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Democratic Texas Rep. Jasmine Crockett claimed on “Getting Better with Jonathan Van Ness” Wednesday that committing crimes does not make a person a “criminal.”

Crockett was previously a public defender, civil rights and criminal defense attorney, specializing in “defending our most vulnerable among us from exploitation in the criminal justice system,” according to her official biography. She said on the podcast that she has spoken to people who were “committing crimes” and that she “understood” their motivations.

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“nderstanding what ends up having people become criminally impacted really informs so much of what I do legislatively, right?” Crockett said. “So, when people are like, ‘Oh, you know, crime is terrible.’ And yes, it is, right? Like, because when somebody goes out and commits a crime, they don’t typically, you know, say, ‘Well, I’m a D or I’m an R or I’m an I.’ Literally, like it’s about, well, how do you fix it? How do you make communities safer?”

“And I do think that I’m in a unique situation because I was having the conversations with people that were going out and committing crimes. And so I understood what was kind of pushing them there,” she continued. “And so I do want people to know that just because someone has committed a crime, it doesn’t make them a criminal. That is completely different. Being a criminal is more so about your mindset. Committing a crime can come for a lot of different reasons.”

President Donald Trump has made cracking down on crime a significant part of his second-term agenda. For instance, he deployed the National Guard and took other measures to tackle crime in the nation’s capital on Aug. 11, with violent crimes subsequently declining.

However, Democrats have not been as eager to clamp down on crime.

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Nearly all House Democrats voted against Republican legislation aimed at reducing juvenile crime in the nation’s capital on Tuesday as the House of Representatives passed two bills to roll back soft-on-crime policies that the GOP argues embolden repeat offenders and deter local law enforcement.

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