Policy and Advocacy
Our Policy & Advocacy Mission
The mission of The Gathering’s Policy & Advocacy work is to reimagine public safety by advocating for policies that promote youth justice and empowerment, police accountability, and true criminal justice reform.
Our advocacy focuses on reimagining public safety in three areas:
We achieve this by:
advocating for equitable budgets, including divesting money from the carceral system and police, and reinvesting it into the community resources for mental health, education, housing, and employment.
advancing legislation that works to undo the harm caused by the criminal legal system and promote opportunities and rehabilitation.
ensuring the proper implementation of budgets and legislation to guarantee that they truly reach, and benefit, the community.
2024 Policy Agenda
New York State
-
The #Right2RemainSilent campaign is a coalition made up of 100+ community organizations and leaders in support of S.1009 (Bailey) / A.8923 (Hevesi) –legislation that requires young people under the age of 18 to have the opportunity to consult with a lawyer prior to police interrogation. Millions of children under the age of 18 have face-to-face contact with police in any given year, and too many of those young people waive their Miranda rights leading to a countless number of false confessions. If passed, this bill would work towards remedying this increasingly harmful issue by ensuring that children’s Miranda rights are protected and minimize the risk of harm arising from false confessions.
-
The End QI campaign aims to end the use of the judicial doctrine of “qualified immunity,” which operates as a near total legal shield from civil liability for public officials–most notably police and corrections officers. The campaign champions S. 182 (Jackson) / A. 710 (Hunter), which would create a state cause of action for violation of state and federal constitutional rights and eliminate the defense of qualified immunity. By passing this bill, New York would take a monumental step towards holding public officials accountable and preventing systemic violence that disproportionately affects Black, Brown, low-income, and other marginalized New Yorkers.
-
The Youth Justice & Opportunities Act (YJ&O)–S.3426 (Myrie) / A.4238 (O’Donnell)--builds off of New York’s “Raise the Age” statute by creating a new “Young Adult” (YA) status for young people ages 19-25, and allowing judges more discretion over granting and utilizing Youthful Offender (YO) and YA status for youth. By passing YJ&O, New York has the chance to lead the nation by protecting the futures of young people up to age 25, enhancing community well-being, and providing emerging adults the opportunity to move forward in their lives without the barrier of a criminal conviction.
New York City
-
The Campaign to Close Rikers works towards fulfilling the 2019 mandate to close Rikers Island–one of the most notoriously dangerous jail complexes in the nation–by the end of 2026. The Close Rikers coalition accomplishes this by prioritizing calling for the closures of the 10 jails on Rikers Island, advocating for decarceration to reduce the jail population, defending the rights of those incarcerated, holding personnel in power accountable for misconduct, and pushing for the divestment of DOC’s budget and the reinvestment of those resources to the community.
-
Strategic Response Groups (or “SRG”) are protest-suppression police units that were established in the wake of the Ferguson uprisings. After a clear pattern of brutalizing protesters was established, there was an outcry against the criminalization of protest and the hyper-militarization of the police. The “Disband the SRG” initiative aims to disband these SRG units by divesting its funding from the NYPD’s to community programs and care.
-
The How Many Stops Act consists of two common sense, good government bills, Intro. 586, sponsored by Public Advocate Jumaane Williams and Councilmember Alexa Aviles, and Intro. 538, sponsored by Councilmember Crystal Hudson, aimed at bringing critical and urgent transparency to the NYPD’s daily activities in New York City communities by requiring a comprehensive accounting of all NYPD stops and consent searches. If passed, the data collected via these two bills will complete the picture of what policing really looks like in our City, and create pathways by which the NYPD can be held accountable for their actions.
Harry Belafonte at the inaugural Gathering convening in Atlanta, GA in 2005, responding to the unjust arrest of 5-year-old, J'aiesha Scott, by calling for the end of child incarceration and racial inequalities in the criminal legal system.