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PUBLIC TESTIMONY
Testimony by Ashanti Baptiste, Community Organizer from Legal Aid Society Community Justice Unit
3:59:42
ยท
152 sec
Ashanti Baptiste, a community organizer with the Legal Aid Society Community Justice Unit, testifies about the negative impacts of the NYPD's gang database on Black youth and communities. She argues for the abolition of the database and passage of Introduction 798.
- Baptiste describes conducting workshops about the gang database, noting that youth and parents react with fear, shock, and anger.
- She highlights how the database negatively impacts financial aid, bail, deportation risks, and even denial of financial assistance for families of deceased individuals.
- Baptiste calls for investing in communities and youth, improving education, and providing entrepreneurial training instead of criminalizing young people.
Ashanti Baptiste
3:59:42
Hello.
3:59:43
My name is Ashanti Baptiste.
3:59:44
I'm a community organizer with the Legal Aid Society Community Justice Unit.
3:59:48
My duties are to provide legal services to the crisis management sites and the broader community as well.
3:59:53
Along with these services we facilitate workshops, the gang database being one that's targeting our children.
3:59:58
I have spoken directly with adolescents, young adults and parents while conducting workshops spreading information about the gangs database and every single individual reacts differently but all feeling afraid, shocked and angry at the same time.
4:00:10
CJU facilitates gang database presentations across the five boroughs and the greatest thing I enjoy about engaging with the youth is experiencing that most of them aspire to do great things, are very intelligent and warm hearted but due to the circumstances of being underserved, society molded them to be complacent, irrational, and very angry.
4:00:29
Black youth just wanna be heard and the only way they have been taught by the world we live in is by violence.
4:00:34
This country's history is based on violence.
4:00:36
Television, news, reality shows, video games, all based on unleashing your frustrations through violence.
4:00:41
So when me and Donald record labels sign kids rapping about drilling, what message is being presented and who's being held accountable?
4:00:48
Our youth is being held accountable and not the labels.
4:00:51
Our teens suffer from PTSD during COVID, which started to trend to wear a ski mask, a product of the pandemic, and now they are demonized for it.
4:00:58
We hear stories all the time of teens afraid at night walking home by themselves because police prey on them, That's exactly what the gang database is executing.
4:01:06
It's not a coincidence being on a database takes away your financial aid, raises your bed without priors, or finds yourself being deported.
4:01:14
We even discovered officer bureaus can deny families financial assistance for deceased loved ones for being on the gang database.
4:01:21
Why go to that extreme?
4:01:22
I have been advocating in Brooklyn for two decades and it seems every generation gets more detached from reality.
4:01:28
What what they hunger for are higher quality education curriculums in schools that they can relate to and efficient jobs providing entrepreneurial training.
4:01:36
With that said, gangs are not illegal but media has made gatherings unlawful when young black youth assemble for fun or boredom and we need to eradicate that way of thinking.
4:01:45
For those that hear my words as rhetoric just know gangs been around since the eighteen hundreds in New York City.
4:01:50
Black people didn't create gangs when we inherited their life.
4:01:53
Societies offer comfort to white kids that commit mass shootings but black kids fighting to survive are labeled savages.
4:01:59
I'm disappointed the police was not required to stay, but I'm not surprised to hear the community speak.
4:02:03
One day they will be held accountable.
4:02:05
But until then, end mass incarceration, end the gang policing, invest in our communities and our youth, and pass introduction 798.
4:02:13
Thank you.