Organizing against Gentrification U.

WEST HARLEM residents and anti-police brutality activists were joined by around 50 Columbia University students at a protest outside the New York City Criminal Court building on October 16.

The focus of the demonstration was a four-year, multimillion-dollar covert surveillance program that resulted in this summer's militarized mass arrest of 103 teenagers and young adults from the Grant and Manhattanville Houses, just north of the Ivy League campus.

The date marked the first of three hearings on indictments that include murder, conspiracy, assault, loitering and larceny. The defendants are accused of participating in an inter-project rivalry between the Grant and Manhattanville Houses that has claimed two lives since 2011.

But parents of the deceased and defendants alike believe that the city is largely responsible for the tragedy, by funneling public investments away from jobs and welfare programs into expensive observation, patrolling and prison technologies.

Residents of the Grant and Manhattanville Houses, like many communities under the domain of the New York City Housing Authority (NYCHA), suffer from a 27 percent unemployment rate, overcrowded schools and a lack of community programs and public spaces.

At the protest, students and residents questioned why, if the city was so concerned with making West Harlem a safer place to live, it had not offered solutions to these underlying problems rather than having the police spend so much time and money spying on Facebook messages, tweets, texts, phone calls and security reels, criminalizing even the most tenuous connection to the area's intermittent tensions.

It was the 2011 murder of Taylonn Murphy's daughter Tayshana that ignited the rivalry between Grant and Manhattanville. But Murphy was at the protest, rejecting the city's police-first approach to the community's problems. As he said in an interview with the Juvenile Justice Information Exchange this summer, "They arrested this generation of kids, a whole generation, but there's another generation behind them. We can't just do the same thing and arrest them when they get old enough."

No one expects the police to change direction without more protest. Law enforcement officials from the District Attorney's "Gang Division" and the NYPD's Criminal Enterprise Unit speak openly about imposing the same tactics on subsequent generations, leaving it up to grassroots alliances to win meaningful reforms. At the hearing, the average age of the defendants is 19, meaning that they were under surveillance from the time they were 14 or 15 years old.

THE DAY after the police raids took place, the vice president of Columbia's Public Safety program, James McShane, sent a letter to university affiliates that celebrated the raids as a moment of progress for the neighborhood. He informed readers that they were the outcome of "a long-term collaboration between local law enforcement agencies."

What he meant exactly is unclear. Did Columbia assist the NYPD in conducting their surveillance program? On this question, administrators have refused to comment--but Columbia's network of security cameras lining the streets adjacent to the projects compel those who are interested to scrutinize the university's involvement.

McShane himself led four different police precincts in the Bronx before beginning his tenure at Columbia. He was also on Ray Kelly's staff during Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's reign, before Kelly--one of the masterminds of the infamous "stop-and-frisk" policy--became police commissioner under Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

Whether or not Columbia played a substantial role in carrying out the spy operation, it has no qualms about its plans for similar activity in the future. In his letter, McShane vowed to help manage and fund more pervasive surveillance and patrolling procedures in West Harlem, with undercover cops, "sky watch" towers and "an extensive system of video cameras."

Columbia has a strong interest in local policing. After winning the right to use eminent domain--confiscation of private property in the service of the "public good"--Columbia has begun to erect a new $6.3 billion campus directly across the street from the Manhattanville Houses. This expansion project has set off a speculative storm of rising property values, which threatens the neighborhood's predominantly African American and Latino working-class population of 32,000 with imminent displacement between now and when the campus is completed in 2030.

In return for its aggressive land grabs, Columbia was pressured to formulate a Community Benefits Agreement in 2009, which stipulates a series of charitable donations and urban policies ostensibly binding until the year 2045. In total, the university promised $150 million in funding with the goal of offsetting the crisis in affordable housing, access to education and living-wage jobs.

The most promising of these concessions seems to be a new public school run out of Columbia's Teachers College, which will service 300 students from pre-Kindergarten through eighth grade. The university has also invested in a new public housing facility further uptown, designed to relocate the roughly 250 residents who once lived on the site of the new campus.

Yet these measures do not begin to address the larger threat of tenant displacement that will affect thousands more in the surrounding areas during the years to come.

Further, much of Columbia's philanthropy has been poorly managed and politically corrupted, coming under investigation in February and December of 2011, March 2013, and September 2014.

Most importantly, Columbia has failed to honor its promise of $3 million in neighborhood improvement funds for the Grant and Manhattanville Houses. Five years after the Community Benefits Agreement was signed, Columbia has used only $85,000 to buy air conditioners for a few administrative offices.

The university has made it difficult to critique their philanthropy by installing intermediaries that absolve Columbia of any continuing responsibility in administering their donations. Legally speaking, it is not Columbia, but its brainchild, the West Harlem Development Corporation, which oversees the university's remaining investments.

COLUMBIA'S NEGLIGENCE in keeping its promises to West Harlem's working class hasn't stopped local public housing tenants from taking initiatives to address the area's political and economic predicament.

After the death of his daughter in 2011, Taylonn Murphy teamed up with Arnita Brockington--the mother of one of two men convicted in Tayshana's murder--to begin a grassroots campaign for greater access to jobs, education and welfare programs.

The coalition managed to broker several truces between the rival factions, both of which expressed a desire to find new job and educational opportunities. But it has proved exceedingly difficult to win employment and education programs for the neighborhood's young people in an environment made more and more hostile as a new demographic of residents begins to move in.

With its annexation of large swaths of Manhattanville removing 1,600 jobs in manufacturing and retail from the area, Columbia has been a major part of the problem facing residents of the housing projects.

Until recently, however, few residents actually knew about the university's $3 million donation to the Grant and Manhattanville Houses. When Murphy and his partners learned about these investments, they began to pressure the West Harlem Development Corporation and Columbia's Office of Government and Community Affairs to direct the money towards expanded employment opportunities.

In June 2013, Murphy helped gather 40 young people from the opposing factions in Grant and Manhattanville to meet with an executive from Columbia's Community Affairs Office about potential jobs in the construction of the university's new campus. Columbia's 2009 Community Benefits Agreement promised to employ 'women, minority, and local' residents in 40 percent of the expansion's construction crew. Both generations present at the meeting from Grant and Manhattanville Houses insisted that their circumstances presented a timely opportunity for Columbia to fulfill this promise.

The youths were given forms by an official from the construction company contracted to build the new campus, and told that they would be notified soon after about registration for training programs. After the meeting, tensions in the neighborhood receded significantly, perhaps because of a shared vision for the future held by individuals caught on opposing sides of the rivalry.

But nothing further came out of the meeting, and the community coalition was left to start over from scratch even as, unbeknownst to them, the NYPD was making its final preparations for the raids.

IN THE face of these setbacks, parents and young people have continued to struggle toward their own solutions to the problems plaguing their community. Most recently, these activists came into contact with Columbia students, who were appalled by their neighbors' stories of injustice at the hands of the city and the university.

The students first organized a contingent for the court hearings on October 16. Since then, they have begun working alongside West Harlem residents to think through strategies to pressure the university administration into fulfilling its philanthropic obligations.

The students involved come from a variety of campus groups, including Student Worker Solidarity, the Columbia Prison Divest campaign (which demands that the university withdraw its $10 million in stock from the private prison industry), Students Against Mass Incarceration, the Black Students Organization, the Coalition Against Gentrification and the International Socialist Organization.

Beyond the achievement of immediate demands, these developments offer a chance to forge a long-term alliance between Columbia students and local residents. Such an alliance may prove increasingly urgent as West Harlem continues to undergo traumatic changes during the university's 20-year expansion project.

The rate of tenant displacement in the neighborhood has increased even more quickly than many expected. In 2016, a new luxury hotel will open its doors one block north of Grant Houses. Small businesses are closing shop due to untenable ground rents, and longstanding residents with incomes at or below the poverty level are being forced out of increasingly profitable apartments buildings.

With one of the most expensive university campuses in the world arriving immediately across the street from two impoverished and disenfranchised public housing projects, tenants in Grant and Manhattanville Houses are facing the prospect of even more aggressive police surveillance, and the possibility of the privatization of their homes after 2045, when Columbia's Community Benefits Agreement is set to expire.

If Columbia students can build and sustain an alliance with residents in their neighborhood, they will gain a platform from which to promote the political empowerment of West Harlem's working-class communities, introducing alternative agendas in the face of the university's corporate takeover. It is a challenging task, but a growing number of students are committed to making it happen.