Political Quotes

“let me say a word about gun violence because in the city of Chicago, which I am honored to represent, it breaks my heart what is happening in that city. Not last weekend but the weekend before, there were 37 shootings in the course of a weekend. Seven people died. This weekend, 9 people were killed and 26 others wounded by gunfire. This is the beginning of the summer months. I am afraid that it tells us we still have a massive challenge ahead of us. We have to do more at every single level. Let's start with what the HEAL Initiative is doing and bring some hope to the lives of folks, give them an opportunity for a decent- paying job, let them have an affordable place to live that is safe from gunshots and other threats to a family. We have to work on this together to deal with the criminal justice system. We learned the hard way that simply putting tougher sentences down for something like crack cocaine is not necessarily the answer. In fact, it can backfire, as it did, we learned, over the last 20 years. We have to have sensible criminal sentencing guidelines that punish wrongdoing, of course; keep dangerous people off the street, of course; but give people a chance to rebuild their lives. Many of them will be able to do it. Let me also say that we have to have effective prosecution. We lost one of our best Chicago policewomen just last year. Her name was Ella French.…”