Public safety and law enforcement

Keeping people safe is the most important function of government. But mass incarceration hasn't done it. Criminalizing poverty hasn't done it. Locking people up without treating addiction or mental illness and expecting different results hasn't done it. Colorado's Department of Corrections has a recidivism rate over 50%. We know what works, and we haven't been willing to fund it.

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As attorney general, David will build a public safety system that actually makes us safer, including:

• Creating a Community Health and Safety Fund — directing recoveries from corporate wrongdoers that make us unsafe into behavioral health services, substance abuse treatment, and community-based crisis response in the communities that need it most.

• Fighting the criminalization of poverty. 

• Supporting expansion of restorative justice models, consistent with Colorado law and in the interests of victims and rehabilitative goals of DOC. 

• Working closely with law enforcement while holding it accountable for abuses. David will use the AG's pattern or practice authority to investigate agencies engaged in systemic civil rights violations, and push beyond the Aurora consent decree toward a model of community-based accountability. 

• Holding agencies accountable when they collaborate with ICE in violation of state law — David has already done this, serving the Garfield County Sheriff with a cease and desist and suing the Polis Administration for illegally sharing Coloradans' data with federal immigration authorities. 

• Requiring that law enforcement obtain a warrant before accessing any license plate reader or Flock camera data — your movements are not the government's business without probable cause.

• Defending Colorado's gun safety laws and holding gun manufacturers accountable for profiting off weapons of war.

• Fighting for the safety of all communities.