After a twelve year old boy was shot and killed on the Northside, Mayor Ben Walsh and Governor Andrew Cuomo announced that state troopers would start patrolling Syracuse’s streets alongside city police officers. That surge in law enforcement is supposed to make the City safer, but it’s going to restrict people’s access to housing, perpetuating the long-term problems that cause this violence in the first place.

The state troopers are going to focus their attention on parolees living in Syracuse:

“As part of the Syracuse crackdown, the state Department of Correction and Community supervision will monitor parolees in Syracuse for recent gang involvement, restrict the access of parolees to high-crime areas, and conduct unannounced home visits and curfew checks.”

The idea is that repeat offenders are to blame for all this violence, and if you keep those people away from each other, then there will be less crime.

Those restrictions on parolees work against the State’s other efforts to reduce crime in the City. In 2017, New York State picked Syracuse to pilot a program placing parolees in public housing. Access to housing reduces recidivism and makes communities safer, so it was a good idea for the Syracuse Housing Authority to open its doors to the formerly incarcerated.

But in Syracuse, a lot of public housing is in neighborhoods that could be described as “high-crime areas”

Affordable Housing Sites

Crime

If the State is going keep parolees out of “high-crime areas,” then it’s also going to have to keep those same people out of public housing, eliminating its own reentry program.

Syracuse is too violent. That’s an obvious problem, and it’s tempting to think that there’s an equally obvious solution. The Mayor and the Governor have given into that temptation, sending in troops to stop the violence by force. But cities are more complicated than that. By restricting the freedom of people who have served time, the Mayor and the Governor are torpedoing another government program that could have made Syracuse safer in the long term.

Five young people have been killed violently in Syracuse this year. After the most recent killing on October 11, the community and its leaders are calling for action to stop the violence and to address its root causes. New York State Governor Andrew Cuomo responded to that call by sending State Troopers to patrol “high-crime areas” in the City, as if heavy policing is some kind of new solution to a “recent” problem.

The long term plan for dealing with violence and poverty in Syracuse has, for decades, been segregation and incarceration enacted through the exercise of police force in certain neighborhoods and on certain kinds of people. It’s led to miscarried justice, like when a man trying to make a new life was sent to jail after speaking out about the difficulty of reentry. It’s enabled major private employers to deny jobs to qualified applicants. It’s how Syracuse, the 9th poorest city in the nation, managed to pen all of its poorest people in a few select neighborhoods. Sending more police into these neighborhoods will just extend the status quo.

What’s changed now is that the neighborhoods that we were comfortable to write off are bursting at the seams. In 2000, there were 12 census tracts in Syracuse where at least 40% of people were poor. Fifteen years later, 30 census tracts were “high-poverty.”

It’s no coincidence that the community’s call to action came after James Springer III was murdered on the Northside–a neighborhood that has only become “high-poverty” in the last several years.

This moment is an opportunity and a reason for hope. The people who know have long tried to convince the wider community that poverty in one neighborhood is a problem for all neighborhoods. Their words used to fall on deaf ears, but as their predictions come true, powerful people like Mayor Ben Walsh are adopting their language:

“just because you don’t live in the neighborhood where there is chaos, that doesn’t mean that you don’t own it, and that I don’t own it, and that the entire region doesn’t own it”

If anything good can come of this year’s violence, it will be that people recognize our common cause in making all of Syracuse a better place to live.

The governor has promised to speak with “community leaders, clergy and law enforcement” about making a “longterm plan to reduce violence” in the City. Those conversations have to result in a plan that radically changes the way the police and the courts operate here, prioritizing rehabilitation and community stability over punishment and control.

But that can only happen with the common understanding that zealous policing is the source of so many problems in Syracuse’s neighborhoods. The reflexive expansion of police activity in response to the spread of those problems reveals that no such common understanding exists. Those who cannot remember the past are doomed to repeat it.

