Okay, we are recording.
Thank you for this interview today.
I want to be able to say your name
correctly. Can I have you slowly say
and spell your first semester?
Yeah, it's Yogesh Chavla.
It's Y-O-G-E-S-H.
Last name is Chavala, C-H-A-W-L-A.
And for our records, your district.
Yes, I'm the Dane County Board
Supervisor for District 6, where
we are right now.
So District 6, and that's where
we're here right now, tell me about
the mood of your constituents
in the last 24 hours.
Our district has seen too many
officer-involved shootings, as has
this entire country.
We had just behind us Polly Heenan,
we had Tony Robinson, and
something needs to change.
We need accountability, we need
a transparent, independent
investigation, and most of
all what we need is justice.
So you said it's happened
one too many times.
What's not changing?
What's not changing is there's not
enough de-escalation, there
are poor training methods, and then
there is a tendency to
go to the most lethal
form of
subduing somebody as possible.
When you pull out a gun, someone is
gonna die, and we've seen it
happen time and time again, and
we need that to change now.
But we're hearing, no, there's
trainings of de-escalation.
It wasn't used here.
So what's happening with these
trainings?
You know, I don't know specifically
what's happening with those
trainings, but what I can tell you
is when you have in
a four to five block radius,
multiple officer involved shootings
and we know them and we can
name all them and they're seared
into our memory.
Something is intensely
wrong and there needs to be a
sharp correction to it.
And if it doesn't happen,
we're not going to leave these
streets. We'll be here every night
until we get justice for the family.
Are you surprised at the number of
people that are here?
The only thing I'm surprised by is
that there's not more people here,
and I think the numbers will swell
and grow.
And as we finish up, as a leader,
the emotions and the tension is
really, really high.
How do you step in?
So just on this street last night,
I was helping de-escalate a
situation where we had a
police car surrounded by people.
We wanna make our point that we
want systematic change.
We want the focus to be on
the change, changing the process,
changing the system, so we don't
want any distractions to happen.
So what we want to do is we wanna
practice what we are asking law
enforcement to do, to de- escalate
and to come up with community-based
solutions.
Are you hopeful of what will happen?
I'm always hopeful it'll happen, but
today's a hard day to be hopeful.
Thanks.
Thanks. Let me give you my card.
Yeah.