SAN FRANCISCO — Julián Castro revealed his plan to reform policing across the country at MoveOn’s “Big Ideas Forum” on Saturday in San Francisco.
“The system is broken, so let’s fix it,” the Democratic presidential candidate said, after receiving a standing ovation for listing the names of high-profile black victims of police action, including Tamir Rice, Stephon Clark, Eric Garner, Philando Castile, Pamela Turner, Jason Pero, Antonio Martin, and Laquan McDonald.
Rice, a 12-year-old Cleveland resident, was killed by police in 2014 while playing in a public park with a BB gun. Clark was shot eight times — including six times in the back — and killed by two Sacramento Police Department officers while talking on his cellphone in the backyard of his grandmother’s house in 2018. Eric Garner died after New York City police put him in a chokehold for allegedly selling loose cigarettes, which he denied. Castile, a licensed gun owner and school district employee, was shot by police during a traffic stop. His death was livestreamed on Facebook by his girlfriend, whose four-year-old daughter was in the car with the couple at the time.
The 44-year-old Turner, who suffered from mental illness, was shot earlier this year by an officer and Baytown, Texas, neighbor who knew of her paranoid schizophrenia when he tried to arrest her near her apartment complex for outstanding warrants. The 14-year-old Pero was shot by a sheriff’s deputy in Wisconsin in 2017 after he called in a report of a man with a knife that matched his own description and lunged at the deputy who arrived. Missouri resident Martin was shot in 2014 by police outside a convenience store after drawing a gun on officers who confronted him. Dashcam footage revealed Chicago 17-year-old Laquan McDonald was shot 16 times while walking away from police, who suspected him of having a knife and breaking into cars.
Castro compared those deaths with the situation of Dylann Roof, a white supremacist whom the police detained without incident following the 2015 shooting at a black church in Charleston, South Carolina, that left nine people dead.
Castro, an Obama administration housing secretary, was one of eight White House hopefuls to address the gathering of liberal activists but was the only presidential prospect to use the opportunity to propose a new policy. The former mayor of San Antonio, Texas, will formally unveil the platform on Monday.
His reforms are aimed at mitigating overaggressive policing, ensuring departments and individual officers are held accountable for misconduct, and healing the divide between cops and the communities they are supposed to protect, he said. Some of his suggestions include demilitarizing police units, introducing national standards for when officers should use force, ending stop-and-frisk practices, and creating mandatory reporting procedures and a public database.
“I’m convinced that we need a president who is going to be a president for everybody, but also one is not afraid to tackle even the toughest issues and the most controversial ones,” Castro said.
He has previously released immigration and education plans.
