AgdaPkt 2020-07-27 Joint SA PFA - Laserfiche WebLink

Browse Search

concerns we raised last month? How will you change your pattern of actions from the troubling course of the past month? What can we, the people of Redwood City, expect you to do to ensure that we are protected from the police -- and that the pressing needs of education, housing, environmental, and public health systems are better supported as the surging pandemic puts still greater pressures upon us all, especially those with the fewest resources and least political power among us? I urge the City Council to take decisive, courageous action immediately. I implore you to demonstrate to the community that you are truly listening by taking action: take steps to begin defunding the police and shifting funds to other areas of community need this summer. This is a matter of need and justice: amends must be made for the racism, sexism, and homophobia that our police have fueled in our community. Protect the people of Redwood City. Our leaders must guarantee that this pattern will be ended and never happen again -- and that we will reorient our public resources toward a different moral logic that prioritizes housing, education, the environment, and the arts. Other communities and civic leaders in the Bay Area are doing exactly this: proving they are listening by taking actions that shift funding from the police to community needs and undertake changes to policing that go well beyond the minor, symbolic (at most) steps that Redwood City has taken to date. Along with many members of our community, I await evidence of courageous action and a material, major change of course on your part. Sincerely, Paul On Mon, Jun 22, 2020 at 3:42 PM Paul Nauert <paulnauert&umail.com> wrote: 1 Dear Mayor, Vice -Mayor, and City Councilmembers, I hope this email finds you well amid this trying year. I wrote earlier this month to express my concern with the proposed budget priorities for next fiscal year and the moral logic of our budget priorities for our community generally. I write again on this day of the important city council budget vote to share what I've learned and to deliver a petition of 870+ signatures to you. As I wrote earlier this month, I believe that our budget priorities reflect moral priorities. Over this month, inspired by the historic social movements sweeping the U.S. and world, I have been involved in learning more about how city resources are allocated and used. I'm especially grateful to those of you who personally replied to my emails and took time from your busy schedules to dialogue. I've also been listening and learning from many fellow community members, particularly those who have been engaged in years of research, activism, or direct experience with the impacts of policing and the lack of funding for nonviolent community services. Through these conversations, I have become more deeply convinced that reforms, such as those being discussed over the last week by the council, are not enough. Instead, I believe that we must comprehensively reevaluate and reorient our entire prioritization of public resources to defund the police and reallocate those funds to areas of urgent community needs in housing, education, mental and physical health, environmental resilience, the arts, and nonviolent, life -affirming services. I believe that this is possible and