CAMPAIGN TO FUND THE PEOPLE, NOT POLICE
In June, Mayor Michelle Wu passed a $69 MILLION INCREASE TO THE BOSTON POLICE DEPARTMENT. She cut $9 million from the City Council’s budget for affordable housing, youth jobs, and community programs. She reversed their $3 million shift from her $50 million BPD increase and then made the increase EVEN BIGGER.
AT STAKE: $9M FOR HOUSINg, YOUTH JOBS, & COMMUNITY PROGRAMS
On Wednesday, June 5, Boston City Council passed a budget that invested an additional $11 million in community priorities and took away $3 million of the Mayor’s proposed $50 million BPD increase. While we believe the BPD should get ZERO additional dollars and that the Council could have invested much more, now we must defend these wins from Michelle Wu’s veto. She cut $9 million of the investments, put money back into BPD, and added more to BPD for a new increase of $69 million.
YJPU joined the Better Budget Alliance and many partners to present grassroots budget priorities to the City Council. Among these priorities, we won:
$2 million for youth jobs
$1.5 million for low-income rental subsidies
$750,000 for community land trusts
$300,000 for ESOL parent classes
$100,000 for a housing emergency relief fund
The City Council invested $11 million into these items, and additional wins for housing and community programs.
The Mayor sent back a budget to the City Council on June 10, rejecting most of these changes.
Then, the City Council voted on Wednesday, June 26 whether to override any of her vetos. Winning an override required 9 votes, and 7 of the City Councilors consistently voted to override the veto. But because of resistance from Councilors such as Henry Santana, Enrique J. Pepén, and Sharon Durkhan who sided with the Mayor over the community, the City Council was unable to completely restore the $11 million. City Councilors who sided with the community pressured the holdouts over 12 hours and forced them to add some money back in. In the end, we protected about $5 million of the $11 million in community investments, but the Mayor’s $69 million BPD increase was not cut back. We are continuing to build power for the long term so that young people and residents can make decisions about the power, hold politicians accountable, and reinvest the police budget into real community needs.
OUR DEMANDS:
Decrease the police budget and stop Mayor Michelle Wu’s $69 million BPD budget increase. Michelle Wu wants to increase the BPD budget from $405 million to $474million. We want to stop this increase, freeze police hiring and cut police payroll “ghost funds” they dont’ spend, cut and cop overtime, and stop Michelle Wu’s $5.1 million increase to equipment and contracts. After this year, we want to cut the police budget by 30% to $280 million.
Increase youth jobs funding by $16 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 to $18-24/hr, and hiring outreach workers to recruit youth and organizations to fill 6000 summer jobs.
Increase funds for building truly affordable housing by $10 million. The City gives less than $10 million of its own budget now for building new affordable housing, and most of it is still too expensive.
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.
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 collective grassroots budget priorities including city rent subsidies, buying housing units to keep them affordable, rental assistance, and education, housing, and health resources for newly arrived immigrants.
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, in the winter and spring of 2023-2024, she signed three contracts with police associations including $85+ million without capping overtime. She has also been hiring extra-large police classes, with a plan to hire 200 officers next year.
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.
YJPU is partner in United Way of Massachusetts Bay’s New Way Forward initative:
