Stewards: Building Community Coalitions for Community Safety with Betty Yu
A key dimension relevant to public spaces, considers how frameworks for justice and accountability inform and advance public safety. Alternative approaches that centre community care and healing, reconfigure conventional ideas about safety and work towards aligning community values with practices to support collective wellbeing. In this week’s Stewards piece, we followed up with multimedia artist and co-founder of the Chinatown Art Brigade, Betty Yu to learn more about her perspective on how community based strategies redefine public safety and introduce new ways of thinking about justice and accountability.
About Betty and Her Work
Betty Yu (she/her) is an award winning multimedia artist, activist and educator born and raised in New York City to Chinese immigrant parents. Betty integrates documentary film, new media platforms and community-infused approaches into her practice and has over 20 years of experience in community, media justice and labour organizing work. She is also a co-founder of Chinatown Art Brigade (CAB), a cultural collective using art to advance anti-gentrification organizing efforts. Betty’s work has been presented at various institutions including the Brooklyn Museum, Queens Museum and Tribeca Film Festival’s Interactive Showcase and she recently made her curatorial debut this Fall, presenting Imagining De-Gentrified Futures at Apex Art in Tribeca, New York City.
Her Thoughts on Safety
As an artist and activist, Betty explores a range of issues in her work including housing equity, labor rights, displacement and gentrification. Informed by her experiences, Betty highlights the importance of positioning conventional approaches to public safety within the context of a capitalist society that leverages racism and inequity in order to function. Betty explains that this is critical to understanding how notions of safety, which permeate public spaces, are inherently informed by this framework.
“I think it’s imperative that we acknowledge that we are socialized to think about ‘safety’ and ‘security’ in racially coded ways that are driven by racialized capitalism. Why do we see an increase of policing and surveillance in gentrified communities - are they meant to protect the long-time residents?”
Betty underscores that when safety is framed in this way, we fail to identify and grapple with underlying issues of inequity, leading to displacement, poverty and homelessness. Consequently, she explains the importance of pursuing efforts that unsettle these systems, and highlights that communities are already organizing successfully to effect change in significant ways. A recent example of this is demonstrated by the successful community organizing effort opposing the expansion of Industry City, a luxury complex development proposed in Brooklyn’s Sunset Park neighborhood. Concerned with the rapid gentrification of the area, community members and supporters committed to collective action and voiced their concerns and defeated the rezoning proposal required for the development.
“I want to underscore that community safety in public spaces has to be seen and therefore addressed within the larger context of fighting for systemic change. It’s our capitalist system that pits our communities against one another, deeming one neighborhood “dangerous” and stoking racially-driven fear across our communities.”
Betty also shared a few ideas about what components are necessary for creating safer spaces and reinforces that fundamental questions about justice and accountability must guide these efforts. For her, this includes:
A defunded, disarmed and eventually dismantled police force, eventually replaced by community policing
Community advisory and oversight of community policing principles driven by restorative and transformative justice. This will work towards eliminating the criminalization and incarceration of people of color and undocumented immigrants, broken windows policing, police racial profiling, brutality and murder of BIPOC, LGBTQ and especially Black folks.
Shifting power and decision making to local communities who are able to envision, direct control and enact urban planning policies that prevent displacement of current residents and stops luxury development. As Tanya Chung-Tiam Fook also shared with us, this approach will allow space for reinvesting in government subsidized public spaces, parks, art and community centers, libraries and liveable public housing.
Freedom of movement including the decriminalization of border crossing, and full recognition of basic human rights to shelter, food, healthcare and living wage jobs. Safety is about having the right to stay in your home without fear of displacement.
You can find Betty’s full bio and list of creative projects here, and follow her on Instagram @bettyyu21.
You can follow the Chinatown Art Brigade on Instagram @chinatownartbrigade.
