Community Safety
We've been sold a lie that's led to low-visibility cars, cops in schools, and bodycam footage as content fodder.
There are two boogeymen that are often used to scare people into acting against their best interests. One is the financial insecurity that mega-retailers leverage by undercutting local businesses to get us to spend money out of our communities and into their hands, and the other are threats to our physical security or of property loss that has allowed the rise of ubiquitous surveillance, low-visibility or unmarked law enforcement vehicles as standard, and putting cops in schools which in a few short years has turned a school system with a fairly representative social, economic, cultural, and racial distribution of suspensions and incident reports, to our school-kids just getting arrested. In 2025, an overwhelming >96% of whom were people of color.
Calling cops in ours schools 'SROs' is propaganda
It's time to stop normalizing the police presence in our schools. Law enforcement has always been able to respond to a call at a school; having cops permanently stationed in our schools, along with the omnipresent camera systems, harms our kids psychologically; it threatens their creativity and critical thinking when the threat of a punitive response is always looming.
When a community sends a cop with a gun, they get a cop with a gun.
We need visible public safety officers not slick-top and unmarked cars
Public safety vehicles that are high-visibility and approachable, not menacing or stealthy. Do away with automated enforcement actions that put money in the pockets of the companies that own the cameras and do little to curb errant behavior. Trained community resource personnel who can respond to support, not just crisis intervention, but any call where a cop with a gun is unwarranted.