Youth Engagement
I’ve led in education spaces over the last ten years, and was deeply involved in youth activism for 15 years before that. I continually observe that young people thrive when they have material stability and social support, and that we can’t expect them to do well in school or plan for their futures if they don’t have their basic needs met. One of these primary needs is belonging, which comes from supportive environments, loving adults that share their culture with them, and opportunities to pursue their dreams. Our racialized, austerity -based models of education, mental health and community safety undermine all of this, and are drivers of the recent epidemic of youth disengagement and violence.
We need to invest heavily in culturally responsive care workers and loving adults who are able to provide guidance to our youth. We must adequately fund our mental health professionals, nurses, counselors, advisors, and paraeducators within our K-12 school systems, and create much lower student to staff ratios to ensure our children get the proper care they need. We must provide ongoing opportunities for recertification, skill sharing, professional development, and resources to connect care workers with families and their schedules. We must also engage in creative collaboration with community-based-organizations, and help students navigate spaces outside of school and transition into adulthood.
We need to recognize public schools as one of the last remaining truly egalitarian public spaces in our society. We must provide them with the adequate resources and a mandate to serve young people by making major investments in on-site before and after school care, childcare, and extracurricular activities. We must also support working families by providing workshops on financial literacy, tax support, understanding their community workplace rights, and guaranteeing flexible school schedules, both within the year and in potentially year-round programming." In short, it means a full transformation and orientation towards care, rather than churning out worker cogs.
Mental Health
I’ve long recognized that Washington’s mental health system is underfunded and broken, but it took three years of organizing to build a non-police crisis response team in Tacoma to realize just how far we have to go as a state. I’m proud of the multi-racial, multi-generational leadership from the An Intentional Response (AIR) coalition in pressuring the city to create the non-police HOPE team and provide it with over $2 million in funding, and proud of the great work that the team and their supporters in the Tacoma Fire Department have done. We need to put so much more support into our communities, facilities, and mental health workers.
Washington’s behavioral health system has long been woefully inadequate at taking care of our most vulnerable and mistreated community members. We lack adequate resources and training for mental health professionals, we lack adequate inpatient beds and outpatient treatment facilities, and we lack the common decency to get people the help they need, rather than cycling them in and out of jails or houselessness. The disastrous outcomes of all this are evidenced every day in our communities, in our jails and on our streets.
The recent Trueblood settlement of $400 million will hopefully start to rectify this. But it’s disturbing that this could only happen through the courts, after decades of mental health divestment. Luckily, Trueblood has spurned legislative and administrative fixes, particularly around potential systems for dispatch. But legislators on all sides have been pushing too much reliance on third party intermediaries, rather than robust state programs, and putting too much pressure on counties and municipalities to go it alone.
While programs like Tacoma’s new HOPE team are a great first step, they still lack the resources for 24/7 service and direct community access, with meaningful referral into a robust, wrap-around system of outpatient and inpatient care. Only major investments of new state funding and guidance for systemwide coordination can do that. Legislators need to commit to a robust, state-backed model. I promise to make such legislation a priority in my first session, and to fight to build out the system to support it in the years to come.
Violence Reduction
The recent surge in both property crime and violent crime is disturbing, and has people from all walks of life concerned about their own safety and the safety of people they love. I’ve witnessed this first hand in my Hilltop neighborhood, where friends, coworkers and neighbors have faced break-ins, car theft, assault, and at least one case of death from a shooting. It is tragic and chilling and it leads to further spirals of anxiety and violence. Solutions based solely in policing often don’t work, as police are rarely on the scene for the actual incident, and the communities with the most violence often also have the lowest levels of community-police trust.
Many factors contribute to spikes in crime, and crime tends to rise and fall in cycles. We have been living -and dying- through a particularly difficult period. This means we all have safety on the mind and understandably want immediate fixes. But we must be careful not to choose fixes that only perpetuate the problem (such as discipline and police in schools driving the school-to-prison pipeline, militarizing SWAT or other police units, or the disastrous war on drugs). Addressing community safety starts at the root, by providing the resources and care that prevent violence, rather than perpetuating it.
I fundamentally don’t believe “more cops” will address any of these issues. But I do believe that more youth engagement, diverting mental health calls to the appropriate professionals, and providing general social resources will free up police time to do actual police work. Huge amounts of evidence from communities taking these approaches support this. Luckily, municipalities across the country are starting to embrace this. But they’ll only succeed when they have robust state support, consistent systems, and delegated authority.
Comments