On September 30, Shakeen Robbins, an employee at the Dunkin Donuts on N Salina Street, poured cold water on Jeremy Dufresne, a homeless man who was in the donut shop to charge his phone. A video of that cruel act got international attention, the Post-Standard published a new story about it every day for seven days in a row, a GoFundMe page raised over $20,000 for Dufresne, and Syracuse Deputy Mayor Sharon Owens, Common Council President Helen Hudson, and Police Chief Frank Fowler have all gotten in touch with the company that operates that particular Dunkin Donuts to talk about how to treat poor people better.

Poor people deal with isolated acts of cruelty everyday. Those acts are pointless and dehumanizing, and they’re all worth our attention. When that video went viral, all kinds of people saw the cruelty of dumping water on another human being just because that person couldn’t do anything about it, and they recognized that cruelty for what it was. Now, hopefully, people like Jeremy Dufresne won’t have to put up with so much casual abuse every single day.

But poor people also face cruelty that isn’t so isolated. They face cruelty that’s part of a coordinated effort to push them out of sight, to pretend that ‘progress’ isn’t leaving anybody behind, to pretend that people who are doing well have no responsibility to the people who aren’t. That kind of systematic cruelty is worth just as much attention and it deserves just as much condemnation as the kinds of isolated acts that Jeremy Dufresne has brought to top of mind.

Ryan McMahon’s plan to incarcerate poor people is an act of systematic cruelty. It tries to use the power of the state to exclude poor people from public space because their presence might be “perceived as threatening.” It targets poor people specifically for being poor and specifically when they make their poverty known. It’s an abuse of power, a failure of government, and a cruel act.

So let’s pay attention as the new County Executive tries to turn his plan into a law. Let’s pay attention to whether Mayor Ben Walsh stands up for Syracuse–the 9th poorest city in the nation–or whether he chooses to go along with the County’s plan to hide its poverty behind bars. Let’s pay attention when SPD arrests any person in the service of that plan, and let’s condemn every single act that fails to respect people’s basic human dignity.

Last week at the ceremony opening the new Expo Center at the State Fairgrounds, Governor Andrew Cuomo spoke about bringing Upstate New York into the “new economy.” As he sees it, that new economy is based on making Upstate into a place that people want to be.

The Governor pointed to County Executive Joanie Mahoney and Mayor Ben Walsh as two local politicians who understand this “new economy.” The County Executive turned Onondaga Lake “into an asset and an attraction which is what water is everywhere, and that amphitheater on the lake is magnificent, and it’s working, and it’s attracting people.” In Syracuse, the Mayor focused on “downtown development” because that attracts “the new workforce: the millenials… They want to be downtown.” Investing  in tourist destinations and downtown apartments attracts people to the region, it gets people to spend their money here, and it gets people to live here.

But now we’re seeing the dark side of this “new economy.” On the same day that the Governor gave that speech, Ryan McMahon, Chairman of the Onondaga County Legislature, went public with his proposal to incarcerate people who ask for money “aggressively.” The new law “would prohibit persistent solicitation after a person has rejected a request for money, which could be perceived as threatening.” A couple days later, Mayor Walsh came out in support of the law, saying that he’d heard complaints from “business owners and citizens who have felt threatened or harassed by panhandlers.”

If your idea of the “new economy” is based on bringing in new people, this panhandling law makes perfect sense. Those new people are the ones spending money Downtown, renting the $2500 apartments, shopping at the high-end clothing stores, drinking the $6 beer, and they’re not going to do all those things if they “feel threatened” or if they “perceive” Downtown to be dangerous. They are the people that matter, and if they might get scared off by interacting with some of the people in Syracuse who don’t matter, the obvious solution is to criminalize that interaction.

That’s why the Governor’s “new economy” is a moral failure–the people who have been living in Syracuse do matter, and they don’t deserve this. They don’t deserve to be talked about like they’re the problem, like they’re the reason the City has fallen on hard times. They deserve better lives, and any economy that can’t make that happen isn’t one worth bringing about.

It’s exciting that people want to be in Syracuse, are choosing to live in Syracuse. But those people need to see the whole City. It’s a City racked by poverty, segregation, and homelessness. The health of this community depends on facing those challenges squarely, respecting the humanity of each person who has suffered from them, and working together to overcome them. When Syracuse finally does that, it will have created a New Economy worth talking about.