Everyone deserves to feel safe in DC. To do that, we need to do better than responding to crime, violence, and disorder after it’s already happened. We need to prevent violence and crime in the first place.
As Ward 1 Councilmember, Aparna will fight for a District that keeps us safe: great schools and good-paying jobs; stable, affordable housing that keeps people off the streets; and free childcare that’s proven to reduce crime in the long run. By creating economic opportunity, investing in education, and building well-resourced neighborhoods, we’ll make our communities safer for everyone.
While working towards those goals, Aparna will also work to improve public safety, prevent crime, and improve our quality of life. In recent years, the District has also slashed the already-too-low budgets for programs that reduce gun violence or that expand access to mental health and substance abuse treatment. Aparna will fight to reduce those cuts. She’ll fight to fix outrageous and life-threatening delays in DC’s 911 system and to protect immigrant residents from being kidnapped by masked federal agents on our streets. And she’ll fight to make sure that everyone feels safe in DC.
End Life-Threatening Delays in DC’s 911 System
DC’s 911 system is failing us. Callers are put on hold during emergencies, firefighters and ambulances have been sent to the wrong addresses, and the District's system has “long response times that fall short of national standards.” For someone having a heart attack or a stroke, delays could make the difference between life or death. And tragically, too-common system outages have already cost lives in DC.
Aparna will fight to invest in a 911 system that delivers real public safety. DC’s Office of Unified Communications (OUC), which runs the 911 system, is under-resourced and undderstaffed—leaving calls to go unanswered or leading to dispatchers to make mistakes while working long overtime hours. She’ll fight to raise dispatcher salaries and to invest in up-to-date technology that can strengthen responsiveness and reliability.
Aparna will also work to strengthen our 911 system’s emergency triage capacity. From 2019 to 2020, DC implemented a pilot paramedic call taker program that significantly improved emergency triage by routing certain emergency calls directly to Fire and EMS professionals. The program reduced the number of unnecessary ambulance dispatches and increased the number of cases that were effectively managed through a nurse triage line or referral to community clinics. Aparna will work to invest in a lasting, city-wide paramedic call taker program, and advocate for a pilot program to place qualified medical directors on staff to supervise dispatchers and strengthen the system’s triage capacity. She’ll also work to change the culture at OUC to help ensure that dispatchers send DC’s behavioral health professionals to respond to mental health emergencies, rather than overtaxed firefighters and EMS workers.
Prevent Crime and Violence
Expanding Evidence-Based Gun Violence Prevention: DC and other cities have successfully used a data-driven, evidence-backed, and public-health driven approach to prevent gun violence before it happens. Violence interrupters, using the Cure Violence model, are trained, credible messengers who are tasked with peacefully resolving conflicts before they result in violence and preventing retaliation. Violence interrupters and outreach workers are tasked with identifying people at a high risk of being victims or perpetrators of violence, peacefully mediating conflicts, creating individualized risk reduction plans, and helping connect people at risk of involvement with violence with counseling and other services. Violence interrupters are typically people from and highly-respected within the community where they do this important work. Cure Violence programs have a proven track record of success across eight cities and recently contributed significantly to a dramatic reduction in homicides and gun violence in Baltimore.
Aparna will fight to invest in and strengthen gun violence prevention in DC, including the “Cure the Streets” pilot program and the city’s hospital-based violence interruption program. Because the Cure the Streets program is still in a pilot phase, data on its effects in DC remains limited, but early results indicated that, once the COVID-19 pandemic ended, the program is working to reduce gun violence Ward 1 and Ward 4 hot spots. But the program—as well as the Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, where it now lives—has faced constant threats of cuts from Mayor Bowser and the DC Council. This year, the Council cut the program’s budget by more than $8 million, just as it was yielding results. Aparna will fight for continued investment in violence-prevention programs, work to expand the program to more Ward 1 neighborhoods where it’s needed, and she’ll demand that the next Mayor prioritizes evidence-based violence prevention strategies as part of a comprehensive public safety strategy for every neighborhood.
Expanding mental health and addiction treatment: DC needs to provide real solutions for people struggling with mental illness or substance abuse. Aparna will fight to expand DC’s Certified Community Behavioral Health Clinic program, which helps connect people who are suffering on our streets or in our communities to resources that can prevent a mental health crisis or help them break an addiction. She will fight to expand behavioral health services in schools and fund mobile health care crisis units. And she’ll fight to expand access to high-quality health insurance, including by fighting for an expanded Basic Health Plan option—which would allow all residents to buy in to a public insurance program if they chose to—and to restore funding for an expanded DC Alliance Program, including coverage for mental health and substance abuse. We are all safer when everyone in our community can get the mental health care they need.
