Funding housing, healthcare, and education should be the priorities. Redistribution of resources would bring down high crime rates that are symptomatic of poverty, racism, and mental illness.

As a community, we should be concerned about building better safer environment for all - not just spending millions on expanding the prison industrial complex (policing and prisons) to lock away... only to permanently stigmatize them (making it impossible to get access to jobs or housing) which leads to high recidivism rates. The reality is that the carceral system is not doing anything to address root harms, but rather reinforcing them (racism, poverty, houselessness, mental illness, lack of access to affordable healthcare and education).... And yet, while the State and media outlets continue to profit from the incarceration of people, we will only continue to see crime.