Steve’s plan for safety and justice
The Commonwealth’s Attorney is the community leader who shapes its justice system. Thousands of cases come through the Commonwealth’s Attorney’s office each year and it’s the job of the officeholder to ensure the community’s values are front and center when determining how to treat those cases. As the elected leader of the criminal justice system, the Commonwealth’s Attorney is responsible for making the system transparent, pursuing justice for all, and keeping the community safe.
Steve is the only candidate in the race for Fairfax County Commonwealth’s Attorney to have a detailed plan on how to keep our communities safe, seek justice for all, and treat everyone with equality. You can read the full plan here. Only through seeking justice can we achieve long-lasting public safety. Below is an overview of Steve’s plan.
Community Engagement
You should know your elected officials and trust that they represent your values. Our Commonwealth’s Attorney should represent our values every day, not just when it’s time for an election. As a veteran, a father, and an active member of our community, Steve will make sure that the values we share are always front and center.
To improve trust and engagement between the Office of the Commonwealth’s Attorney and the community, Steve will prioritize:
Creating a Community-Focused Justice System - The decisions made by the Commonwealth’s Attorney often have a direct and substantive impact on the lives of those that call Fairfax home. With this responsibility in mind, the Commonwealth’s Attorney must be a visible and accessible fixture in the community.
Increasing Transparency - Our criminal justice system affects too many lives and too much of our community to be shrouded in mystery. As a member of the Fairfax County Police Civilian Review Panel, Steve fought to bring greater transparency and attention to the County’s criminal justice system. He’ll do the same as your Commonwealth’s Attorney. Steve will collect and distribute information regarding the statuses of his office’s priorities.
Moving Past “Tough-on-Crime” Policies - Tough-on-crime policies are short-sighted and hurt our community. They create a community-wide cycle of decreased opportunity, increased poverty, and increased crime. People who are unnecessarily criminalized, lose their jobs and can’t support their families. Even after they’re released and have “serve the time”, it’s harder to find decent work, making it that much more difficult to make an honest living. Steve will work to create a smarter criminal justice system that will produce the just, equitable, and forward-looking Fairfax County we want.
Equality
Our justice system should be a place where every person gets a fair shake. Unfortunately, too many families and individuals are falling through the cracks in Fairfax County. As your Commonwealth’s Attorney, Steve will lead the way to ensure everyone receives equal treatment under the law, regardless of who they are, where they live, or how much money they have. Steve’s plan to bring about this change by:
Ending the Use of Cash Bail - Cash bail undercuts one of the most critical pillars of our criminal justice system: the idea that rich and poor have the same access to justice. Under a cash bail system, whether a person sleeps at home or in a cell can be determined solely by how much money they have. Ending cash bail not only ends an injustice, it promotes a social good. Communities are better when people are working and supporting their families. Keeping families together as long as possible helps avoid a situation where increased poverty and familial instability leads to decreased opportunity and more crime.
Rooting Out Systemic Discrimination - To fix systemic discrimination, we need to first get data on the drivers of the discrimination. Independent organizations are ready, willing, and able to collect data on the office’s actions at every key decision-making point—all at no cost to the taxpayer. Steve will invite such an organization into the office and ask the organization to sort the data by race, gender, income, and location to determine exactly where disparities appear. In response to the data, Steve will create policies aimed at fixing the disparities. Steve will publicly release the data, the office’s plans to address the disparities, and subsequent data showing the office’s progress.
Justice for All
Fairfax County is full of great schools, incredible first responders, and beautiful neighborhoods. That’s why it’s so distressing when we hear about a crime committed in our backyard. Steve will make sure cases are handled in an appropriate fashion—focusing on real criminals, getting closure on the toughest cases, and reconstructing trust between the people and their justice system. In order to achieve safety, our criminal justice system must focus on seeking justice, not vengeance.
In order to achieve long-lasting public safety, Steve’s plan includes the following priorities:
Seeking Justice, Not Statistics - A prosecutor’s goal isn’t merely to win cases, they have a higher calling: to seek justice. Steve’s office won’t overcharge individuals or threaten them with charges that carry harsh mandatory minimum sentences just to bully them into guilty pleas. Nor will Steve’s office move forward with charges that are dubious or the product of unconstitutional investigatory acts. Steve’s office will be guided by the same principle he learned as a federal prosecutor in President Obama’s Department of Justice: the prosecution “wins its point whenever justice is done by its citizens in the courts.”