Daria Liza Avila Chevalier

And I think people understand that, right, where we have folks who are 26 percent of our people are living below the poverty line.

Our budgets are moral documents.

They tell us exactly what we actually prioritize in our society.

And when we have a representative who is voting to send billions upon billions of dollars to endless war and to slaughter, what that tells us is that, you know, they are more concerned with sending that money there than bringing it back to our communities.

In many ways, I think it's an argument about life, right?

It's an argument of making sure that our resources are investing in life and not in death.

And I think we save lives abroad, but we're also saving lives here, right, by investing in our communities here.

You know, I think what is often ignored in these types of questions is that at the heart of our movement for justice is public safety, is making sure that we are actually increasing safety.

I am someone who works at a public defender's office, and I see how the vast majority of the clients we work with are black and brown people who are living through the indignity of poverty.

And the way that we use policing as a response to that, as opposed to actually investing in the things that will increase public safety, that will make their lives more dignified, that will make the lives of our entire community more dignified, I think often gets lost in this conversation.

And in a time where we are spending more and more money to militarize our police force, why is it that we still feel so deeply unsafe?

Mm-hmm.

You know, and the thing is, they are, right?

They're here, right?

And that is how we have been engaging with this question of public safety for so long that, of course, we're not going to get rid of the police overnight.

And that was really never my argument.

I guess it's the only moral way forward.

And what I would like to, you know, to that is that

What I'm saying then and now, and I know that we're probably going to get to this question of how I discussed these issues in the past, but...

What I'm saying is that the moral way forward is to make sure that we are creating the conditions where we all feel so safe in our society that we don't need an institution that is militarized.