2022_09_New_Jersey_Monthly
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the latest and greatest on<br />
what’s happening<br />
at the<br />
JERSEY SHORE<br />
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njmonthly.com/newsletters<br />
POLITICS<br />
this area need? What can we do? How<br />
is it gonna make your business more<br />
successful? But more importantly,<br />
how does it make our neighborhoods<br />
more successful?<br />
Rather than stripping resources,<br />
you advocated for collaboration<br />
with police. How did you land on that<br />
approach at a time when the topic of<br />
policing is heavily debated, especially<br />
in communities of color? What<br />
do you hope those efforts look like in<br />
the West Ward moving forward?<br />
I landed on that space from my own<br />
experiences. Policing is tough, and I<br />
salute all of the police out there. At a<br />
younger age, I might not have talked<br />
like this, because we always looked at<br />
police as being bad guys, because they<br />
did bad things to people who look like<br />
me and our communities. But police<br />
are not all bad.... I believe that if you<br />
bring more police presence, you deter<br />
what’s going to happen with crime….<br />
We don’t want to defund the police,<br />
but we wanna take money and utilize<br />
it in our community to be proactive.<br />
Things like officer violence and<br />
prevention, programs that train them<br />
to be able to deal with the community.<br />
Put more police that actually live in<br />
our community. If they don’t live in<br />
our community, they have to spend<br />
certain hours and certain time in<br />
those communities.<br />
You mentioned making where you<br />
come from better. You’ve spent most<br />
of your life helping the West Ward.<br />
Do you have political aspirations<br />
beyond the ward and <strong>New</strong>ark?<br />
No, right now my political aspirations<br />
are to make the West Ward the best<br />
ward that I can make it. I always treat<br />
my journeys like a highway.... On this<br />
highway, you’ve got headlights on your<br />
vehicle. You only see 200 feet in front of<br />
you, but that’s when you’re not moving.<br />
When you move a little bit, you see another<br />
200 feet…. You start to see things<br />
that you couldn’t see off in the distance.<br />
You start to see exit ramps and onramps<br />
and destination signs that you<br />
didn’t even know you would be interested<br />
in. So I can’t really answer that in<br />
its completion because my journey has<br />
just begun .<br />
38 SEPTEMBER <strong>2022</strong> NJMONTHLY.COM
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