This week, I heard from Peter Graumann, a retired documentary and news producer who actively supports the Sanders for President campaign.  He encourages all Bay Area Bernie supporters to contribute letters to the editor and blog posts published by newspapers and news broadcasters:

It sickens me that on almost the exact anniversary of the police shooting of Michael Brown in Missouri, yet another black teenager should be gunned down by police on the streets of Ferguson. I know many people share my disgust but most candidates for President have failed to address the issue. Bernie Sanders is an exception. He has labeled such one-sided shootings as “intolerable acts of violence.”

Sanders’ web site declares: “Violence and brutality of any kind, particularly at the hands of the police sworn to protect and serve our communities, is unacceptable and must not be tolerated. We need a societal transformation to make it clear that black lives matter, and racism cannot be accepted in a civilized country.”

As President, Senator Sanders would move to strip away the tanks and machine guns the military supplies to local police agencies. Police training would emphasize the de-escalation of conflicts and require civilian oversight led by the black and brown communities who have the greatest interest in seeing the targets removed from the foreheads of their youth.

I don’t hear any similar approaches from the rest of the field, not to mention the crime-reducing benefits from raising the minimum wage, bolstering trade unions and fully funding the VA—all components of Sanders’ platform.

The header image is adapted from “Garner and Ferguson Protest Seattle 12-4-2014” by Flickr user scottlum, licensed under Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC 2.0).