Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison argued punishment wasn’t always the best solution when dealing with criminals in a wide-ranging interview on MSNBC’s “PoliticsNation” on Sunday.
Host Al Sharpton cited FBI data to claim crime went down in 2023 but argued the public perceives crime to be surging. The MSNBC host blamed this on messaging from the right, to which Ellison agreed.
“We need to continue to be aggressive about protecting people,” Ellison said, but added that “some of the right-wing prescriptions for how to deal with crime are wrong and are going to bring us back to the bad old days.”
The far-left attorney argued that addressing crime isn’t just about punishing criminals but also about deterring them. For instance, it is the responsibility of auto manufacturers to make sure their cars are not “tempting” thieves, he said.
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“But we have to go upstream, and we got to make sure that the automobiles are not so easy to steal that they are a tempting, attractive nuisance for young people. Right now we are investigating two major automakers because their cars are dramatically too easy to steal for young people,” he claimed.
Ellison continued to take the blame off of criminals, suggesting law enforcement needed to go after others on the “chain of criminality.”
“We have to go upstream on crime and not just say we are going to only deal with the criminals, the people on the street. There are a lot of people involved in the chain of criminality, starting sometimes for people who are members of the country club, resulting in tragic circumstances for victims on the street,” he continued.
He told Sharpton that dealing with crime should be “comprehensive” and less about “throwing people in jail.”
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“We also have got to understand that it is not all about punishment all the time. Sometimes it is about giving people another opportunity,” he argued, pointing to preventative measures like making sure kids stay in school.
The Democrat has aligned himself with Defund the Police activists in the past, and supported a Minneapolis ballot measure that was aimed at replacing the city’s police department with a new department of public safety.
Last year, Ellison blamed auto manufacturers Kia and Hyundai for a spate of car thefts, going as far as to open an investigation into whether the manufacturers had omitted “industry-standard, anti-theft technology” on some of their automobiles.
“Kia and Hyundai vehicles might as well have a giant bumper sticker that says ‘steal me’ on them,” Ellison said last March.
Fox News’ Joe Schoffstall and Michael Lee contributed to this report.
