Legislative District 32

A sense of personal safety, of freedom without favor and equality without exception for all people is the foundation of my conception of public safety. Driving a car down the freeway, expecting our fellow drivers to stay in their lane is one of the greatest examples of mutual confidence and trust in our society. Our mutual expectation that other drivers will do “right” as we share the public space is the idea of public safety. Our mutual expectations that we all have agreed to a commonly shared set of laws and to abide by these shared rules provide our conception of public and personal security.

Ours is not a perfect system. There are examples of discrimination, inequity, and exclusion. We have tried affirmative action, no affirmative action, preferences, quotas in the distribution of the benefits of following the rules. Often those with the power to control the crafting of rules, or those enforcing the rules, forget about freedom and equality that belongs to all people. They violate basic universal human and civil rights of some people.

People of goodwill must challenge the public policies that permit discrimination and violation

of civilized safeguards that societies create for their communities. The Doctrine of Discovery issued by the Catholic church in 1493 conferred upon European monarchs and their explorers, including Christopher Columbus, the legal right to declare non-Christians to be non-humans and to kill them or enslave them and take their property. The idea of Doctrine of Discovery remains embedded in public policies and law today.

The Doctrine of Discovery has legitimized mining, fracking, extraction of minerals, water and resources that take wealth from indigenous communities to benefit the wealth accumulation of others, destroying the environment and the rules of public safety that have been created. The rights by conquest and domination, grounded in the Doctrine of Discovery, are in conflict with the Universal Law of Human Rights and the United Nations Covenant on Civil and Political Rights and the Covenant of Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. The Doctrine of Discovery was adopted to legitimize the divine right of kings and white, European men while the Universal Law of Human Rights legitimates the rights of individuals, everywhere.

We will only have full public safety if the rights of every individual, everywhere, are acknowledged and protected. Safety for some, at the expense of others, is a warped idea. Women and men, white and BIPOC, shall benefit equally. Inequality is not perpetuated. This is

called “mainstreaming” and entails bringing the perceptions, experience, and interests of all impacted individuals to bear on policy-making, planning and decision-making.

I believe the procedures of the United Nations’ mainstreaming analysis could be of great use in instituting comparative analyses of the impact on diverse citizens of any policy-making, planning and decision-making in the State Legislature. At the present time legislation simply describes what conditions in a society could be changed when a particular program is instituted. However, the proposed legislation is generally devoid of any impact on public safety of the individuals who might be touched by the proposed legislation.

The impact of a tax, or a regulation, or whatever is being proposed, is not included. An impact analysis is a technique that is designed to uncover or unearth the “unexpected” negative effects of a change on an organization or individual. When legislators are often directed to consider “who benefits and who pays”, that type of deep impact analysis does not happen.

Perhaps.