Tommy Vitolo Interviews 4th District Congressional Candidate- Jake Auchincloss [4:38-7:20]

Another thing that maybe had been bubbling but certainly hadn't exploded was the Black Lives Matter movement. And of course, since George Floyd was murdered by four officers, we've had a lot of conversations in this country around the militarization of the police and police behavior around racial justice. Give us some thoughts there. Tell us how you think we should move forward nationally on these issues and maybe what you would do in Congress to help move us forward. Well, this is an issue where unfortunately it's very easy to talk to talk, but we need people who can walk the walk. I've done so over the last five years as a city counselor and you can take a hard vote to create more housing in a city whose exclusionary zoning doesn't always line up if it's progressive ideals. I've helped make Newton a more inclusive welcoming place, which is why I've got the support of a broad array of housing and civil rights advocates from Newton. I've also taken the lead on police reform as a chair public safety in Newton. Help push for independent police reform task force and have called out inappropriate incidents of racial profiling when I've seen them. Now, I've also talked more broadly at the national level about demilitarizing the police. And I want to put this in a context that I think is too often overlooked. After 9-11, two things started happening in this country that felt unrelated, but I think we're deeply intertwined. One is we started asking our military to police people overseas. I was a veteran of that mission in Afghanistan. And at the same time, we started asking our police and our intelligence services to turn in words and to take almost a counter-espionage tack towards the public sphere here at home. If you see something, say something, and there were threat codes everywhere in airports, felt like you were trying to enter a nuclear vault. And some of that was an appropriate response to heightened risk of terror, but some of it also seeped into our consciousness into the way that we approach public safety. To the point, we've become an overly militarized public safety outfit here in the United States. We need to wind back both of these deleterious trends over the last two decades. One, we've got to end the forever wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and prevent a third war choice in Iran. Secondly, we have got to reinvent public safety at the local level here in the United States. I think the Minneapolis experiment is one that we should all be looking at and looking to copy its successful elements. And I've been someone who's pushed for that at the local level here in Newton as we have an independent police reform task force to look at how we can be imagined public safety.