“We are defunding our public schools, defunding our public pools, defunding our parks, defunding our libraries. When we are taking all of these resources and demanding that every single department – except the militarized one – be cut, we are sending a message about who and what we care about.” - AOC
On The Daily Show last night, Alexandria gave Jordan Klepper a look inside a cutting edge program in The Bronx that is hands down one of the most effective treatments we’ve seen to reduce incidents of violence.
Alexandria secured federal funding for the Stand Up to Violence Program that runs out of Jacobi Hospital (a PUBLIC hospital!) which has shown a 46% reduction in retaliatory violence for participants in just a few short years.
Here’s what Alexandria had to say about violence interruption:
What the data has shown us is that if you respond to violence as a public health issue, instead of as an incarceration issue, violence decreases. And that’s what we’re doing here at Jacobi Hospital [in The Bronx].
There’s security presence and police presence that is standard in any hospital, but that’s not what this program is about. In the traditional response to an incidence of violence – a shooting, or a stabbing – you may go to the ER real quick, and you get patched up, and then you go straight to the precinct.
What we decided to do is say ‘Let's shift the response and see what happens when we make the center of the response a hospital, instead of a jail.’
And we have case workers, we have social workers, we have therapists, and we also have people who themselves were once incarcerated. Some of our most effective people in this work are the former gang members, people who formerly spent time at Rikers.
We are now at a point [in New York City], officially, where most officers are paid more than a teacher with a masters degree serving these same kids involved in these same incidents. We are defunding safety, defunding our public schools, defunding our public pools, defunding our parks, defunding our libraries. When we are taking all of these resources and demanding that every single department except the militarized one be cut, we are sending a message about who and what we care about.
If we want to reduce violent crime and lower the number of people in our jails, the answer is to stop building more of them and instead, build more hospitals and get people mental health care, overall health care, and employment. We must support communities, not throw them away.
In solidarity,
Team AOC
P.S. To watch AOC’s full interview on The Daily Show, click here.
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