Join us this Friday at 3pm . Our Youth Leaders have demands and they will be heard!
A post shared by Citywide Youth Coalition (@citywide.youth) on Jun 3, 2020 at 3:31pm PDT
(Updated) — The Citywide Youth Coalition has two new demands for how to decrease police presence in schools and increase funding for the Board of Ed: replace all school resource officers with counselors, and move over $30 million from the city police budget to the budget for the public school system.
The local youth advocacy and anti-violence organization released those demands in a video published on Instagram Wednesday evening.
The video dropped two days before the coalition plans to co-lead an anti-police brutality rally and march beginning on the New Haven Green Friday at 3 p.m. alongside Black Lives Matter New Haven and other local police accountability groups. Those groups also helped lead Sunday’s 1,000 person anti-police brutality march.
(Update: Citywide Youth Coalition has a total of eight demands that its youth organizers will be promoting during Friday’s rally. See more below.)
The video shows a young woman wearing a shirt that reads “#WEVOTENEXT.”
“We demand the immediate divestment of school resource officers within New Haven Public Schools,” she says to the camera. She says that divestment and termination of contracts should be followed by a commensurate investment in school counselors.
The young woman also calls for the reduction of the police department $43 million budget for the next fiscal year to $10 million. She says that extra $33 million should be redirected to the public school system instead.
“Join us this Friday at 3pm,” the Instagram video’s caption reads. “Our Youth Leaders have demands and they will be heard!”
In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by a white police officer in Minneapolis last week, the city’s public school district has terminated its contract with the city police department.
Police critics have been increasingly calling for defunding — rather than reforming — police departments around the country in the wake of Floyd’s murder, with the balance of that police funding going towards other underfunded social services instead.
8 Demands
In addition to replacing school resource officers with counselors and cutting the police budget by $33 million and redirecting the balance to the public schools, Citywide Youth Coalition’s youth organizers, who are named Lizamishell, Lihame, Krista, and Melody, will be promoting the following demands on Friday:
That $20 million be taken out of the budget for police pensions and be allocated to create affordable public housing instead.
That the city end the “triple occupation” of New Haven currently performed by city police, Hamden police, and Yale police.
That the Board of Alders “stop being complacent in entering more Yale Police Department Police officers into the New Haven community.”
That every officer in the state of Connecticut that has been involved in the killing or beating of a civilian be prosecuted “with the full weight of the law.”
That the people who are appointed to the Civilian Review Board “are viable people elected by the community.”
And the “immediate end to police brutality within our city, state, and country.”