CAMPAIGN TO FUND THE PEOPLE, NOT POLICE
For two decades, youth organizers have fought to restore City funding for youth jobs after it was cut in the 9/11 recession. Youth Justice and Power Union (YJPU) took on this fight in 2011. As groups in Boston developed an analysis around the prison industrial complex and abolition, and as youth led Black Lives Matters protests joining millions in the U.S. and around the world, in 2015 YJPU began calling to defund the Boston police.
After the failure in 2020 of the City Council and Mayor to divest from the police and reinvest in Black and Brown communities, communities organized in 2021 to change the City “charter” (a version of a local constitution that sets the rules for how government and decisions work) to move budget powers from the Mayor and increase the power of City Councilors and the community. With this new power, the City Council voted in 2022 to boost youth jobs funding to $16 million and increase funding for rental subsidies fro affordable housing to $9.8 million. It pressured Mayor Wu to cut the police budget to $395 million, although an 8-5 vote fell 1 vote short of a required 9 votes to move another $2 million from the police department to youth jobs.
Since then, in 2023, Mayor Wu dramatically increased the police budget while refusing to add significant funding for community priorities such as participatory budgeting, a pilot for community-led mental health crisis response, youth jobs, and affordable housing. Instead, she increased the police budget to $405 million and issued a 100% veto of a City Council proposal to cut the police budget and fund community priorities. Then, at the end of 2023, she signed a contract with the largest police association which increases the budget by $30+ million without capping overtime. She has also been hiring extra-large police classes, and hiring two classes each year instead of one.
In 2023,we had the following budget priorities. Stay tuned for updates aboiut our 2024!
Decrease the police budget. In recent years, YJPU has fought to cut the police budget to $280 million, including cutting overtime and freezing hiring.
Fund $40 million for participatory budgeting. YJPU and DefundBosCops groups are part of the Better Budget Alliance, which is working to put 1% of the City budget into a fund that residents will vote on!
Fund $2.6 for community-led mental health crisis response. YJPU supports The City School, Boston Liberation Health, and the Community-Led Design Group who created a model to respond to mental health crises with trained community responders and not police.
Increase youth jobs funding by $6 million for good-paying, truly year-round jobs. This includes making school-year jobs last from September-June, increasing pay rates for 14-24 year olds, hiring outreach workers to recruit youth and organizations to fill 6000 summer jobs, and conducting a community-led audit to fix the problems with SuccessLink.
Youth Justice & Power Union (YJPU) is a youth led organization for and by people of color. YJPU was founded in 2011 in an effort to build up the leadership of people most impacted by systems of oppression to be the leaders we know, want, and need them to be if oppression is going to be fought and won.
The mission of the Youth Justice & Power Union is to build collective power in an effort to address systemic issues at the root happening in communities and confront them through organizing and direct action.
