Crime survivors turned policy drivers champion public safety
Republican-governed states are quietly passing criminal justice reform in large part due to crime survivors advocating for better public safety.
Video Transcript
JAY JORDAN: If you ask any American, do you want to be safe, they're going to be like, yes, I want to be safe. If you ask any American, do you believe that communities all around the country should be safe, and they will say undoubtedly, yes. Where it gets tricky is how to get to that safety.
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My name is Jay Jordan. I'm the CEO of Alliance for Safety and Justice. And I also serve as the National Director for our program Time Done. Alliance for Safety and Justice is a multi-state public policy organization that organizes victims of crime and also people who've had prior experience with the justice system.
Mainly, what we do is we work with those two constituencies to look at better ways to improve public safety in their communities. We run legislation in eight states across the country, so California, Arizona, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Florida. And we are aspiring to go into Georgia and New York as well.
Our sweet spot is looking at budgets at the state level and at the local level to figure out where can we prioritize preventing crime before it happens instead of waiting for it to happen.
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ASWAD THOMAS: My name is Aswad Thomas. I'm the vice president of the Alliance for Safety and Justice. Communities of color are most harmed by the justice system. Communities of color and individuals in those communities are most impacted by violence. But for decades, those communities, those individuals in low-income communities have been least-supported by the justice system.
And so through our work at Alliance for Safety and Justice and Time Done, we really work to elevate the voice and the experiences of those people who are most impacted.
I got into this work. I'm a former basketball player. Through the [INAUDIBLE] to go overseas to play basketball, I was shot twice in my back. And that incident changed my life. I remember being released from the hospital. My doctor was telling me about the physical challenges of surviving these gunshots. But nobody never told me about the psychological effects of being a victim of violence.
I come from a family of gun violence victims. My father was shot in the 1980s. My brother was shot in the '90s. My cousin was shot in the '90s. And myself as well is a victim of gun violence. Five out of 10 males in my immediate family are victims of gun violence. And none of us never received any support or services after.
For me, what really changed my life was learning about the young man who shot me. That young man was also a victim of gun violence four years prior. And I strongly believe that if we invested in safety that includes being and healing, then that young man who was shot at 14 would have gotten support and services to help him heal. And that would have prevented my shooting years later. But unfortunately, that infrastructure of healing, that infrastructure of victim services didn't exist.
So our work at Cross-Wire Safety and Justice really centered around mobilizing the people who are most impacted by these issues and bringing them in districts and bringing them to state capitals to meet with legislators about what safety looks like to them.
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JAY JORDAN: We've been able to pass or win over 50 campaigns. When you look at around the country now, we have a tremendous drug addiction problem, a tremendous mental health problem. It's everywhere. And if we had the conversation holistically around what does public safety actually mean, then we would prioritize drug rehab programs and mental health crisis teams.
And that's where we live at. We live at the intersection of what does the community want? And how do we prioritize and just cut down on wasteful government spending to get at true safety?
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