Legislative District 36

Everyone deserves to feel safe, and to be safe. We all want someone to come when we have an emergency. And we all in one way or another have experienced OR born witness to the harm that over policing and police brutality can enact. Our work for accountability and reform must continue. The State can and must play a vital role in making us safer. Public safety is the number one top concern for my neighbors who are small business owners. Public safety is a top concern for parents. I am committed to keeping our communities safe knowing that safety means different things to different people.

My approach is to expand our understanding of what is public safety so that we see the connections between the many challenges we face.

• My youngest child Luca told me that he defines public safety as an end to gun violence and school shootings because he does not feel safe in school and my daughter Luna sees the mental health of students in schools as a key component of how she defines public safety.

• My colleague from HIV shared that we should be defining public health and COVID-19 mitigation as public safety.

• The Magnolia mom I spoke with sees addressing intimate partner violence as a key arm of public safety.

• A Ballard mom shared the alarm parents have over the gun violence associated with homeless encampments by the food bank where their kids volunteer.

And as we expand our understanding of public safety, invest upstream to prevent the public safety concerns we face right now in Seattle and across our State. This is a focus on ensuring a strong start in life, lifting our kids out of poverty, addressing mental health and substance use, and what I learned from former and current gang members in the 1990s in Harlem and Washington Heights. These thoughtful young men wanted safe schools; safe homes; training opportunities; grocery stores with healthy food; and good jobs so that they could lead a life of loving and raising their children, caring for their communities.

As a part of OUR prevention agenda, we must also be investing in mental health and behavioral health systems and services that have the so that our public safety officers and frontline responders can keep us safe and healthy not try to take on a scope of work that exceeds their training and should not be in their remit.

There is an extraordinary cost to investing in the criminal legal system to treat the symptoms, not the problem. Our criminal legal system addresses our failings as a society but is not set up so that we can all thrive.

As a legislator, I would be focused on a prevention agenda.

1) Invest in a strong start for all our kids. This includes high quality child care, and assessing the success of promising pilots around guaranteed basic income to see what worked and what we can scale.

2) Reinforce our public education system so that there is excellence in education and opportunity for all our students.

3) Address gun violence as a public health issue, and banning assault weapons.

4) Strengthen our public health systems and structures so that we have a strong infrastructure in place to help us navigate COVID-19, make progress toward ending homelessness, care for the most vulnerable amongst us, and more.

5) Strengthen our investment in mental health and behavioral health access, systems, services, and providers across our State so no one is left behind.

When I spoke at length with a public safety officer at the State Labor Council convention, his proposed solution is an interesting one that I think merits consideration – raise the qualifications for our police officers. His idea is that we ensure all officers have a college degree.

Public safety to me means that communities feel safe from violence and criminal behavior, and that safety is rooted in the community’s prosperity, interconnectedness, and community-based accountability for criminal activity. It means that if law enforcement is involved, they are working to respond to and in the service of what the community has asked them to do, not what law enforcement agencies alone think is best. It means that police officers are held accountable for their actions, just as every day citizens are, and that there is transparency, trust, and respect for communities at the heart of all public safety decisions.

I think the COVID-19 pandemic has really underscored how few resources are available in our state for people experiencing a mental health crisis, and how much we place on our first responders to address what is more than an emergency problem but a need for long-term, consistent care. In the state legislature, I will prioritize funding for mental health care, including beds for mental health patients (adults and children), services, counseling, and mental health responders who can support other emergency services in addressing crises.

Furthermore, I am also committed to addressing the scarcity and poverty that is at the root of so much crime. Lack of access to jobs, education, housing, mental and physical healthcare, food, lead to increases in crime in our communities. The legislature’s responsibility is to address scarcity in our state, and as a legislator this will be a priority.

As a legislator, prioritizing public safety will mean ensuring that all of my constituents feel secure and protected in their environments. I am committed to listening to communities about their safety needs, and to standing by them even when it’s politically inconvenient. It takes time to thoughtfully implement reform on all levels and that police are taking responsibility for their part of training and implementation. I will work to ensure that communities are seeing the effects of legislation to protect their safety.

I will also push for expanded investment in housing, mental health care, jobs, education, and access to green spaces, which are tools that meaningfully support lasting public safety and healthy communities. And I will increase investments in community programs like the Seattle Community Safety Initiative which support non-carceral, non-police based safety solutions statewide.

We must also recognize that the systems in place to keep us safe and promote accountability are the same systems that continue to attack and discriminate against our communities of color. As a legislator, I intend to prioritize comprehensive police and criminal justice reform to ensure that these systems can serve the community in a positive manner.

Even as crime has gone up, the commitment to police reform hasn’t changed in Seattle. We have the intelligence and the resources to keep people safe from crime AND police misconduct.

As a Black woman, this is a personal issue for me. I have a Black brother, a Black father, and a Black boyfriend. I know what it feels like to have them go out the door and know what might happen to them. I know what might happen to me. I also have police officers in my family, and as contributors to this campaign. We need police departments and unions to do their part and partner with the state to implement systemic reforms and accountability so that our communities can be safe.

When I’m addressing issues like police accountability and community safety in Olympia, it will be through the lens of watching my Black father, brother, partner walk out the door every day and worrying if they will come back. It will be as someone who lived on Capitol Hill in the summer of 2020, with teargas coming in the window and helicopters overhead as police confronted racial justice protests. It will also be as someone who has close relatives who are police officers, and with an understanding that we have to focus on changing the systems that create violence, scarcity, distrust, and lack of safety in our communities, more than individual hearts and minds.

My idea of public safety goes beyond policing; it’s making sure the public is protected from disasters and danger. That includes our firefighters and those involved in all types of disaster response. When you think about what puts people in danger, there are a variety of things that could lead a person towards danger – the biggest being poverty. So in my mind, a big first step to achieving public safety is to continue efforts to help lift people out of poverty.

To me, tangible ways of measuring progress include looking at things like employment rates, school completion rates, poverty, and other indicators/contributors of community safety. I would look at crime statistics as one information piece but I wouldn’t rely on them as a stand-alone measurement. Crime stats are interesting as they depend on reporting, which is not always accurate.

I would prioritize community-led social services and community development in impoverished neighborhoods over funding the police. I would work to increase funding for public health, healthcare, education, childcare, and job training services (including for incarcerated individuals). In regards to policing, I would also like to see the end of qualified immunity. I’d also work to stop enforcing laws that criminalize people for their poverty or lack of housing.

As I consider the $34M the state pays out due to police misconduct, I think about medical and legal professionals who are required to hold liability insurance. It makes sense to require the same of police officers so they’re subject to a risk assessment scorecard. It’s not a new idea but it is something to potentially revisit.

Again, not a new idea but it would be great to have public data on police activities disaggregated using demographic markers.