Safety

Let’s develop a comprehensive approach to keeping Boulder safe.

Our roads are deadly and becoming more dangerous. Gun violence, suicide, and opioids continue to plague us. We are in a poverty epidemic that is fueling homelessness. Poverty is also undermining our health and safety, a problem that is disproportionately impacting marginalized groups including people experiencing homelessness. We face a growing danger of wildfires, floods, and other increasingly threatening weather events.

The nature of our public safety threats are varied. Some of the biggest ones are chronic problems we have gotten so used to that we often fail to recognize them. Others are about the risks of very low-frequency events that will be catastrophic. Others are emerging problems that we don’t understand very well.

Furthermore, Boulder should not and cannot tolerate violent crime, bike thefts, and other property crimes. We need to ensure the police have the resources and the autonomy to stop crimes that harm our community from happening and investigate those that have occurred.

As a member of City Council, I will work to:

• Establish a clear centralized view about the objective dangers facing our community, with a chief safety role that evaluates hazards varied in nature and integrates our understanding of options in the near, medium, and long term.
• Become more proactive about investing in preventive measures and critical services that are focused on systems-based solutions to reduce the magnitude of our problems and get the most out of resources available.
• Bolster our systems for monitoring emerging issues in a world that has increasingly complex environmental and social pressures while enriching our programs of outreach, hazard reduction, and preparation with the public regarding emergency management.