The recent murder of a Temple University police officer days after Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro announced he would not issue any execution warrants during his term did not change his mind on the death penalty in Pennsylvania, Shapiro said in an interview with NBC10 @Issue that aired Sunday.
“I do still feel that I will not sign any death warrants as governor,” the first-term Democrat said, explaining how his opinion on the death penalty has evolved from believing it was a “just punishment” when he campaigned for attorney general in 2016.
“The more I thought about the issue the more I thought about the idea of the state being in the business of putting people to death, the more questions I got ... from my 10- or 11-year-old son asking me why is it OK to kill someone as a penalty for them killing someone else," Shapiro said. "When I couldn’t look him in the eye, when I couldn’t pursue the death penalty in the various cases I had as attorney general, when you look at the system in its totality and the challenges therein, I just ultimately felt that this was not something I could do as governor."
Shapiro discussed the issue of crime and efforts in his budget to address it in the interview, conducted the week he submitted his first budget as governor.
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Asked about how to address the issue of kids with guns, Shapiro pointed to proposals in his budget for mental health services in schools and $100 million for violence prevention initiatives through the Pennsylvania Commission on Crime and Delinquency.
In his budget address to the Pennsylvania legislature last week, Shapiro also used an example to show the impact of not having enough resources that described the situation Temple Police Sgt. Christopher Fitzgerald was in the night he was gunned down, working alone in a North Philadelphia neighborhood near Temple. Shapiro talked of an officer being “forced to walk the beat alone” as unacceptable.
Asked whether police departments should commit to only sending officers out in pairs, Shapiro said the decision would be up to law enforcement officials, not the state.
“Whether it’s Officer Fitzgerald or any other police officer we have a responsibility to invest in their safety and security,” he said. “That means more personnel so they don’t have to walk the beat alone, that means more training, more technology, more resources so that they can stay safe. Ultimately a police chief in a particular municipality or in this case college is going to make the decision as to how they deploy resources and how they deploy their women and men in uniform, they will make that judgement, the state won’t.”
Shapiro added he wants to make sure those agencies have enough resources “to ensure cops don’t have to walk the beat alone whether at Temple University or anywhere else.”
Shapiro took office in January after winning an election against Republican state Sen. Doug Mastriano. Asked about a recent report that Mastriano is considering running for U.S. Senate in 2024, Shapiro said he hadn’t heard about that and “we’ll see, I think he didn’t fare too well last time and I’d put my money on Bob Casey.” Shapiro said he would be a strong supporter of current U.S. Sen. Bob Casey, a Democrat who’s up for re-election next year.
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