It is quite obvious that when it comes to our current justice system things have not been ok. Whether that is because of the protests that have erupted to unjust acts carried out by the police or the Black Lives Matter movement becoming increasingly more prevalent in today's political culture, it is clear that our justice system needs to be reformed. It is important for our community to acknowledge the injustices here in the United States and it starts with making changes in our own home state. Our justice system has unfortunately done a lot of harm that has never been addressed to the majority of the public. We must do better when enacting law enforcement because we know we are better than what our current system is. So it's time to work for what is right even when it's not easy to do.

​

How do we do this:

• Fund the creation of Restorative Justice Offices in Oregon to implement Restorative Justice Best Practices including:

  • Accountability metrics

  • Democratic control 

  • Non-carceral policing standard 

• Establish direct-democratic community control of local, and state law enforcement agencies, ensuring that communities most hurt now have the power to hire and fire officers, determine disciplinary action, control budgets and policies, and subpoena relevant agency information within their own community. 

Reforming The Police:​

• Demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies. 

• Invest in community policing. 
   

How:

Only when we get officers into the communities, working within neighborhoods before trouble arises, do we develop the relationships necessary to make our communities safer together. Pay reparations to individuals who were incarcerated or had property seized due to marijuana-related offenses​. 
Create an independent, transparent, 100% civilian-controlled agency that allows for good officers to report the actions of bad officers without fear of retaliation and provides accountability structures to immediately dis-empower and remove individuals who abuse their power from their positions. 

Demands & Requirements:

• Demand police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities, including in the training academies and leadership. 

• Publicly fund required body cameras for law enforcement officers to ensure that they’re held accountable for their actions. 

• Require that body cameras record the entirety of all law enforcement shifts, and render the cameras impossible for the users to disable. 

• Require that footage collected by body cameras be made public within 24 hours of an officer-involved shooting. 

• Require police departments and Oregon's Department of Public Safety to collect data on all shootings and deaths that take place while in police custody, and to make that data public. 

• Require Police officers to be trained to de-escalate confrontations and humanely interact with people who have mental illnesses.

• Abolish drug raids, no one whether its police officers or innocent civilians want to have their lives put at risk for something non-life-threatening.  This is how Breonna Taylor died and we need to do everything in our power to prevent this from happening in our community.

The Prison System: 

• Ban all for-profit prisons, which create incentives to arrest, jail, and detain non-violent offenders in order to keep prison beds full.​​​​​​​​​ 

• End the failed “War on Drugs” and eliminate mandatory minimums which result in sentencing disparities between black and white people. 

• Encourage the United States to legalize marijuana.​ 

• Decriminalize all drug use and treat the opioid and methamphetamine epidemics like a public health emergency. 

• Be able to fully participate in the banking system and protect marijuana businesses from federal prosecution for selling pot.​ 

• Investigate local governments that are using implicit or explicit quotas for arrests or stops. 

• Ban arrest quotas.​ 

• Stop local governments that are relying on fines, fees, or asset forfeitures as a steady source of revenue.​ 

• Require governments funded by civil asset forfeiture to pay reparations to individuals whose property/assets were unfairly seized by a predatory system of policing.​​

Ending Systemic and Environmental Violence​:

• ​Protect low-income and minority communities who are hit worse by the effects of climate change, while also protecting existing energy-sector workers as they transition into clean energy and other jobs.​ 

• Require equal enforcement of environmental, civil rights, and public health laws across all communities. 

• Address the inadequate environmental cleanup efforts of ‘Superfund’ hazardous waste sites in communities of color. 

• Stop the unequal exposure of people of color to harmful chemicals, pesticides, and other toxins in homes, schools, neighborhoods, and workplaces, and challenge faulty assumptions in calculating, assessing, and managing risks, discriminatory zoning, and land-use practices, and exclusionary policies.

• We must ensure all Americans have access to basic financial services and end the exploitative practices of these modern-day loan sharks. To do so we must encourage the federal government to allow banking in post offices. This grants communities that do not have easy access to banking the financial tools needed to be successful in today's economy. We can utilize the 31,000 post offices across the country to provide basic banking services. In fact, we used to do it here. From 1911 to 1967, you could bank at your local post office in the United States. In the middle of the 20th century, our postal banks serviced 4 million customers.

• Mandate cleaner manufacturing processes, renewable energy systems, and safe product designs that end pollution and the use of toxic chemicals while providing safe jobs and other economic benefits for people of color.​​​​ 

• Prosecute individuals in agencies who focused solely on deportation, detention, and suppression of migration that have engaged in human rights abuses during the course of their work.

• Prohibit the use of solitary confinement for punishment. Solitary confinement is torture and has no place in a modern justice system.

• Create a system that allows for citizen recall of any supervising law enforcement officer.

• Require comprehensive bias training for every law enforcement officer, member of the judiciary, and court employee; this includes but is not limited to:  the LGBTQ+ community, racial/ethnic minorities, minority religious groups, mental health conditions, people with disabilities, and immigrants. Include stringent requirements for continuing education to respond to the needs of marginalized communities.

• Capital punishment is morally wrong, inherently “cruel and unusual”, and historically has been particularly harmful against communities of color.