Feeling safe in your neighborhood is not a luxury. It is a basic expectation that every DC resident deserves, and right now too many residents still don't feel it.
My view on public safety is straightforward: enforcement and investment are not opposing ideas. They have to work together. Crime does not happen in a vacuum. It is connected to inadequate housing, food insecurity, limited job opportunities, and young people without enough to do. That philosophy shaped my work on youth curfew legislation, where I successfully required that youth programming be provided alongside any curfew zone and that enforcement come with clear limits on law enforcement discretion. If we are telling young people where they cannot be, we have a responsibility to create spaces where they can be.
On MPD, I support a right-sized, well-trained force that can actually afford to live in the city it serves. Right now, DC is effectively paying for hundreds of additional officers through overtime at a rate far higher than it would cost to simply hire them. That is not smart fiscal policy and it is not sustainable. I support consolidating our community violence intervention programs for greater efficiency, improving transparency between MPD and the communities it serves, and ensuring that DC's police department is never used as a tool of federal immigration enforcement.