Norfolk's Communities
Norfolk, and the rest of Virginia, are made up of beautifully diverse communities with distinct needs and varying experiences. Ensuring community care for all people is a top priority for Hannah. The first step in this process is to significantly reduce the police budget. Police serve many important roles in communities, but they are not a universal solution to community problems. Rather, resources should be used to invest in healthcare, housing, education, and supportive services. Crime is primarily driven by unmet needs. By ensuring people’s needs are being met, we can move towards true safety in our communities. This is important in addressing another chronic issue in our communities: the school-to-prison pipeline.
Community care ensures the right to safety to all. It must include protecting women’s right to healthcare professionals who listen to their concerns and needs, protecting their access to abortion, and adequate sexual education. Our LGBTQIA+ neighbors need to be continually provided protection from discrimination, harassment, and criminalization of their identities. LGBTQIA+ individuals are incarcerated at higher rates than the general population, particularly if they are identified in multiple oppressed communities. Further, transgender people are often treated poorly, housed with the wrong gender, or thrown into solitary confinement at higher rates simply for being trans.
Hannah stands with every member of the community and is committed to fighting for their rights.
Vision
- Invest in people and community programs, not prisons
- Abolish the death penalty
- End for-profit prisons and detainment centers
- Increased funding for mental health and healthcare in regional jails
- Access to healthcare for all
- Public policy initiatives that provide proper training for public safety officials ensures equitable and just treatment, and provides support for public safety officers
- Legalization and taxation of marijuana at the State level and expunge past records
- Address racism in healthcare
- Continue women’s safe access to health care, birth control, and abortion
- Increase awareness and education on Black maternal mortality
- Expand protections for LGBTQIA+ people of color
Current Legislative Stances
- Support SB 5040: Provides that the Attorney General may assist in the prosecution of certain felony offenses committed by law-enforcement officers during the performance of their official duties
- Support SB 5054: Increases the penalty for displaying noose on property of another, a highway, or other public place with intent to intimidate from a Class 6 felony to a Class 4 felony
- Support SB 5055: Increases the penalty for placing a swastika on certain property with the intent to intimidate from a Class 6 felony to a Class 4 felony & expands the crime to include placing a swastika with the intent to intimidate on the property of another, a highway, or other public place
- Support HB 5053: Conditional release of geriatric, terminally ill, or permanently physically disabled prisoners
- Support HB 2132: Removes the ability to use a person’s actual or perceived sex, gender, gender identity, or sexual orientation, as a defense to any charge of capital murder, murder in the first degree, murder in the second degree, voluntary manslaughter, or assault and bodily wounding-related crimes and is not provocation negating or excluding malice as an element of murder.