Safe Communities Require Serious Leadership

I want every family in Carver County to feel safe in their home, their neighborhood, their school, and their community.

Safety is not created by slogans or fear. It comes from preventing violence, supporting well-trained first responders, addressing mental-health crises before they become emergencies, protecting constitutional rights, and building trust between people and the institutions that serve them.

I do not believe we have to choose between supporting law enforcement and demanding accountability, or between respecting responsible gun owners and taking reasonable steps to prevent gun violence.

We can do both.

Preventing Violence Before It Happens

As a psychologist, I have spent my career trying to understand what happens before someone reaches a crisis.

Prevention matters.

That means improving access to mental-health and substance-use treatment, helping families recognize warning signs, supporting crisis-intervention services, and making sure schools, healthcare providers, and law enforcement have effective ways to respond when someone may be a danger to themselves or others.

Mental-health care alone will not prevent every act of violence. But ignoring people until they reach a breaking point makes everyone less safe.

We should intervene earlier whenever we can.

Responsible Gun Ownership and Gun Safety

I believe responsible gun ownership and reasonable gun-safety laws can coexist.

Law-abiding gun owners should be treated with respect. At the same time, we have a responsibility to keep firearms out of the hands of people who pose a serious danger to themselves or others.

I support universal background checks and responsible measures that reduce preventable violence while respecting lawful gun ownership.

We should also take secure firearm storage seriously, especially in homes with children or someone experiencing a mental-health crisis.

This should not be an argument about whether one side cares about freedom and the other cares about safety.

Responsible ownership means taking both seriously.

Supporting Effective Law Enforcement

We ask police officers, firefighters, paramedics, dispatchers, and other first responders to handle some of the most difficult moments in people's lives.

They deserve the training, staffing, equipment, and support necessary to do those jobs well.

Law enforcement should also have strong partnerships with mental-health professionals, schools, healthcare providers, and community organizations so officers are not expected to solve every problem alone.

And public trust matters.

Good policing depends on people being willing to call for help, cooperate with investigations, and believe that officers will act professionally and within the law.

Accountability strengthens that trust. It does not weaken it.

Keeping Our Kids Safe

Every parent should be able to send a child to school without wondering whether that child will come home safely.

School safety requires more than one solution.

We need secure facilities, effective emergency planning, strong communication, trained staff, mental-health support, threat assessment, coordination with local law enforcement, and reasonable steps to keep dangerous weapons away from people who should not have them.

There is no policy that can eliminate every risk.

But the fact that we cannot prevent everything is not an excuse to stop trying to prevent what we can.

Protecting Safety and Civil Liberties

Government itself can also become a threat to public safety when it ignores the law or treats entire communities as suspects.

During Operation Metro Surge, I saw frightened families and children in our own community afraid to go outside, go to work, or even wait for the school bus.

Michelle and I joined other neighbors as constitutional observers because simply having people present and watching made a difference. If law enforcement is operating legally and professionally, public observation should not be a threat and they should have no need to hide their identities.

I believe laws should be enforced. I also believe they must be enforced lawfully.

No government agency should be above constitutional limits, and no community should have to choose between public safety and basic civil liberties.

Helping Communities Recover

My earlier work with trauma taught me something important: after a frightening event, people need both empathy and action.

You have to listen to what people experienced and understand the impact it had on them. But you also have to maintain enough perspective to determine what should happen next.

That applies to public safety.

After violence, disaster, or community trauma, our responsibility does not end when the immediate emergency is over. Children, families, schools, first responders, and entire neighborhoods may need support long afterward.

A safer community is also one that knows how to recover.

Safety Is Something We Build Together

There is no single law, program, police department, or elected official that can keep a community safe alone.

Safety comes from strong families, good schools, responsible gun owners, effective law enforcement, accessible mental-health care, trusted institutions, prepared communities, and neighbors who are willing to look out for one another.

I saw the power of that during Operation Metro Surge, when people across Minnesota came together to protect neighbors they may not even have known before the crisis began.

That experience reinforced something I already believed:

When communities come together, they are stronger.

As your senator, I will work to prevent violence, support effective law enforcement, protect constitutional rights, strengthen mental-health care, and make sure Minnesota uses evidence—not political theater—to keep people safe.