there to be like a police force…[b]ut to give comfort, information, stewardship, to the parks…” On the other hand, city workers with enforcement roles do have some degree of the ideological conservatism mentioned above, and their job does put them in a position to oppose and criminalize militant working-class activity.
Stop Cop City activists must have a plan for organizing these workers who will be under pressure to adopt the NYPD’s hardcore policing culture, not only to resist the incursion of the NYPD into their jobs but to fight for an end to Cop City and to transform the repressive, carceral attitude that is a part of the cultural fabric of the “non-cop cops.”
This will not be an easy task. Stop Cop City activists are not deeply rooted in public sector unions, even less so the locals that represent the “non-cop cops” being threatened by the NYPD. Getting a critical mass of city workers to oppose Cop City will require a coordinated intervention with a compelling political message and a strategy on a multi-year timescale. This is the other necessary component in an effective Stop Cop City campaign: structures capable of uniting the various tactical aspects of the campaign into a coordinated effort.
NYC-DSA is well-equipped to create the necessary structure because a large number of members are already involved across the necessary spheres of struggle (city council, the streets, workplaces and communities) for a Stop Cop City campaign. But the chapter cannot rely on members alone to carry out this work. To maximize our individual contributions, the organization itself must pull together DSA members and our allies to plan, act and reflect together. The Stop Cop City campaign proposal for consideration at this year’s NYC-DSA convention is an excellent foundation to begin this coordinated response.
Beyond a strong intervention among city workers and an organizing body to coordinate across numerous tactics, the Stop Cop City campaign, like the struggle in Atlanta, must be driven by a story that adapts to the historical and geographic specificities of NYC’s Cop City and that has the potential to resonate with New Yorkers.
This story must be woven in collaboration with city workers, activists and everyday New Yorkers, but there are some historical precedents worth pulling from. Eleanor Goding, a black radical social worker, led the CIO’s city worker union in New York City and fought against the carceralization of the Department of Welfare until the city fired her in anticommunist purges (aided by undercover cops). DC 37 does have a history of campaigning for the “civilianization” of the NYPD, although the intention of advocates was to cut municipal budget costs and bring more employees into DC 37. And the city does have a history of fighting back against the NYPD embodied in the frequent street movements against police assaults and murder.
The fight to Stop Cop City is an uphill battle, but NYC-DSA’s plan to coordinate a multi-tactic campaign featuring a long-term plan to organize front-line city workers and develop a resonant story for the campaign gives activists in the city a fighting chance.
The work starts now!