Legislative District 37

We need to think more comprehensively about public safety as more than just police officers. Let’s start by looking at people involved in the criminal justice system, determine underlying drivers for why they are involved in it, and then fund measures to prevent those issues from happening.

This includes a legal system that centers restorative justice and rehabilitates people, instead of being strictly punitive. The goal is to prevent crime from happening in the first place, remove biases from investigation and judgement of crimes, and create sentences that address the root causes of crime, helping the person reenter society as a productive citizen. This is especially imperative for juveniles who are still in the process of growing up and have their whole lives ahead of them.

Currently we only gauge public safety by incidents of crime while ignoring prevention and rehabilitation. Focusing on increasing the success of diversion programs and decreasing recidivism rates would decrease the amount of crime that happens in the future.

Our prison system has been systematically defunded and the first things to be cut are programs that help rehabilitation. We need to realize that funding these programs is not only the moral thing to do, but also the financially prudent thing to do as locking people up is extremely costly. Reducing recidivism leads to less crime, fewer fractured families, and reduced costs in our prison system over the long run.

As part of thinking comprehensively about public safety, I think we should set our police force up for failure or poor outcomes. They are not trained in mental health, so we should not have them responding to non-violent mental health crises. We should have mental health professionals do this. This will provide better services for the person in crisis and reduce the chances that the situation escalates.

We should not have police in schools. Instead, we should have counselors. Our kids will get help with the issues they are struggling to work through, and we’ll reduce the chances they end up in the school to prison pipeline.

Finally, we should also expand discretionary parole which was severely limited in 1984.

I came to community organizing and public policy advocacy honestly. My eyes were opened as a young person in high school at Garfield when I saw my community harmed by the War on Drugs. There was immense over-policing, crime bills further criminalizing people around me who were suffering, and families left in the dust. I consider myself a survivor of that war. I emerged from that time in our collective history determined to be an agent of change and repair the harm I saw. There was no other option for me than to help my community.

In my community work, I have organized alongside parents, youth, and families including formerly incarcerated people and the families of survivors of police violence, for police accountability and to transform the racist criminal legal system. The path forward for accountability includes local, state and federal advocacy and community organizing.

Police accountability is one part of a larger vision of true public safety. We will achieve true public safety when everyone in our communities has access to health care, affordable housing, good jobs and vibrant, healthy communities.

The measures of progress toward true public safety are in the lives of those who have suffered most acutely the harm of the criminal legal system. Examples of tangible ways to measure progress toward public safety could include, among others; reductions in incarceration, reductions in or ending of homelessness, elimination or reduction in racial disparities in wealth and income, increasing wealth and land and business ownership among Black, Indigenous people and other people of color, and increasing safety of our youth, women, LGBTQIA+ and all people at home, in school and in communities.

As a state representative, I know I have a unique opportunity to partner with families across our state and organizations like the ACLU to advance policies that will truly make our communities safer. Like I mentioned above, these policies look like reducing harsh penalties for non-violent offenses so we can keep folks out of prison. Additionally, I know from my life experience and from my work, that people are able to stay away from the criminal justice system when we as a society are meeting their basic needs. This means engaging our state as a leader in building more housing, fully funding K-12 and higher education, creating good jobs for people of all backgrounds, investing in the trades, good transit, clean air and water, and more. I’ve also worked for over a decade as a mother and PTSA parent to reduce the school to prison pipeline for our kids, and particularly Black boys, because I know investment and care early to end those systems will serve us all well far into the future. I know because I’ve seen them, that there are very helpful interventions we can make as a community when people are young to ensure they’re getting the support they need in schools and that staff and educators are respecting them. These interventions are proven to reduce people’s engagement in the criminal justice system after graduation, and will serve to keep community members out of prison and all of us more safe and less reliant on a flawed criminal justice system.

I believe the steps laid out above are all very worthy and important. I would like to use this space to make a larger point about how police reform/accountability has happened in our state. It is very disheartening to me, as a mother, grandmother, and active community leader, to see widely-supported legislation be passed only to be rolled back in some regards the following year. I understand that as members of government and experts in policy like yourselves, part of our roles are to acknowledge when we get something wrong. However, I am disheartened to see important measures that would change policing culture and improve public safety changed and weakened seemingly under the radar. I don’t want that to be part of my service, if I’m so lucky to serve in Olympia. I have no interest in being the person who is complicit in rolling back hard-fought and hard-won police accountability measures. It’s time we change our collective culture of policing once and for all.