Advocates rally at City Hall Park on April 16. Photo Credit: Sarah O’Connell

BY SARAH O’CONNELL

On April 16, advocates in lower Manhattan’s City Hall Park voiced opposition to 175B, a bill that would direct the New York City Police Department to establish protest buffer zones around educational facilities. They called on Mayor Zohran Mamdani to veto the bill.

Titled the “Safe Access to Education Law,” 175B was passed as part of the Five-Point Action Plan to Combat Antisemitism announced by New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin. The plan, which also includes a bill proposing buffer zones around religious institutions, came in response to an alleged rise in Antisemitism, along with student protests against the genocide in Gaza that rocked University campuses, and highly-publicized demonstrations targeting illegal land sales in the occupied West Bank held at synagogues.

The bill was passed by the New York City Council on March 26, with 30 votes, 4 short of a veto-proof majority. Mayor Mamdani has 30 days to veto or sign the bill before it becomes law.

Naila Awan, Interim Co-Director of Policy at the New York Civil Liberties Union, called the bill unconstitutional and said that it was a way for the NYPD to further crack down on protests. “At a time when the federal government is arresting, suppressing, and even killing protestors, our city and our state must reject measures that will bolster this agenda,” she said.

Though the bill requires the NYPD to lay out how they will respond to demonstrations, it is up to them to determine where, when, and to what extent security perimeters would be used, resulting in the department being given a “blank check to escalate police deployment,” Awan continued. The department has a long history of using excessive force against peaceful protestors, such as during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests, after which thousands of people who reported being beaten or arrested were awarded a settlement. In 2023, the NYCLU and Legal Aid Society announced an agreement with the NYPD to reform how the department deploys police officers to protests, reforms that 175B could undermine.

Tiffany Cabán, Councilmember for District 22, said that giving more power to the NYPD would not work to end the hate violence in the city. She said that the bill overlooks evidence-based solutions, such as Jews For Racial & Economic Justice's NYC Against Hate Violence policy proposal, which details a plan to combat hate violence without increased policing.

Because the language employed to define “educational facility” is broad, encompassing facilities such as daycares, libraries, and private institutions. Protest outside of expansive university-owned property, such as New York University, which owns 14 million square feet of real estate, would be suppressed. Workers at facilities labeled educational facilities will also be denied the right to protest, even if a demonstration is unrelated to concerns about hate violence on campus.

James Davis, president of PSC-CUNY, a trade union representing faculty and staff of the City University of New York system, called this a "chilling effect on the very same rights that the Trump administration is trying to restrict. It will give comfort to opponents of freedom of expression in Washington, D.C.”

In his second term, President Donald Trump has directed an ongoing crackdown on First Amendment rights. In June of 2025, approximately 4000 National Guard troops were deployed to Los Angeles to quash protests against immigration raids, with the Los Angeles Police Department making almost 400 arrests and detentions. The Trump administration has also led a widespread attack on labor rights.

Tanesha Grant read a statement from Taj Sutton, former school board President and member of Parents Supporting Parents New York, who testified at a February 25 Council meeting regarding the buffer zone bills. “The safety you pretend New York is derived from police presence is an $11.2B lie while students go underfunded in the interest of funding a militarized police state,” Grant read. She said the effort to combat hate violence was ineffective if the impact would increase police harassment and violence that Black and Brown students experience.

Both 175B and 1B have been significantly watered down from their original form. The original versions allowed the NYPD to create buffer zones of up to 100 feet, which the department rejected as the size of buffer zones is made on a case-by-case basis, and may be larger than 100 feet. The NYPD's Deputy Commissioner for Legal Matters, Michael Gerber, told the City Council that the watered-down bills would “not change what we do day-to-day.”

At a press conference the same day of the rally, Mamdani stated that he was still considering whether to veto the bill. Zara Nasir, Executive Director of The People’s Plan NYC, was confident that he would veto it and stated that he risked alienating his young voter base if he failed to do so.

It was through protest that “democratic life and a vision and hope was restored”, said Chenjerai Kumanyika of the American Association of University Professors. “If this bill had been in place, maybe the mayor would not be in office right now.”