Community Safety
Both of my brothers have been hit by cars! My brother Garren was riding a bike to his middle school when he was struck by a car pulling out of a neighborhood. Thankfully, he came out of the experience fairly unscathed. My brother Cohen, on the other hand, is very lucky to have made it out of his accident. He was struck by a car in the Shadow Ridge High School parking lot. He got pretty banged up, requiring stitches and even losing a tooth. In both scenarios, our family was extremely fortunate, but there are too many families just like ours who have suffered immense loss as a result of cars striking pedestrians. Our community grieved the loss of a graduating honors student at Arbor View High School just last year. One of the accidents that has stayed with me for so many years is when an elderly woman struck three girls under the age of six on Camino Eldorado, just blocks from where I live.
Community safety is more than violent crime and gun violence. While both are always a part of the conversation, we need to make sure that we are facing the entire breadth of safety concerns. Pedestrian fatalities are a huge issue in Nevada. Managing public health crises like the COVID pandemic or localized measles outbreaks is also essential to community safety. The same goes for suicide prevention, drug addiction treatment, handling extreme heat, sheltering the unhoused, responding to natural disasters, protecting workers from dangerous workplace conditions, and more! As I seek to represent AD-1, I know that the policies I work on can save lives, and I will act accordingly.
Policy Priorities:
Investments in Pedestrian-friendly Infrastructure: It’s not just the cars killing us, it's our urban planning. We need to design our cities and neighborhoods to be walkable and safe for pedestrians.
The “Bike Bill” - I want to follow the lead of Oregon. In the 1970s, they passed their famous “bike bill” that allocated 1% of the state highway fund to biking and pedestrian infrastructure projects. Eventually, the percentage was raised to 2%. Over the course of several decades, Portland has become a national example of walkability and public transit. I think designating a portion of the highway fund to advance transportation justice is just one of many policies that we can try to make our neighborhoods safer and walkable.
Investments in Public Transit: Las Vegas is the largest metro area in the Mountain West without a light rail system. Investing in robust public transit lowers emissions, reduces traffic congestion by removing cars from the road, promotes healthier lifestyles through encouraging walking, and gives independence to individuals unable to drive. We cannot build the future we need without public transit.
Expand non-police response to mental health crises and other non-violent 911 calls: When it comes to creating safe communities, we need a two-pronged approach: prevention and response. Police are not always the best response to situations that require intervention, like mental health calls. Jurisdictions across the country have already begun programs to divert these calls to non-police teams of professionals, and Nevada can begin to explore doing the same. Policies like this have the potential to build trust with communities who are afraid of over policing, increase police efficiency and response time because of the lightened caseload, and help deliver services to people in crisis and decrease stigma for asking for help.
Treat Drug Addiction as a Public Health Issue: Addiction is an illness, one that eats away at the fabric of not just individual lives but entire families and communities. Criminalizing illness does not solve the problem, at least it hasn't in any meaningful way since the War on Drugs began fifty years ago. I believe that letting medical professionals and social workers lead the path forward will be our saving grace as we seek to unravel the lasting effects of our nation’s relationship to drug use and mass incarceration. Treating addiction as a public health issue often means creating policies around harm reduction.
Unions and a Pro-Worker Agenda: Empowering unions and passing pro-worker legislation improves the material conditions of everyday Nevadans. When unions are strong, they are fierce advocates for their members, sometimes even more effectively than state representatives. Keeping wages up addresses the social determinants of crime by meeting the basic needs of our community. Maintaining pressure on employers and legislators to evaluate workplace safety makes sure workers can return home to their families at the end of the day. (See Labor Rights and Unions for more info)
Environmental Action: Climate change and pollution are a threat to public safety. Whether its pollutants and microplastics poisoning our blood and worsening asthma attacks, or if it’s extreme heat killing people every year in Nevada, we must act now and act boldly to mitigate the most deadly aspects of the climate crisis. (See Climate Change and Environmental Action for more info)
From the 83rd Legislative Session →AB 456: This bill, sponsored by assembly members Moore and Considine, would protect low-income Nevadans from dangerous weather conditions by banning utility shut-offs during extreme weather. Governor Lombardo vetoed this bill, and I think we need to bring it back.
