No more cops.
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GSOC STATEMENT CALLING FOR TERMINATION OF NYU-NYPD TIES
This statement, which highlights the specific nature of the relationship between NYU and the NYPD, is made in support of a cross-campus call for cutting ties with police departments. You can find that statement here.
GSOC-UAW Local 2110, the union of graduate student workers at NYU, joins graduate student workers across the country who are calling for an end to police terror and white supremacy. We stand in solidarity with protests in response to the murder of George Floyd by the Minneapolis police, and call for the officers responsible to be held accountable. Along with the above linked statement of support for their protest, we demand that NYU immediately terminate all relations with the NYPD, an institution that enacts the same violence and upholds the same white supremacy in our own city.
NYU maintains many connections with the NYPD, including through its own public safety office, its relationship to real estate development around the city, its use of NYPD to harass and displace houseless people around campus, and its fellowships, such as the NYPD Fellowship at NYU Law. The vice-president of NYU Public Safety has said: “Our NYU Public Safety team and our relationship with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) are strong, and our campus is safe.” But we remember the murder of Eric Garner—who, like George Floyd, could not breathe—and it is clear that the same institution that murdered these people, along with Sean Bell, Amadou Diallo, Akai Gurley, Deborah Danner, and other members of the city’s Black communities, makes NYU more dangerous, not safer. Even in its enforcement of social distancing during the pandemic, the NYPD has displayed egregious racial bias and discrimination.
We further condemn cultures of racism and anti-Blackness at NYU, which recent incidents have continued to demonstrate. Last fall, a Black student in the NYU Silver School of Social Work experienced an appalling act of anti-Black racism at the hands of another student, while their professor failed to intervene. This week, screenshots of anti-Black messages in an NYU fraternity group chat surfaced as a reminder of the pervasiveness of this culture. This anti-Blackness props up the same systems that put Black community members at risk every day in New York City. NYU must take action to address the systemic issues in our own community to ensure the safety of Black students.
We are demanding that police and ICE be banned from NYU’s campus in our upcoming contract negotiations, and will work with other campus and community groups to that end. We follow the lead of all those organizations and efforts already pushing for an NYU and NYC free of the structural violence of police and the criminal legal system, including NYU Black Student Union (whose recent statement can be found here) and NYU Incarceration to Education Coalition, in addition to No New Jails, #SwipeItForward, Survived and Punished, Revolutionary Abolitionist Movement, and FreeThemAll. NYU community members, please find the full x-campus statement here.