Amy Klobuchar was a tough-on-crime prosecutor. Will a diverse Democratic base accept her record?
Sen. Amy Klobuchar, a Minnesota Democrat who is running for president, listens to former U.S. labor secretary Robert Reich speak during an event in D.C. on March 5.
Klobuchar, then 42, declined to bring charges against the officers, and a grand jury she convened did not indict them. “We were already a community in distress when she became Hennepin County attorney,” said Nekima Levy Armstrong, a civil rights attorney and former president of the Minneapolis chapter of the NAACP. “Rather than taking steps to help mitigate some of those concerns and issues, during her tenure in office, her policies exacerbated the situation.”
“When I first came into the office, the major thing I heard from the African American community, bar none, was that there were a bunch of their kids that were killed by gangsters,” she said in an interview with The Washington Post. “We simply went in and did our jobs. We prosecuted those cases and got results for our community.”
“I don’t have a perfect record. But I promise you, every single day in that job, I tried to put myself in other people’s shoes to try to do the right thing,” she said. During her campaign, Klobuchar vowed a zero-tolerance approach toward nonviolent crimes by young people, including petty theft and vandalism.
In the interview, Klobuchar cited figures from the Vera Institute of Justice showing that the prison incarceration rate for African Americans in the county declined by about 13 percent during her tenure. Klobuchar’s campaign noted that she was one of about a dozen original co-sponsors of the First Step Act, a sweeping bipartisan measure aimed at lowering the recidivism rate. It received broad support in Congress and became law in December of last year.
In the interview with The Post, Klobuchar acknowledged that her rhetoric about not letting juvenile crime “go unpunished” might have been perceived as harsh by some African Americans but said her actions were directed by what county residents wanted. Police said Burns struggled violently for several minutes and that they responded with a sanctioned form of neck hold. A lawyer for the officers later called the case a “bad combination of circumstances for the guy,” pointing to Burns’s history of high blood pressure and heart disease as possible factors in his death.
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