We need a community-focused Hennepin County Attorney’s Office that understands our role in public safety, our duty to enforce police accountability, and our responsibility toward racial equity.
Public Safety: I will prioritize prosecuting violent offenses.
We need a criminal justice system that fairly and effectively works for our community. Why? Because we live here. I live here. We need a criminal justice system that focuses on what our community needs, wants, and deserves. One that works at keeping ALL of us safe.
- I will focus our resources on prosecuting murder, drive-by-shootings, sexual assault, sex-trafficking, and domestic assault cases.
- I will advocate for victims. All genders, races, ages, sexualities, religions, abilities, immigrant, non-native English speakers.
- I will work with the newly formed state office on missing and murdered Indigenous People to solve and prosecute these cases.
- I will develop in-house expertise to effectively prosecute hate crimes committed against the Asian, Jewish, Muslim, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized communities
Police Accountability: I will prioritize enforcing police accountability.
Our community deserves to feel safe. No one should feel conflicted or scared to call 911 for help when they need it. No one should have to worry that calling the police might make a situation unnecessarily more dangerous.
I will hold police accountable. It’s the right thing to do and we want to avoid future unrest in our communities. Police accountability means more than punishing bad acts; it means systemic change that engenders more trust and peace.
- I will hold officers accountable for crimes they commit.
- I will have prosecutors train officers on the law and best practices to ensure changed behaviors and rebuild faith in the criminal justice system.
- I will do my part with the hardest thing of all - culture change. When a prosecutor sees evidence that a person was treated or spoken to inappropriately by an officer, I will ask them to immediately tell a prosecution supervisor who can bring this directly to the police department and take appropriate steps.
Racial Equity: I will prioritize addressing racism and systemic racism.
Racism is a way of thinking that has existed and metastasized throughout our shared American history. It exists in all parts of society, including in the criminal justice system. We must address it if we want to have a more just society.
- Racial equity means having a Hennepin County Attorney’s Office that looks like our community, and treats everyone fairly under the law.
- Racial equity means not just hiring a diverse group of lawyers, victim advocates, and legal staff, but taking active steps to retaining employees by creating a warm, integrated, inclusive, and supportive environment to work.
- Racial equity means reviewing prosecution practices that disproportionately impact people of color leading to unjust outcomes. The same behavior should have similar outcomes.
Restorative Justice: We need to prevent crime from occurring in the first place.
We need to reduce crime. It is proven that incarceration does not prevent recidivism, but it does cost taxpayers a lot of money. We need to invest our money more effectively to prevent crime in the first place.
- I will expand treatment courts. Treatment courts address the issues underlying crime, help people find resources so they do not return to a life of crime, and cost far less than jails and prisons.
- I will use other legal tools that are already available to us to more effectively address low-level cases stemming from addiction, mental health, and poverty.
- I will focus on expungements for rehabilitated people who have already paid their debt to society on eligible crimes.
Fair and Just Prosecution: We need to rebuild trust in the justice system.
We need to engage with the community to restore faith in the justice system and give some people faith for the first time. To do that, we need to update our practices to the 21st century.
- I will create a community engagement position within the office so we work with the community to reduce violence and other criminal justice issues.
- I will work on bail reform.
- I will update our drug charging policy. Nixon’s War on Drugs is antiquated, not working well, and disproportionately enforced.
Privacy Rights: Abortion, Contraception, and LGBTQ.
As a woman and a person of color, the U.S. Supreme Court just took away my fundamental right to privacy, and there will likely be a further erosion of our human rights. That is unacceptable. As your next Hennepin County Attorney:
- I will join fellow leaders across the county and choose not to use the U.S. Supreme Court opinion overturning Roe v. Wade as a reason to prosecute people for obtaining an abortion. Read Gov. Walz's executive order here.
- I will work to ensure that other privacy rights, such as contraception, interracial marriage, and gay marriage, similarly do not result in prosecution.
- I will ensure that our county resources are properly spent on prosecuting violent offenders, not persecuting people for exercising control over their own bodies.
