Despite recent changes in Tampa Bay’s crisis response systems, local activists with the movement for racial justice say that it’s not just the way that the city responds to crises that needs to change—it’s also the level of investment that’s put into addressing the welfare of Tampa Bay’s Black and brown communities.
In Hillsborough County, Black and Hispanic residents are more likely to live in poverty and be food-insecure. Nationally, people of color are statistically less likely to have health insurance or access to specialized, culturally competent care for mental health and substance use issues.
ONE YEAR LATER
• In Tampa, it’s task forces, talks and slow moving review board changes
• In the face of white supremacists local activists have no plans to back off
• St. Pete’s civilian responder program sets reform example for the entire Bay area
"What's not missing is the money," said Bernice Lauredan, a community organizer, who spoke during a Tampa Tiger Bay Club event on social justice last month. "What's missing is the political will to actually stand up and allocate that money towards the community."
Across Tampa Bay, both cities of Tampa and St. Pete moved to increase their police budgets for the current fiscal year, as the coronavirus pandemic exposed the chronic underfunding of Florida’s public health infrastructure and fault unemployment insurance system.
The Tampa Police Department received an additional $13 million—one of the largest police budget increases seen in major U.S. cities across the country—while the St. Pete Police Department received a modest 1% increase, equivalent to a little over $1 million.
Meanwhile, Tampa Bay saw an increased demand for food assistance during the pandemic—as financial instability enveloped the region’s most marginalized communities—ongoing calls for rent relief, and a sharp rise in drug overdose deaths across the state—as the nation faces what’s predicted to be the deadliest year in U.S. drug use on record.
“We are in desperate need of leadership willing to completely reimagine the services and safety needed for all our citizens,” said Reverend Andy Oliver “Pastor Andy” of St. Pete’s Allendale Methodist church, in an email to Creative Loafing reflecting on the last year’s protest movement. “George Floyd has changed the world, and yet racist systems built on White Supremacy are excellent at resisting such change,” he says.
For middle school teacher and St. Pete City Council candidate Richie Floyd, who organized with other activists for the creation of St. Pete’s non-police responder program last year, advancing justice requires a “holistic approach” that is capable of both acknowledging and correcting inequities of the past and present.
“Black Lives Matter, a lot of people say, is the minimum. But for Black lives to matter, like, Black people's jobs have to matter. Black people's economic security and stability needs to matter. They need to have the social services that offer them support when they need it the most,” Floyd, who is Black, told CL in a phone interview.
“It’s about opportunity. It’s about a world where policing isn’t the only thing that has been invested in.”
Where we go from here: justice
Nearly one year after Tampa Bay residents first took to the streets to protest the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police, moderate police reforms in the Tampa Bay area have materialized.
Some, like the launch of St. Pete’s Community Assistance Life Liaison program, closely resemble demands of local activists. With the last year’s wave of protests has come a shift in the broader awareness of racial inequality and inequity—as well as the organizing work that’s being done in local communities to change that.
But fatal violence at the hands of law enforcement in the United States persists. According to accountability tool Mapping Police Violence, there were only 18 days in 2020 that a U.S. police officer did not kill somebody, with Black people three times more likely to be killed by police compared to their white counterparts.
From 2013-2020, at least nine Black people were killed by police officers in Tampa and St. Pete, out of a total 23 fatalities. In 2020 alone, Tampa police officers fatally shot Dominique Mulkey and Jonas Joseph—both young, Black men and 26-years-old at the time of their deaths.
In St. Pete, Dominique Harris, 20, was shot at more than 50 times by St. Petersburg police officers last year, after non-fatally wounding an officer with his own firearm.
Just minutes before George Floyd’s murderer, former police officer Derek Chauvin, was found guilty of murder and manslaughter last month, police officers in Columbus, Ohio fatally shot Ma’Khia Bryant—a 16-year-old Black child—four times in the chest.
Since Chauvin’s trial began in late March, dozens of people in the United States have been killed by police, including six people within 24 hours of Chauvin’s verdict.
For activists in Tampa Bay and across the country who are pushing for change, enacting justice for marginalized communities today—and those alive in the future—a just world is one where public safety is reimagined into community care, economic justice, and the abolition of punitive systems that perpetuate injustice across racial and even politically partisan lines.
“We don't have another 50 years to solve racism, imperialism, colonialism, capitalism,” said local labor organizer Ashley Green during a community vigil held outside of St. Pete City Hall last month. “We don't have 50 years to try and figure out how to make things better. We have right now.”
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This article appears in May 20-26, 2021.