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Jumaane Williams addresses concerns about community safety and policing approaches
1:15:10
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122 sec
Public Advocate Jumaane Williams opens with remarks addressing misconceptions about public safety bills and critiques of current policing strategies. He emphasizes that opposition to certain policing methods does not equate to being against community safety.
- Williams highlights the persistence of gun violence across generations despite current policing approaches
- He cites statistics on wrongful convictions of Black and Brown individuals
- Williams criticizes the repeated claim that police 'hands will be tied' by new legislation, noting that such fears have not materialized in the past
Jumaane Williams
1:15:10
Thank you, mister chair.
1:15:12
First, I do wanna make sure we're clear because I know sometimes people confuse these bills and these questions as people not wanting safety in their community or sometimes being opposed simply to the police when actually there's just a false binary that's put in place that the way to solve this is simply just trying to arrest and use law enforcement and one of the reasons I do this work is because when I was younger, there's a number of people I can name who are no longer here because they were shot and killed.
1:15:41
Unfortunately, when I speak to young people now, they also have a list of people that are no longer here because they were shot and killed.
1:15:48
And so, if the type of policing that we're talking now was supposed to have worked, they should no longer know those names.
1:15:56
And so, it is frustrating to me that we still have these generational issues that don't seem to be addressed even as we talk about these things.
1:16:04
I did wanna add a statistic that we discussed to to the statistics we discussed about the percentage of individuals who are arrested for shootings and victims, ninety six percent people of more color.
1:16:17
Eighty four percent of the people who are released wrongfully convicted are also black and brown which means the system is not working that way either.
1:16:25
I I do wanna also point out because I heard the words, the police will be their hands will be tied.
1:16:32
I've heard that a lot of time for bills that have come out of the council.
1:16:35
I've just never seen it happen.
1:16:37
So when we passed the Community Safety Act, when I was in the council I heard the same thing.
1:16:42
We went in about a eight year trend of becoming the safest we had ever been in the city.
1:16:47
If you remember a few months ago, all hell broke loose, World War three when we were trying to pass how many stops act.
1:16:54
The world would crumble then as well and I'm now hearing about numbers getting better and becoming safer even with the How Many Stops Act.
1:17:01
We've even had reports that have come out that no one is talking about.
1:17:04
So those I hate those terms because they always make people think we're trying to do things that we're not and they never have come to fruition.