MEASURES FOR PROMOTING RACIAL JUSTICE IN AMERICA

Author: Bernie Sanders

Physical Violence

1. We must demilitarize our police forces so they don’t look and act like invading armies.
2. We must invest in community policing. 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. Among other things, that means increasing civilian oversight of police departments.
3. We must create a police culture that allows for good officers to report the actions of bad officers without fear of retaliation and allows for a department to follow through on such reports.
4. We need police forces that reflect the diversity of our communities, including in the training academies and leadership.
5. At the federal level, we need to establish a new model police training program that reorients the way we do law enforcement in this country. With input from a broad segment of the community including activists and leaders from civil rights organizations we will reinvent how we police America.
6. We need to federally fund and require body cameras for law enforcement officers to make it easier to hold them accountable.
7. We need to require police departments and states to collect data on all police shootings and deaths that take place while in police custody and make that data public.
8. We need new rules on the allowable use of force. Police officers need to be trained to de-escalate confrontations and to humanely interact with people who have mental illnesses.
9. States and localities that make progress in this area should get more federal justice grant money. Those that do not should get their funding slashed.
10. We need to make sure federal resources are there to crack down on the illegal activities of hate groups.

Political Violence

1. We need to re-enfranchise the more than two million African-Americans who have had their right to vote taken away by a felony conviction, paid their debt to society, and deserve to have their rights restored.
2. Congress must restore the “pre-clearance” formula under the Voting Rights Act, which extended protections to minority voters in states and counties where they were clearly needed.
3. We must expand the Act’s scope so that every American, regardless of skin color or national origin, is able to vote freely.
4. We need to make Election Day a federal holiday to increase voters’ ability to participate.
5. We must make early voting an option for voters who work or study and need the flexibility to vote on evenings or weekends.
6. We must make no-fault absentee ballots an option for all Americans.
7. We must automatically register every American to vote when they turn 18 or move to a new state. The burden of registering voters should be on the state, not the individual voter.
8. We must put an end to discriminatory laws and the purging of minority-community names from voting rolls.
9. We need to make sure that there are sufficient polling places and poll workers to prevent long lines from forming at the polls anywhere.

Legal Violence

1. We need to ban prisons for profit, which result in an over-incentive to arrest, jail and detain in order to keep prison beds full.
2. We need to turn back from the failed “War on Drugs” and eliminate mandatory minimums which result in sentencing disparities between black and white people.
3. We need to take marijuana off the federal government’s list of outlawed drugs.
4. We need to allow people in states which legalize marijuana to be able to fully participate in the banking system and not be subject to federal prosecution for using pot.
5. We need to invest in drug courts and medical and mental health interventions for people with substance abuse problems, so that they do not end up in prison, they end up in treatment.
6. We need to boost investments for programs that help people who have gone to jail rebuild their lives with education and job training.
7. We must investigate local governments that are using implicit or explicit quotas for arrests or stops.
8. We must stop local governments that are relying on fines, fees or asset forfeitures as a steady source of revenue.
9. Police departments must investigate all allegations of wrongdoing, especially those involving the use of force, and prosecute aggressively, if necessary. If departments are unwilling or unable to conduct such investigations, the Department of Justice must step in and handle it for them.

Economic Violence

1. We need to give our children, regardless of their race or income, a fair shot at attending college. That’s why all public universities should be made tuition free. We should pay for that with a tax on Wall Street speculators.
2. We must invest $5.5 billion to create 1 million jobs for disadvantaged young Americans who face high unemployment rates and job-training opportunities for hundreds of thousands of young adults. We should pay for that by ending the loophole allowing Wall Street hedge fund managers to pay a lower tax rate than nurses or truck drivers.
3. We must increase the minimum wage to a livable wage of $15 an hour by 2020 —which will increase the wages of about half of African-Americans and nearly 60 percent of Latinos.
4. We must invest $1 trillion to put 13 million Americans to work rebuilding our crumbling cities, roads, bridges, public transportation systems, airports, drinking water systems and other infrastructure needs. We should pay for that by closing offshore tax loopholes.
5. We must pass federal legislation to ensure pay equity for women.
6. We must prevent employers from discriminating against applicants based on criminal history by “banning the box.”
7. We must promote policies to give the formerly incarcerated an opportunity for education, including expanding the Second Chance Pell Pilot Program and reentry programs.
8. We need to ensure access to quality affordable childcare for working families, especially for parents who work non-traditional hours.
9. We must fundamentally re-write our trade policies and rebuild factories that were closed as a result of bad trade deals.

Environmental Violence

1. We must protect low-income and minority communities, who are hit first and worst by the causes and impacts of climate change, while also protecting existing energy-sector workers as they transition into clean energy and other jobs.
2. We must have equal enforcement of environmental, civil rights and public health laws.
3. We need to address the inadequate environmental cleanup efforts of Superfund hazardous waste sites in communities of color.
4. We must 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.
5. Federal agencies must develop and implement clear, strategic plans to achieve climate and environmental justice and provide targeted action where the needs are greatest.
6. The environmental analysis for a permit for a polluting facility must consider the disparate and cumulative environmental burden borne by a community.
7. States should evaluate and report progress made on addressing climate and environmental injustice.
8. We need to mitigate climate change and focus on building resilience in low-income and minority communities.
9. We must promote 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.