Video: Five Years Since an Uprising Against the NYPD, What Has Changed?

The protests were often joyful, with music and dancing. Some doubled as pride marches.

Yet at their heart was anger at the police. Some protesters graffitied NYPD cars, or even set them on fire. Even with such controversial tactics, limited polling suggested that New York state residents approved of the protest movement by a more than two-to-one margin. For the first time in US history, police abolition became a temporary part of mainstream discourse.

The NYPD responded in kind. In the early weeks of the protests, then-Mayor Bill de Blasio imposed a citywide curfew. The police department began mass arrests, which sometimes turned violent. The city later agreed to pay out a nearly $14 million settlement to victims of NYPD violence during the 2020 protests.

Activists organizing the protests had policy demands. In June 2020, they succeeded in getting the state to repeal a law, commonly known as 50-a, that exempted police discipline records from public disclosure.

The activists also wanted to slash NYPD spending. On June 23 — a week before the city’s annual budget was due — demonstrators erected a protest encampment outside New York City Hall to demand that officials cut $1 billion from the police department’s $6 billion operating budget.

The encampment was built for the long haul. Within hours, protesters had set up water depots, hot food stands, sanitation stations, personal protective equipment stations, a “bodega” for sundries, a charging station, WiFi, and much more.

On the night of the city budget vote, encampment residents watched on an outdoor screen as city officials claimed to have met their main demand. The $1 billion in supposed cuts, however, turned out to be mostly accounting tricks; the NYPD budget remained largely unchanged.

The next morning, police showed up to raid the encampment. The protesters wouldn’t leave; using umbrellas, police barriers, and their bodies, they fought off the cops. The encampment lasted another three weeks, until the NYPD razed it in a surprise overnight raid.

As the protests tapered off and the US experienced a Covid-era spike in reported crime, nationwide support for the 2020 movement fell — to just over half — according to Pew research. The drop in support coincided with a lack of faith that the movement would bring about change: Over half of Pew respondents in fall 2020 thought the protests would lead to changes that would improve racial inequality, whereas nearly three-quarters responded earlier this year that the protests failed to bring about those changes.

In New York City, little changed when it came to policing, and the NYPD today is operating much as it was before the protests. The department’s operating budget still hovers just shy of $6 billion, while it blows further past its overtime allotment every year; last fiscal year, it spent just shy of $1.1 billion in overtime alone. Stop-and-frisks have sharply risen, meanwhile: Though nowhere near the levels seen in the 2000s and early 2010s, recorded stops have tripled under Mayor Eric Adams, who has also launched his own street policing initiatives like a recent “quality of life” division that’s tasked with ticketing for petty violations.