Sahan Journal recently spoke with the Hennepin County Attorney primary candidates about their campaigns. Their answers to each question have been edited for length and clarity.
How do you plan to address racial equity issues in prosecution?
Paul Ostrow:
Everyone deserves a community that’s safe. When we’re looking at racial equity issues, we have to look at how we prosecute, but we also have to look at how we protect the rights of victims. Many of our immigrant communities came to this country from places where they did not feel safe. For immigrants who came to this country believing that they were coming to a place that would protect their safety, we have a sacred obligation to keep everyone safe.
We need to recognize that BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) communities and immigrant communities aren’t monolithic. Everyone has a unique experience. It’s going to be very important to me that we work with culturally competent community organizations and others to make sure that we’re very zealous in terms of advocating for the victims of crimes.
As it relates to racial equity in the court system, the most important part of this has got to be transparency and accountability. My intention is to have the most transparent and accountable county attorney’s office in the history of Hennepin County. And what that’s going to mean is that we will have a public dashboard of cases charged, cases not charged, and dispositions.
We will make sure that we are constantly evaluating that for disparate impacts on people of color and immigrant communities. And we will be very public about that. And we will have public hearings at least twice a year where this information is shared. That’s the best remedy in regaining trust.
Mary Moriarty:
I’m very interested in data. For example, the marijuana sting from about five years ago that [Minneapolis police] was doing downtown—our office was collecting those cases. The county attorney’s office was charging those clients with felony drug sales even though we were talking about really small amounts of marijuana.
We discovered that 46 out of the 47 people were Black, and the county attorney’s office claimed that they didn’t know that. That is unacceptable, first of all, that they said they had no idea. There has to be some system in there. Second of all, I would never charge somebody who had a petty misdemeanor amount of marijuana—who was approached by a police officer and asked to sell it—with a felony drug sale.
We did a lot of work when I was chief public defender on traffic stops. We know we have huge racial disparities in traffic stops, but due to the work we did at the public defender’s office, we also know that for every Black driver stopped for a minor violation and searched, the police found a gun in less than half of 1 percent of the cases. So that means 99 and a half percent of Black drivers were pulled over, searched, and had nothing.
In pretty much every area at the county attorney’s office, we have to be collecting data, we have to be analyzing it from race and gender perspectives, and we have to be putting in place policies that will try to eliminate that.
Saraswati Singh:
I’d move folks over from the drug unit over to the violent crime unit. In the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, do you know the number one type of case they still prosecute? It’s drugs. And where do we have some of the greatest disparities in the criminal justice system? Drugs. It’s mostly low-level drug possession cases.
And when you go into a courtroom in Hennepin County—this is true in many counties—you’ll see mostly BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) people who are charged with drug crime, even though people that identify as white use drugs at a slightly higher rate than people that are Black.
We need to focus on police accountability. When law enforcement abuse their power, it hurts the whole system. We need to do a lot of work of checking the backgrounds of officers in the Minneapolis Police Department and doing whatever the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office can to make sure that when we see those abuses, we respond to them immediately.
I’ve seen it in my work and I’ve learned from it: just because you identify them, it’s not enough. You need someone at the top to actually hold the police department accountable and take action. Otherwise, things don’t change.
Martha Holton Dimick:
I don’t want prosecutors making a decision based on a person’s color, religion, sexual preference, or anything. We cannot have that. I dealt with racial inequality my whole entire life, so I know what it feels like to be discriminated against. And I know that it’s not a fair system and everyone’s not being treated the same way.
Now, I am going to make sure that our cases are tried based off the facts and the law–that’s the only thing that we are supposed to be considering. I still have associations and connections with people on the bench. I can meet with the judges and if there is an issue in terms of sentencings that are not being equally dished out. I know I can meet with my former colleagues and we can sit down and iron this out. I have the relationships with probation, with psych services, with child protection.
I do know for a fact that more Black kids are taken out of their homes than any other race. And that’s something that has to be addressed too, because that certainly is very disruptive to the home environment. I don’t know how successful they are at reacclimating these kids to their homes or where they’re putting these kids.
Because of the high rate of crime, sometimes the office might pull people from other departments to help with the charging. But we also have to have a sufficient number of social workers. I heard that the social workers are being rotated out too often so they don’t get any consistency in addressing the issues with the families.
There’s a lot of steps along the way through the prosecution where there’s discretion. And the county attorney’s office has to examine its own internal bias to ensure that decisions regarding charging, bail, upward departures, certification of juveniles as adults, and sentence requests are not discriminatory. That is what the county attorney can do to change its own practices.
But the cases that are referred to the county attorney from police departments are beyond the direct control of the county attorney, which is why the ability to build partnerships and coalitions to change the entire criminal justice system is necessary.
It’s why being an excellent attorney with a lot of experience in the criminal system is not sufficient to make a difference. You have to have the ability to get people who disagree with you on board with change, or find places where you can agree and work together to make the system fair.
I’m going to bring in the Vera Institute of Justice. This is a nonprofit organization well-respected around the country that looks at social justice issues in general, but one of its skills as a third-party is it goes into different prosecutors’ offices around the country and assesses all the policy, protocols, processes from A to Z to make sure they don’t have inadvertent, unintended bias.
Secondly, I do not believe that we have adequate representation—even if I were to get elected. My office needs to reflect Hennepin County. One of my first priorities will be to hire excellent attorneys, with a focus on folks of color.
All the attorneys in my office, including myself, will go through bias training to make sure we’re trained and educated on dealing with these issues. We will also take an internal look at our policies and practices and look for disparate impact on different groups of people.
Thaddeus “Tad” Jude:
All races would be treated the same. It would be a color-blind application of the law. You wouldn’t have one law depending on if you’re a man or woman.
People have complained to me when I was a judge, saying, “Women aren’t in prison as much as men.” Well, that’s based on behavior. That’s not based on them being a woman or a man. We don’t make those distinctions based on someone’s religion, ethnicity, or sex. It’s based on behavior.