The Current Reality
The murder of George Floyd marked an awakening in America’s collective consciousness that was long-overdue. More than ever before, people listened to the voices of Black and Brown activists, who for years had attempted to spotlight the state-sanctioned violence of our policing and carceral systems. Safety can never be reached by growing the number of militarized agents on our streets. Safety can never be reached by fueling the Prison-Industrial Complex. Safety is found in community. Currently, the vital resources we owe to these communities are instead being diverted towards a punitive and violent criminal justice and enforcement system.
Black and Latine bodies have and continue to be targeted and victimized by law enforcement. Locally, we see the LAPD use improper force at peaceful protests, shoot people in mental distress, and disproportionately brutalize minorities. We witness LAPD, LASD, and other Californian departments profiling Black, Latine, and Indigenous individuals in traffic interdictions and pedestrian stops. On a national scale, police in other metropolitan areas like New York have returned to using Stop-and-Frisk tactics on BIPOC individuals. In many cases, police escalate, rather than de-escalate, violence in the situations they enter. The 2023 Police Violence Report found that 2023 saw the highest number of killings by police on record (1,247 people), despite most killings occuring after officers responded to nonviolent offenses or cases where no crime was reported.
Los Angeles County shamefully holds the largest jail system in the United States. Those trapped in our criminal justice system face a cycle of over-policing, dehumanization, fines, asset forfeiture, housing and employment discrimination, and disenfranchisement, all while having limited access to rehabilitative services. The result? 62% of California’s inmates released in 2018 were assessed as being at-risk for recidivism. It is time that lawmakers recognize this rate for what it truly is: a testament to the failure of our current system.
The future of our communities is dependent on the choices we make today. We can choose to follow decades of failed tradition and funnel more resources into policing and punishment, hoping for a different result. Or, we can take a new approach, addressing root causes of crime– poverty, untreated mental illness, substance abuse, homelessness, failing education systems, and other growing disparities– by investing in our communities, implementing crisis response systems that are proven to be effective, and reforming criminal laws that disproportionately impact marginalized communities. Through the establishment of systems of care that address the fundamental needs of constituents, we can begin to heal and transform our communities.
What Needs To Be Done
Our Priorities
- Address the root causes of crime by creating more living-wage jobs, funding job training for the 21st-century economy, increasing housing stability, and establishing systems of mental health care and drug rehabilitation.
- Expand and fund health-centered alternatives to policing to respond more appropriately to community needs such as unarmed crisis response to respond to calls relating to mental health crises, substance abuse, homelessness, and non-emergency medical situations.
- Demilitarize police and establish nationwide use of force standards.
- Increase police accountability and transparency to counter their ability to violate human rights.
- End mass incarceration and the school-to-prison pipeline.
- Ban forced prison labor.
- Gradually decriminalize consensual crimes such as drug use and sex work, and pair these efforts with properly funded health programs.
- Step up the fight against human trafficking.
- Provide survivor-led support to survivors of crimes.
- End the law enforcement’s and local governments’ criminalization and brutalization of poverty.
How We Plan to Do It
Reimagine Public Safety:
- Advocate for states’ reduction of police department funding and reallocation resources towards much-needed community-led safety strategies in communities most impacted by mass incarceration, over-policing, and crime.
- Increase funding of community-based services in mental health, reentry, harm reduction, and crime prevention, by passing legislation like Rep. Cori Bush’s People’s Response Act.
- Increase funding for state, local, and tribal non-police crisis response systems, like Eugene, Oregon’s CAHOOTS program, which dispatches medical specialists rather than police to 911 calls related to addiction, mental health crises, and homelessness.
- End the failed war on drugs by shifting to strategies based on treatment and harm reduction.
- Offer additional grants to county governments to provide rehabilitative substance abuse treatment programs outside of carceral spaces.
- Eliminate mandatory minimums at the federal level to follow California state law.
- Get rid of three strikes laws.
- Ban no-knock raids.
- Limit the use of artificial intelligence and surveillance by law enforcement.
- Encourage the demilitarization of the police by eliminating the 1033 Program to prohibit the transfer of all military-grade weapons to state and local law enforcement agencies.
- Repeal civil asset forfeiture, which is routinely used to arbitrarily separate citizens from property without regard for due process, and has incentivized departments to over-police and unjustly target individuals not convicted of any crime.
- Decriminalize consensual sex work and repeal SESTA/FOSTA.
- Protect unhoused Americans’ right to exist, by banning forced police-removals when secure housing alternatives are not provided.
- Regulate the conditions of existing unhoused shelters/temporary housing programs to prevent carceral-like conditions imposed upon our vulnerable neighbors.
Healing our Communities:
- Prohibit profiling by law enforcement and intelligence agencies based on race, religion or national origin by enacting bills such as End Racial and Religious Profiling Act.
- Provide federal support for local initiatives such as Black Student Achievement Plan to deliver much needed services such as education.
- Replace school police programs with more proven effective counseling by supporting the Counseling Not Criminalization in Schools Act.
- Legalize cannabis and vacate cannabis convictions by supporting bills like the MORE Act.
- Seal past records of drug convictions, and allow those with drug possession convictions to access life-saving federal benefits such as food and housing assistance by supporting the Drug Policy Reform Act.
- Build a survivor-led support system for those who have been victims of domestic abuse, human trafficking, and police and prison violence by working with organizations already doing work in these spaces.
End Mass Incarceration:
- Reduce incarceration and shift prisons’ focus to rehabilitation and diversion.
- End mandatory prison labor and extend standard labor/workplace protection laws to prison laborers.
- Ban immigrant detention centers.
- Repeal mandatory minimum sentences and automatic “sentencing enhancements” so that judges have the discretion to issue sentences that are appropriate for the circumstances.
- Restore voting rights to the incarcerated and remove barriers to ballot access in jail.
- Abolish the death penalty.
- Eradicate private prisons to remove the profit motive.
- Stop treating youths as adults in the courts and prison system.
Police Accountability:
- End qualified immunity for law enforcement officers and government officials.
- Amend 18 U.S.C. § 242, a provision of the federal criminal code, to lower the burden of proof where civil rights may have been violated that can help federal prosecutors hold law enforcement officers accountable for wrongful acts.
- Combat the infiltration of white supremacist groups into police departments.
- Establish national use-of-force standards, such as banning carotid holds and limiting the use of less lethal weapons against protesters.
- Create a national police misconduct registry.
- Ban the re-employment of any officer fired for misconduct.
What This Will Do For Us
What’s clear is that our current approach to public safety is failing us. By shifting to proven community-led safety strategies, police demilitarization, robust mental health and rehabilitative services and more, we can establish a comprehensive system of human-centered care that addresses root causes of crime. We can then begin to heal our communities, families, and people from the harm of a system that tears loved ones and families apart in the name of justice and order. I’m running for Congress because it’s clear that the status quo isn’t working. Our punitive systems of public safety are failing to protect us, and far too often are disproportionately punishing those who need community support and robust social services. We keep us safe, and it is time to give ourselves the support we need to do so.