Thomas Breen photo
Cruz-Bustamante at a November 2020 rally on the Green.
(Opinion) As bodies continue to drop on the streets of New Haven, Connecticut as a result of gun violence, residents, community advocates, the police department, and local politicians scramble desperately to find a short-term band aid to apply to a heavily bleeding wound in the community.
A quick solution to give to neighborhoods heavy with grief, sorrow, and fear: more police and stricter prison punishments.
While police charts on homicide rates and gun violence continue to draw the fretful attention of the media and residents, our system of local politics overlooks the deep-seated roots of crime: poverty.
Increasing the amount of police officers will not decrease crime. It merely increases the amount of noise from the sirens after the fact.
True safety is silent; safety is not derived from armed reactionaries, it is derived from functioning infrastructure, accessible healthcare, stable and healthy climate, funded schools, rehabilitative social services, and interconnected communities.
We can observe this in American suburbs. Rarely do you hear the deafening sirens of police vehicles in the quiet, calm streets of the outskirts of the city.
This “true” and silent safety observed in the suburbs is not a coincidence. The United States has a long, dark history of denying funding to core governmental services and institutions on the basis of race and class, that continues to this day. The U.S. also has a long history of fighting against “radical” abolition: abolition of slavery, redlining, segregation, and instead implementing inadequate reforms, mass-producing and distributing nationalistic, “feel-good” propaganda that waters down its horrors, or outright not addressing misdeeds.
Money is power. Cutting a community off from funding, critical services, and necessities is like cutting the jugular vein of a body: they die. The rumbling stomach of the child, the frail body of the unsheltered, and the unheard cries of the addict breed violence. State violence as a response to need will not silence their rumblings, cries, and pleas. It merely moves them out of the way, out of sight, out of mind, to be heard, instead by the prison inmate or by the graveyard.
The police are used for perpetuating the systems of colonialism, capitalism, patriarchy, racism, and white supremacy in our society. They were used for “capturing” enslaved people, union-busting during the Industrial Revolution, enforcing segregation during Jim Crow, brutalizing and intimidating queer and trans people, hosing down Civil Rights activists (some of whom are still alive), playing star actors in the theater that is the “War on Drugs,” and profiling and imprisoning people of color and the underclass who are surviving on the bare minimum.
How do we expect a group of supposed “public servants” to “protect” us, when they have a criminal history that is as long as American history? What is life if one is constantly surveilled? What does it say about our society if one is constantly spat on and looked down upon, with no hope of escape, help, or “redemption” promised by the nation that we are told are supposed to serve us, when we recite the Pledge of Allegiance?
In the short term, what the oppressed neighborhoods of New Haven need is money with deliberate spending into new preventative services, affordable and quality housing, effective and open education and schools, and youth programs.
Let us end the obsession with wanting to know an individual’s reasons for committing crime and the respectability politics when it comes to human lives.
The bottom line is that a) poverty causes violence of all kinds, and b) we can end it.
This message is directed towards the establishment: Mayor Elicker, Governor Lamont, President Biden, Democrats and Republicans, Alderpeople and the Congress.
In the long term, we need the demands for the abolition of police, prisons, and the abolition of the system that forces one to choose between wage slavery and death; inequality and oppression for one for the profits and luxury of others, to triumph.
True equality is not found in becoming the oppressor, but in liberating and humanizing all, and abolishing the hierarchy that creates the “oppressor” and the “oppressed,” true meaning is not found in the weekly paycheck, but in community, and true safety is not only found in the silence of the gun, but in the absence of the sirens.
This message can only be rung true and carried out in the eyes, ears, and hands of the worker, the organizer, the oppressed, and The People.
Dave John Cruz-Bustamante is a freshman at Wilbur Cross High School, a coordinator and community organizer at Sunrise Movement New Haven, and the operations apprentice at Citywide Youth Coalition.
It's time for New Haven to step up and like Oakland, CA give everyone at the poverty level $2,500 a month until they reach the $50,000 a year threshold. Tax the wealthy of New Haven to make this happen. Raise the mill rate by 35 points. Make the police drive to crime scenes with their sirens off. Extend the school day by three hours and hire the necessary support staff. Build community centers is all the neighborhoods of New Haven. Legalize drugs and subsidize them. Take all cars off the roads of New Haven, and give a bicycle to all residents. Free healthcare for everyone. Then if you're not happy, you'll be banished to the suburbs where no one will give you anything, that's the way it's been forever.