For New Yorkers Who Need Food And Shelter, “Abolition Park’s” Police-Free Zone Feels Like Home

Benigno Perez, 37, was on his way to a city homeless shelter early last week where he was staying when he stumbled across a plaza next to City Hall where several hundred activists had taken up residence. He asked around to see what was going on, and decided to stay.

“It’s summertime, it’s not cold. There’s a lot of people, there’s food, clothes,” said Perez. “Most of the people’s going through the same thing. I love it. If you look around you see the unity...the unity of the people.”

Perez is among dozens of people experiencing homelessness who are camping out alongside the activists calling for the defunding of the NYPD and other criminal justice and economic reforms. Abolition Park, as it’s been renamed by protesters (a nod both to abolishing slavery as well as abolishing the police department), has become a scrappy little village with a library, a bodega, a medic’s tent, and food and clothings stations, all decorated with brightly-colored graffiti and artwork.

An earlier group of organizers pressing for at least a billion dollars in cuts to the NYPD budget left on July 1. A second crop of activists decided to stay at the plaza once the budget deadline passed, with the overall goal of abolishing the police, something Perez disagrees with. “There’s people that need the police,” he said.

Some of the homeless people lived on the plaza before occupiers got there, others heard about the encampment by word of mouth. The cohabitation has fostered some positive relationships, and has led to difficult moments. But in general, the occupiers are getting a sense of what it means to live by their convictions and find ways of handling tense and even violent situations without dialing 911.

“This is their space and we’re just here, occupying [it] with them. So we make sure they are fed, they are clothed, that they have bathrooms to go to,” said Tameer Peak, 24-year-old organizer who is a postal service employee. “They are our most important priority...so their needs come first.”

Nikki, an 18-year-old transgender woman, had been couchsurfing and sleeping on roofs, in shelters, and on the subway for the last two years, before she started staying at the park. She declined to give her last name for fear of retaliation.

“I have never been so fucking full and felt so healthy and felt so supported. Anywhere I go outside of here I’m a fucking freak, being trans and skateboarding and wearing different clothes,” she said. “I’ve had transphobic slurs thrown at me for being in public. But here the first thing I get asked is, ‘What are your pronouns?’”

Like many of the people staying in the plaza, she agrees with the demands to defund police, and has had her share of run-ins with the NYPD, whether it was getting arrested for trying to sleep in a secluded area, or getting kicked off the subway.

“They’d stop the entire train, just bang their flashlights on the poles, and wake people up and stop the entire train for like 10 minutes,” she recalled. The plaza has provided a bit of a respite from that. Even better, she met someone there with an extra room in Bedford-Stuyvesant where she can stay when she ends up decamping.

“At the end of the day, community takes care of the people,” she said. “We don’t need a heavy police presence.”

Another young person experiencing homelessness, 20-year-old Romeo Thibou, was sitting cross-legged on a recent afternoon, painting his sneakers different colors at the art station. He had been living with two friends on a street nearby, when one of them heard about Abolition Park.

“It was always just us,” said Thibou, who was released from jail for a parole violation in late January. “We didn't have like such a big group like this. Here we have a big group we can talk to if we need to...A lot of these people, I probably would have never met, if it wasn’t for this.”

Danielle Strle, 39, a former Tumblr employee who’s designing a new video platform, said she’s spent days and nights at the plaza over the last two weeks, though she lives in an apartment nearby. Over that time she’s befriended several homeless people whom she’s brought back to her apartment to let rest and shower, she said.

“I’ve never had so many houseless friends as I do here now,” she said. “We’ve brought them more services than the city has ever brought them. They have as much food as they want. We have a medical tent here for them. An ad hoc thrift store. That’s the kind of place that we want to build.”

The cohabitation hasn’t been completely harmonious. When a first crop of organizers left the space following the city council’s budget’s passage last week, the remaining activists struggled to find new sources of food and supplies. Some people living at the plaza suffer from severe mental illness or substance abuse issues or both, and occasionally tense encounters turn violent.

On Tuesday, a group of street medics who had been providing medical attention in the plaza said they were leaving and opening a pop-up mobile facility nearby.

“While street medics routinely operate in dangerous conditions, medics at City Hall have been repeatedly assaulted, physically, emotionally, and sexually,” a statement sent in a text message update from Abolition Park’s organizers.

In a particularly violent encounter in the early morning of June 29th, one man, who witnesses said seemed to be having a psychotic episode, was running around the encampment punching people at random.

Jacques Dovonou, 32, tried to intervene and was punched in the face. Dovonou then gave the man a bear hug to keep him from hurting others. That’s when Dovonou said the man bit him.

“He actually bit me on my chin. I was trying to get him off my chin. I pulled him on the ground,” he said.

After others pried the man off, Dovonou spent the night in the emergency room. Still, he said, he’s glad police were not involved.

“I think people will learn with time how to handle these types of situations and what would be the best way for us and the best way for the attacker, too,” he said. “It’s going to be a learning process and people have to come up with the technique.”

That attack and other altercations in the plaza highlighted the need for better mental health services on site. Organizers put out a call on social media for trained mental health professionals and over the weekend and on Saturday, Yessenia Benitez, a 29-year-old social worker, set up a “Mental Rest” station. Now there’s a rotating cast of psychologists, social workers and therapists most of the time.

“I have people who want to provide polarity therapy. I have people that want to provide acupuncture...medication circles...healing musical sessions...art therapy,” she said.

Those volunteers also have confronted some difficult situations, but calling the police, she said, is not an option.

“We have made a commitment to come together and just process what is happening how we can best address it, without involving the systems these people have already been oppressed by,” she said.

She and others at Abolition Park hope it serves as a tiny laboratory to create a model for a police-free society.

“If we can be successful, with this, the mental rest area, where we can provide a safe space emotionally, physically that we can replicate this elsewhere and how we can do that,” she said. “I see it. I definitely do see that it is possible.”