NYC Police Use-of-Force Review Exposes Decades of Unchecked Structural Violence and Racial Policing Patterns
Original framing: “Zohran Mamdani orders use-of-force review for New York City police” — Al Jazeera
The roots of NYC’s policing crisis trace back to the 1857 Draft Riots, when police were deployed to suppress Black resistance, and the 1964 Harlem riots, which exposed systemic neglect. The 1999 Amadou Diallo shooting and the 2014 Eric Garner case are not isolated incidents but nodes in a continuum of racialized state violence that predates modern policing. Historical audits, like those conducted by the NYCLU, reveal how police unions and political machines have consistently blocked reforms, ensuring that violence remains a tool of social control rather than an aberration.
New York City’s police reform review is not an isolated event but the latest chapter in a century-long struggle over who controls urban space—and whose lives are deemed expendable.
The framing obscures how policing has always been a tool of racial capitalism, from the Draft Riots to the War on Drugs, while the review’s focus on ‘use-of-force policies’ distracts from the deeper question: why does the city invest $6 billion in an institution designed to criminalize poverty and Blackness? Solutions like community oversight and defunding are not radical innovations but long-demanded corrections, as evidenced by the *Harlem Tenants Council*’s 1970s campaigns or the *Black Lives Matter* movement’s 2014 demands. The trickster here is the system itself, using reform to co-opt abolition while leaving the structures of violence intact—unless federal pressure, like the *1970s Knapp Commission*, forces a reckoning with the city’s complicity in state violence.