Reducing Homelessness: Communities are safer when everyone has a stable home. The District can help reduce homelessness by guaranteeing stable housing and mental health treatment—but Mayor Bower has chosen criminalizing homeless people. Aparna will fight to prevent homelessness, including by fully funding eviction protection programs like the Emergency Rental Assistance Program. She’ll work to expand outreach staff and wraparound services for homeless people, ensuring that people receive stable housing, sustained mental health treatment, and safe transitional housing. Ultimately, research shows that the best way reduce homelessness is to provide people in crisis with stable homes, so they can address mental health and other needs. Aparna will fight to expand housing vouchers to move people out of chronic homelessnes—including by filling in for federal funding cuts that leave hundreds of DC residents at risk of losing federal emergency housing vouchers in 2026—and to rapidly build affordable housing for all.
Invest in engaging youth programming: Aparna will fight to keep DC’s young people in school, where they’re safest. That starts by investing in good schools for all, including counselors, social workers, nurses, and other support staff, so that District schools have the resources to keep students engaged in their education and so that students have adults they feel comfortable talking to. Aparna will also fight to fully fund after-school and weekend programs, and revitalize the Marion Barry Summer Youth Employment Program, which sets kids up for long-term success. Aparna will work to expand third spaces for our youth, like expanding rec center hours and providing programming that kids want, so that kids have spaces to be kids. Aparna is also running to make childcare free for every child in DC, which will prevent crime in the long-run—early childhood education is proven to reduce adolescent crime by helping kids stay in school and develop healthy socio-emotional skills.
Expand Our Emergency Response System
Every day, 911 receives thousands of calls— many of them for non-violent concerns like mental health crises, wellness checks, substance use issues, or noise complaints. Right now, police officers are sent to deal with all these different concerns. People dealing with an acute crisis should be seen by a professional that can support them in that moment, not a police officer. And we don’t need police officers to respond to minor concerns like wellness checks. Several cities, including Denver and Albuquerque, are shifting to first-responder models that ensure emergencies are responded to by the people best equipped to deescalate situations and provide people with wraparound support. This means having mental health professionals respond to mental health emergencies, trained counselors respond to folks managing substance use, or social workers respond to people experiencing homelessness—providing better care to people in crisis, reducing dangerous law enforcement encounters, and promoting public safety in the process.
Aparna supports expanding and overhauling DC’s crisis response programs. The District has a patchwork of programs that dispatch health professionals to mental health crises and these other situations, but they are underfunded and need reform. A comprehensive pilot was launched in June 2021, and by that November, just 2% of 911 calls about mental health crises were rerouted to social workers and other health professionals. While that program was expanded and is still being evaluated, more can and should be done. Aparna will fight for this by: investing the resources we need to guarantee that the District consistently sends high-quality health responders to respond to mental health emergencies; consolidating community responders into one program, rather than our patchwork system; ensuring 911 operators are trained to rely on mental health responders, rather than reflexively dispatching police; working to ensure 988 and 911 interoperability, and expanding the size and raising salaries of Crisis Response Teams.
End MPD’s Collaboration With ICE
Trump has sent masked immigration agents into our city to carry out mass deportations, brutally arrest parents in front of their children, and rip families apart. ICE’s dragnet immigration raids are making all of us less safe, from Minneapolis to Chicago to DC. One of Aparna’s top priorities will be ending DC’s collaboration with Trump—starting by ending MPD’s cooperation with his mass deportation agenda.Aparna will fight to strengthen the Sanctuary Values Act, starting by barring MPD from participating in immigration enforcement in any way, including through joint patrols, surveillance and intelligence, and operational support. Aparna strongly supports Councilmember Janeese Lewis George’s legislation to block MPD’s support for Trump’s warrantless arrests. Aparna will also fight for consequences for local officials who blatantly break our sanctuary law; introduce legislation to ban all law enforcement from wearing masks, as well as to require them to display names and badge numbers; and expand the Sanctuary Values Act to all District agencies. And she will call for criminal prosecutions of federal agents who commit crimes that harm DC’s residents, like the murder of Renee Good in Minneapolis.
Invest in Victims’ Services
Aparna will also fight to make sure that the District is serving victims and survivors. Today, victims’ and survivors’ services are underfunded and underresources. Every day, DC’s domestic violence programs serve more than 1,100 survivors and children – but, without adequate resources, they’re still regularly forced to turn away survivors who desperately need help. Worse still, DC’s domestic violence programs are facing DOGE-driven budget cuts at the federal level and Mayor Bowser-driven budget cuts at the local level. Aparna will work to improve victims’ services by:
- Opposing budget cuts for already-underfunded housing programs for domestic violence survivors and their children, from safe emergency shelter to long-term stable housing. Domestic violence is a leading cause of homelessness, and we cannot leave people fleeing violence on the street.
- Opposing cuts to the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants (OVSJG), which funds critical services for victims of violence.
- Increasing funding for DV organizations, including to expand mental mental health services for domestic violence survivors.
- Reducing barriers to accessing victims’ services, from transitional housing to counseling, including by relaxing requirements that survivors of violence make a police report before accessing certain services. While well-intentioned, those requirements ultimately block many victims--such as immigrant victims or domestic violence survivors--from accessing victims’ services.
