Minnesota AG Keith Ellison Defends Record On Crime In Heated Debate

Minnesota Lawyer Basic Keith Ellison (D) defended himself towards prices that he helps police funding cuts and accused his Republican challenger, Jim Schultz, of posing a menace to abortion rights of their fourth and remaining debate on Sunday evening.

“I’ve requested for actually hundreds of thousands of {dollars} over the course of 4 years of my time period in order that we are able to put violent criminals in jail when counties name on us to do it,” Ellison declared within the debate, which was hosted by KSTP-TV.

“Defunding the police was by no means a good suggestion and it was even worse phrasing,” he added later within the debate.

Ellison, a former public-interest lawyer, state lawmaker, and member of Congress, has certainly by no means supported defunding the police. “I don’t suppose the binary is pro-police/anti-police,” he informed HuffPost for a June 2020 profile.

However Schultz blasted Ellison specifically for supporting a “sure” vote on Query 2, a 2021 referendum in Minneapolis that might have changed town’s police division with a extra multifaceted division of public security.

Schultz, a Harvard-educated hedge fund legal professional, known as the referendum, which voters rejected, a plan to “defund and dismantle Minnesota’s largest police drive.”

“That’s not simply dumb or incorrect,” he mentioned. “It’s immoral.”

Ellison famous that Fox 9, a neighborhood TV station, has known as efforts to conflate help for the passage of Query 2 with “defunding” the Minneapolis police drive “deceptive.”

“What folks in Minneapolis have been on the lookout for is a greater means ahead,” he mentioned.

If the referendum had handed, Minneapolis would have been free to implement a extra public-health-driven strategy to tackling crime that advocates hoped would mix conventional regulation enforcement strategies with extra progressive outreach strategies. Town would now not have been required to keep up a sure ratio of cops per inhabitants, however the metropolis council would have been free to allot as a lot funding for officers because it wished.

Many different distinguished Minnesota Democrats, together with Gov. Tim Walz (D) and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey (D), nonetheless advocated towards Query 2 and it ended up being defeated by 14 share factors.

Ellison, against this, joined extra left-leaning figures like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) in supporting the referendum’s passage. Omar and Rep. Cori Bush (D-Mo.), who campaigned for Ellison earlier within the week, have embraced each the “defund the police” slogan and the underlying name to scale back police funding in favor of different social packages.

“The actual fact is, Keith Ellison is on an island with a number of radicals across the nation,” Schultz mentioned. “And that’s consultant of how excessive he’s in Minnesota.”

Schultz additionally sought guilty Ellison for failing to do sufficient to stem the uptick in violent crime in Minnesota, claiming that Ellison has “sat on his fingers” amid the surge in crime.

However Ellison famous that the legal professional basic solely takes on the prosecution of crimes on the invitation of county prosecutors. Within the 50 such instances that Ellison has presided over, the legal professional basic’s workplace has an ideal conviction fee, he mentioned.

“My opponent has by no means set foot in a courtroom and is principally simply fear-mongering,” he mentioned.

If Schultz has tried to make crime the theme of the marketing campaign, Ellison has centered on abortion rights, the place he believes he has a bonus over Schultz.

He maintains that Schultz can’t be trusted to guard Minnesotans’ proper to a “protected, authorized” abortion.

Ellison famous that Schultz has served on the board of the Human Life Alliance, an anti-abortion group, and promised throughout the GOP major to “go on offense, offense, offense” towards abortion rights if elected.

Schultz claimed that he wouldn’t let his anti-abortion views get in the best way of defending Minnesota’s current abortion rights protections in courtroom.

“I mentioned [during the primary] that I cannot leverage the Lawyer Basic’s Workplace of Minnesota for abortion coverage,” he mentioned. “I mentioned that overtly and folks on the fitting attacked me and now Keith is attacking me from the left.”

Ellison warned folks towards believing Schultz’s assurances, evaluating them to these of conservative Supreme Court docket justices who instructed, as nominees, that they’d uphold a constitutional proper to abortion however voted to overturn it this previous June with the choice in Dobbs v. Jackson Ladies’s Well being Group.

“All of them mentioned they’ll protect the fitting to abortion. All of them flipped it,” Ellison mentioned. “He’s going to do the identical factor.”

After a hard-fought election win in 2018, Ellison earned nationwide fame for his function within the profitable prosecution of Derek Chauvin, the previous Minneapolis police officer convicted of murdering George Floyd in Might 2020.

However almost two and a half years after Floyd’s dying, a nationwide rise in violent crime that has not spared Minnesota has put Ellison on the defensive.

Polling reveals Ellison and Schultz locked in a lifeless warmth for the state’s high regulation enforcement function.