TLN-9-9-20

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EGACY Yesterday. Today. Tomorrow.

WEDNESDAYS • Sept. 9, 2020

Did you know? In Virginia, you can vote at your local registrar’s office 45 days before Election Day, that’s 9-18-20. Exercise your right and vote!

Richmond & Hampton Roads

LEGACYNEWSPAPER.COM • FREE

Dominion, decriminalization & demilitarization A Q&A with Sen. Jennifer McClellan DAVID DOMINIQUE

A reporter from RVAMag, DD, recently spoke with Virginia state senator and candidate for governor, Jennifer McClellan about her plan for Virginia, from renewable energy and Citizen Review Boards to marijuana legalization and the Green New Deal. Jennifer McClellan, who represents the Richmondbased 9th District, has declared her candidacy in the 2021 race for governor. If successful, she would be the first Black woman elected governor in United States history, and the second woman elected to statewide office in Virginia. An attorney by trade, McClellan was also the first member of the Virginia House of Delegates to participate in a legislative session while pregnant. After E. Donald McEachin’s election to the House of the Representatives, McClellan won her current seat in the state senate in a special election. A former vice chair of the Virginia DNC, McClellan has moved to the left of other prominent Virginia Democrats who have facilitated widely criticized energy contracts and pipelines in collaboration with energy giants such as Dominion. Below, McClellan presents a platform that includes fighting Dominion, demilitarizing the Virginia State police, and decriminalizing all drugs. DD: Senator McClellan, thank you for taking the time to sit with us. Let’s start with the main thing on everyone’s mind right now: policing. As a candidate for Governor, how do you view police reform on a statewide level? JMC: Starting with special session, it’s shifting a couple of different ways. There’s accountability, transparency, and consequences around police misconduct — whether it’s use of force, corruption, the whole nine yards. We need independent investigations from either a Civilian Review Board (CRB) or, at the state level, just a separate entity outside the police. They need to have subpoena power, to be able to recommend, if they find a wrongdoing, that there are consequences and that that is transparent. And that you don’t have a system where a police officer can be found to have done something wrong in one place, and just get transferred and go on as if nothing happened. Police have been used as the first responder for too many issues that are not crime issues. It’s not just mental health, but mental health is a big part of it.

Sen. McClellan with the late Rep. John Lewis I’m carrying a bill to allow localities to do Marcus Alerts and have the Department of Criminal Justice Services and the Department of Behavioral Health to provide guidelines around that. Ghazala Hashmi and I are working together on the CRB, but we’ll also have broad police reform [legislation] – no chokeholds, no no-knock warrants. It’s not just the action of police and the community; it’s also what happens once you’re in the criminal justice system. Making sure that we provide more of what I’ll call “prosecutor mercy” — getting rid of mandatory minimum sentences so that if there is a crime, the penalty for it is proportionate to the injury, and allowing prosecutors to do deferred disposition for certain things. DD: Would you be interested in the CRB being a full-time, paid job for citizens? How do you conceive of the makeup of that board, and how do we give people enough training, confidence, and support to do that job, and do it seriously?

JMC: From the state’s level, we are [structuring] broad guidelines that localities could use to tailor-fit their areas. Having said that, I do think having, if not full-time, at least members who are fully trained so that they fully understand the nature of what law enforcement does on a day-to-day basis, so that they understand the training that law enforcement has. DD: If we only put in place broad legislative guidance that municipalities need to have a CRB, aren’t we leaving undue leeway for racially-biased municipalities to not take it seriously? Aren’t we allowing them to make it toothless? JMC: I’m not ready to share the full details of [Senator Hashmi’s] bill, but we are talking with Princess Blanding and a lot of the advocates here. We are including their feedback in the draft we have. We want to make sure that if a locality has a CRB, it has teeth and it’s independent: that it is not beholden to the police that they’re investigating. Boards of Supervisors or City Councils could have bias, and we’re trying to account for all of that. We’re focusing on enabling legislation, because it’s probably going to take more time to figure out all the best practices that we can put in place going forward. DD: ...About defense contracts and the Navy. Previous governors have seemed somewhat uncritically beholden to these contracts. It’s been said implicitly, and perhaps explicitly, that the economy of Virginia hinges on these contracts. How do you feel about the critical centrality of defense contracts to Virginia’s economy? JMC: If you’re dependent on mechanisms of war, that’s just wrong. We shouldn’t be dependent on war for people to eat. Our number one business is Agribusiness. Our number two industry is Forestry. We should be working to strengthen those, and working to strengthen small businesses to not be as dependent on defense contracting, because then how well our economy does is dependent on if we’re in a state of war, or a state of [war] readiness, or not. That’s contradictory to the view of a beloved community. DD: For the past two months, we have witnessed firsthand the intersection of the police and military in the streets of Richmond. That extends to the Virginia State Police, which you as governor would have control of. State police have arrived in the streets of Richmond with

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