Karen Bass

And

Those years were characterized by a terrible epidemic in the African-American community.

It was the epidemic of crack cocaine and gang violence.

And elected officials, policymakers, the only response they had was to sentence young people was what eventually we would call mass incarceration.

When it was happening, we didn't call it that.

But I certainly knew that it was the wrong way to go.

that crack cocaine was a health crisis, it was an economic crisis, and it was a crisis of divestment from the social safety net, and all three of those converging, and we had a thousand homicides in our city.

We had people dying from crack because at the same time the crack epidemic happened, that's when AIDS exploded as well, and it wasn't called HIV, then it was AIDS.

And so what I tell younger people who don't remember that time period to visualize it, think about COVID affecting one population.

And that's the way it felt like.

It was the desperation and the fear.

And that led to me leaving a very comfortable faculty position at USC Medical School, going to the center of the crisis and starting an organization to try to shift the debate away from criminalization

to a more comprehensive approach.

And so the way the homeless problem exploded in our city, I had flashbacks to the 1990s where the population of Los Angeles was angry

And had tried to tax themselves twice and the problem just got worse.

And I saw us headed down criminalization road again.

And I felt like I, you know, I mean, I loved being in Congress because it was an opportunity for me to work on domestic as well as international issues, which was always a love of mine.

but to come home because I couldn't sit in my comfortable position in Congress and watch the city go backwards.

And it's the same thing I thought when I was at the university, I couldn't stay in my comfortable position when I saw South LA going downhill.

And at the time I was leading an anti-apartheid organization and we were fighting for the freedom of Nelson Mandela.