Julián Castro: ‘This Is the Time to Make Change’

Julián Castro was ahead of the curve. The former San Antonio mayor and secretary of housing and urban development failed to get traction in the 2020 Democratic primary, but his campaign was focused on the issues of racial and economic justice that are now at the center of the national debate over discrimination in America, particularly in policing.

When I spoke with Castro a year ago, he was already proposing the creation of a federal database for police misconduct, the imposition of rules compelling cops to report impropriety by fellow officers, and the curtailment of qualified immunity, the legal doctrine that makes it nearly impossible for police who abuse their power to face consequences in civil court. I caught up with Castro for a (socially distant) interview in San Antonio, where we discussed whether Americans should defund the police, what to do about the national housing crisis, and whether he plans to run for statewide office in a changing Texas that looks more hospitable to Democrats every year. What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation.

Adam Serwer: Your campaign identified a crisis in American policing a year ago. What do you think should be done at a federal level to fix policing?

Julián Castro: At the federal level, the most important thing is, No. 1, to support local communities in reimagining public safety, and then to take several concrete steps to prevent police violence: banning choke holds and strangleholds, getting rid of qualified immunity, creating a database of officers that have been disciplined or terminated that personnel departments across the country are able to access that’s seamless. We have a spotty version of that now. The problem is that it’s not complete. I think that it only includes officers that have been decertified. All states have different standards on who gets decertified and who doesn’t. So that needs to be coordinated at the national level.

I also think that we need to give local communities the resources to transition into that reimagining of public safety and investing in mental-health professionals, social workers, and housing professionals, to deal with two groups of people that police often respond to that they shouldn’t really need to respond to the vast majority of the time: people who are homeless, who have been