How is it that our city couldn’t afford to protect healthcare workers fighting Covid-19 but can afford money for helicopters to hover over peaceful protesters for almost 24 hours? Imagine how many ventilators and PPE we could buy with money spent on the helicopters, body armor, batons, guns, tear gas, pepper spray, and other surveillance tools and military machines they used on the folks they arrested in the Bronx on the night of June 4th. They arrested essential workers getting home and a young kid from the neighborhood they just happened to sweep up. The jails were full that night, with crowded holding cells violating all the social distancing rules we’ve been told to observe. Protestors had their masks ripped off to be pepper-sprayed in the face. Meanwhile we witnessed on film yet another police murder of a young black man; in this case Jamel Floyd, a 35-year-old Black man, pepper-sprayed to death by police in the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center that same historic night, June 4th 2020.

The protesters, essential workers, and community members who have been brutalized by the police will carry scars for the rest of their lives. But all the cops sent by De Blasio and Cuomo to protect property got some great overtime. Imagine the money they made that night alone in processing fees, court fees, and police officer’s overtime so that wealthy New Yorkers could feel safe in their homes while watching them online beat up our peaceful protesters. We paid our taxes for this! COVID-19 took the mask off this truth: The only essential workers this country cares about are cops.

When Covid-19 first began to become a serious threat to life as we know it, the security guards at Freedom tower, many of whom are minimum-wage workers of color, were told they are first responders. At least one worker died before they were even allowed to wear PPE on the site, while the cops were told to limit their exposure to outsiders and management told the security guards to be the first to respond to threats. Even now, many of these workers are forced to cover their own PPE. Meanwhile the teachers were told they couldn’t close the schools. The DOE lost 72 employees to coronavirus related deaths. Several schools in the Bronx had staff who were known to have COVID-19 but administrators did nothing. New York City quickly became the city with the world’s highest infection rate and the governor and mayor framed themselves as victims to Trump’s callousness. But funding and enforcement decisions reveal priorities, and we must recognize the truth if it is to set us free.

Millions of us have lost our jobs and were offered a renewed unemployment benefit and little hope of anything but 1200 dollars the government called economic stimulus. The federal government is already collecting interest on stimulus payments that have yet to be paid out. Meanwhile many billionaires collected significantly more wealth on all the rounds of stimulus payments and kept their businesses open by feeding off the labor of those they deemed “essential.”

While the rest of us were locked in our homes without work, rent support, healthcare, or adequate food; watching our black and brown brothers and sisters die from COVID-19 faster than anyone else; we were even denied access to recreation and fresh air. The NYPD closed playgrounds throughout the city, which disproportionately impacted the Bronx since we have less green space per capita and most families rely upon playgrounds for outdoor time. While NYPD handed out masks to wealthy Manhattan residents picnicking in parks, NYPD arrested and harassed young people of color who gathered in the Bronx. Discriminatory social distancing enforcement was just one more piece of evidence of what many of us have always experienced: the police have never been a friend of Black, Latino, Immigrant, or LGBTQ New Yorkers.

Finally this plague of black death boiled over as we watched the cops lynch George Floyd in front of a crowd, kneeling on his neck as he called out for his mama. There was no way to misinterpret this gesture. This capitalist system doesn’t just deem us non-essential, it thrives off our deaths. In the names of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmad Arbery, Sandra Bland, Eric Garner and many many more; black youth, brown youth, youth of color, and white youth across the nation stood up together to buck the boot off our necks. Burning streets took center stage as COVID-19 became the backdrop for the rebellion. Like all heroes, we’d rather be killed on our feet than on our back.

In New York City, the mayor’s first response was to excuse police in Brooklyn who ran over protesters with their SUVs, then to impose a racist curfew to quiet this combination of peaceful protests, angry rioters, and looters. Imagine how much revenue the city made by giving out all these tickets and making all these arrests in a city that never sleeps. The mainstream media bombarded our BlackLivesMatter against police violence messaging with a narrative of the good vs. bad protester, and empty, out-of-context quotes from Martin Luther King Jr. We were saturated with images of cops at BBQ’s, doing the cupid shuffle, and hugging black children. Too many folks forgot that the history of the civil rights movement included people playing many roles, even in Dr. King’s so called non-violent movement for racial and economic justice.

The second scene was set in the Northwest Bronx, where cops disappeared just as masked looters appeared to smash windows and set fires on camera. As someone who lives in the Fordham area, we know that police chose our blocks to stage their argument against looting to justify the riot police. If you know the history of the Bronx, you should be familiar with this strategy.

I witnessed how police trapped, pepper-sprayed, and beat with fists and batons over 300 peaceful protesters. They used an advanced military tactic called kettling to paint the story that the protest was violent. They drove some protesters around for hours just to scare them out of speaking against the police. They even arrested legal advisors with the same violence, but we are supposed to believe this was because of rioters and looters. I was on my way to the same event, but had to send one of my youth home so I instead joined the jail support team. Though I don’t know everyone who attended the action in the South Bronx, many were community residents in the neighborhood. The narrative about outside agitators is part of the lie to make us think our community didn’t rebel.

Two days after Fordham was “burned to the ground,” they again beat up protesters in the Bronx, trying to reinforce their argument about violent looting. It was exposed as a lie so quickly that the Mayor pretended that he didn’t see any videos of the violence his curfew unleashed on our community. But he dropped the curfew the next day.

They weaponized our collective fear about a virus to keep us at home and weaponized fear of our own community to justify martial law. In order for New York to move ahead, it’s not just about defunding the police–though one billion or two billion cuts to police budgets would be a good start to heal some of what is needed in our community. We need a budget and administration that isn’t weaponized against us. We are essential lifeblood of this city. Our taxes could create jobs for more New Yorkers or help create small businesses. We could use our budget to make sure that Fordham and all our apartments are owned by us. We could re-fund the Summer Youth Employment Program and while we’re at it, create a permanent youth jobs infrastructure. We could use our budget to get some mental and holistic healing for black New Yorkers re-traumatized by the recent explosion of black death and police violence as thousands of peaceful protesters were beaten, trapped, pepper sprayed, and arrested for protesting a curfew of 8pm in a city that never sleeps.

We have the momentum and must fight until we achieve a system that sees all of us as essential and distributes funds and builds programs accordingly. We cannot win the day if we are afraid of the night.

Mustafa Sullivan was born and raised in Brooklyn as a Black Muslim. He is currently the Executive Director of Fabulous Independent Educated Radicals for Community Empowerment (FIERCE.) He can be contacted at Mustafa@fiercenyc.org.