Yeah. I’m talking about using both the carrot and the stick incentives where there are grant programs, and also legislation to ensure that if one officer witnesses another officer engaging in misconduct, that that officer—the witness—is compelled to actually report that. Because too often, those types of things go unreported.

Your plan would also require police officers to “identify themselves, issue a verbal warning, and give the suspect a reasonable amount of time before the use of force, and to only use deadly force as a last resort.” Would there be any exceptions to that, and are you concerned that that kind of approach would put the lives of police officers in danger?

Yeah, I believe that’s the best approach. I saw research not too long ago that demonstrated that police departments across the country that institute the most restrictive policies in terms of when an officer should use lethal force, both still have good rates of officer safety compared to other departments—but also have lower incidents of innocent civilians being harmed.

The Justice Department performs oversight over local police to ensure that they comply with the Constitution. But some of what you’re talking about is addressing local police policy. Is it constitutional for the federal government to dictate policy for law enforcement at that level?

The question is whether it’s constitutional for the federal government to do that. Well, the way that I approach it is, we will do everything we can under the Constitution to hold police departments and officers accountable. And where we need to use incentives [through] our federal grant process, we can use that.

So this is something that I didn’t see in the plan, but I might have missed it: Would you establish a federal database to track police-involved shootings?

You’re right—what we talked about in the plan is the decertification of officers. But I would like to see a database of officer-involved shootings, because we don’t have a database right now.

Do you think that’s important?

Of course, sure. And I don’t believe the public should have to rely on the efforts of journalists across the country, although those are noble efforts. There should be a comprehensive federal database of officer-involved shootings, of use of excessive force, and also, as I said in that plan, the decertification of police officers.

Your immigration plan would make entering the United States illegally a civil infraction. Why?

No. 1, I believe that’s more effective than what we’re doing now. What we’re doing now is a total disaster. It’s ineffective and it’s inhumane. From 1929 to about 2004, we actually used to treat someone crossing the border as a civil violation, not a criminal one. We started treating it as a criminal violation post-9/11—that’s what’s led to so many of the problems we see today. A huge backlog of immigration cases, incarceration of people, the separation of little children from their mothers. So I would actually treat it as a civil violation and create an independent immigration judiciary, and add more judges and support staff to be able to get people seeking asylum, or who are otherwise in that immigration judicial process, an answer, so people aren’t waiting in limbo for years.