Erica Brosnan interviews the winner of this week’s city council primary for Harlem, Yusef Salaam:
With a potential victory in Harlem’s 9th District in the City Council on the horizon, Yusef Salaam, a political novice and member of the Exonerated Five, is expressing gratitude for the support he received throughout his campaign.
“As I walked around my community and touched every single person in our district, I constantly felt a sense that I was being lifted up. People kept telling me, ‘Thank you for running, we need change, we’ve been needing change,’” he said during an appearance on “Mornings On 1” Thursday.
“They knew my story. They knew my 34 years of struggle; they knew exactly where I came from. They knew that I could have remained a private citizen, but to take my pain and turn it into purpose, to take my platform and really do something about the conditions of our people, has really, really resonated with our people in a tremendous way,” he added
Votes in Tuesday’s Democratic primary are still being tallied, but Salaam currently maintains a lead over his opponents, Assemblymembers Inez Dickens and Al Taylor. An official win would put Salaam in the seat left vacant by Kristin Richardson Jordan, who chose not to seek reelection. With no Republican challenger on the ballot, a victory in the primary would secure a win in the general election on Nov. 7.
As a member of the Exonerated Five – a group of five Black and Latino teens wrongfully convicted for the rape of a jogger in Central Park in 1989 – a major issue Salaam hopes to tackle in the City Council is criminal justice reform.
Specifically, he said he would like to “right size the scope of the NYPD.”
“Resizing the scope of the police is talking about the budget. We need police to do the work that they’re doing. We need a budget that’s going to be robust, that allows them to do exactly what they need to do. But we also have savings that we can find there because we need services in our community that provide alternatives,” he said.
Salaam clarified that he does not advocate for defunding the police. Instead, he emphasized the need for police to ensure community safety.
“One of the pushes that I’ve had is making sure that police officers go back into the community and walk the neighborhoods,” he said.
“They don’t have to come from the district but if they come from the boroughs, it gives us an opportunity to have the people who are protecting it serving us come from us and understand us in a way that is inside out as opposed from the outside in.”
See the full article, HERE.
Bathrooms in ABCD/125th Street Station and the 4/5/6 125th Street Station
Bathrooms in two Harlem subway stations are reopening this year. Beginning Monday, July 3, the MTA will open bathrooms at two 125th Street stations: the 4/5/6 and the A/B/C/D stations.
Both stations will have two bathrooms, one for men and one for women, which will be open from 7am to 7pm daily, with a one-hour closure for cleaning from noon to 1pm each day.
“Reopening bathrooms is another way for New York City Transit to provide customers relief when they have to go on the go for a more comfortable experience in the subway,” said NYC Transit President Richard Davey in a statement.
“These refreshed and reopened bathrooms, delivered by the Stations and Facilities divisions at our Department of Subways, show that NYCT is committed to providing faster, safer, and better service to customers across the subway system.”