Rocco for State Senate — SD 65

In 2020, Minnesota’s Democratic leadership did not just criticize bad policing. They ran a political war on the job itself. They told officers to hesitate. They told cities to shrink departments. They treated an arrest as a crime if the crowd demanded it. Six years later the bill is still due: fewer cops, slower 911, and a generation of officers who learned that doing the job can end in a cage.

Rocco’s position is simple. Let cops be cops again. Back the men and women who still show up. Stop treating law enforcement as the enemy of the state that hired them.

Defund was not a slogan. It was a plan.
On June 7, 2020, nine of thirteen Minneapolis City Council members stood in Powderhorn Park and pledged to dismantle the Minneapolis Police Department. That was a veto-proof majority. The follow-through was a charter amendment to replace MPD with a “Department of Community Safety and Violence Prevention.” The Charter Commission blocked it from the 2020 ballot. A later version went to voters in 2021 as Question 2. Voters rejected it. The intent was not in doubt.

When dismantling failed, the council still moved money. In December 2020 it shifted about $8 million from the police budget to violence-prevention and mental-health programs and parked more hiring money where the council could control the tap. Attrition did the rest.

The department emptied.
Before May 2020, Minneapolis had roughly 880 to 920 sworn officers. The force fell into the mid-500s — the lowest in decades — and stayed under the city charter’s minimum for years. Overtime exploded because there were not enough officers left. Statewide, union leaders have described a shortage measured in the thousands. That is what “defund” looks like after the cameras leave.

Democrats later claimed “defund the police” was a Republican talking point. In 2020 they said the words, pledged the dismantling, cut the budget, and watched the ranks collapse. In 2024 they denied the record. Rocco’s campaign has said it plainly: they think voters will forget.

They put officers in the dock for doing the job.
Governor Tim Walz assigned Attorney General Keith Ellison to take over the George Floyd case from the county attorney. Ellison raised the charge against Derek Chauvin and charged the other three officers on the scene — J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao — with aiding and abetting. State and federal cases followed. Chauvin received 22 years and 6 months in state court. The other three were convicted or pleaded in related cases.

Rocco’s position is not that George Floyd’s death was a joke. It is that the process was not a fair trial. The case was tried under riot pressure. National Democrats and activists warned of violence if the verdict was not the one they wanted. Venue stayed in the blast radius of the same politics that burned the Third Precinct. Rocco has called for a federal pardon and a state retrial or dismissal, including a neutral venue such as Warroad in Roseau County, and has backed attorney Gregory Joseph’s effort to attack the state case. The campaign line is the one on the billboard fight: the moment you are silent on injustice, you are complicit in injustice.

That is one case. The larger message to every other officer was the same: if the crowd is loud enough, the state will prosecute the badge.

They also stopped cops from doing the job.
The other half of the war is policy. Sanctuary rules, catch-and-release charging, and prosecutors who treat career criminals as clients teach officers that an arrest is paperwork that goes nowhere. Rocco has pointed to Hennepin County Attorney Mary Moriarty’s record and to Ellison’s priorities. When prosecutors will not hold repeat offenders, cops learn to drive past. When cities tell officers not to enforce immigration law, they create two codes — one for residents who follow the rules and one for people who do not.

That is not “reimagining public safety.” That is telling the police to stand down.

The crime numbers they do not want next to “defund.”
Minnesota’s murder count jumped from 117 in 2019 to 185 in 2020 and 201 in 2021. It was still 172 in 2024. The 2025 BCA report shows a drop to 132 murders — better than the peak, still above 2019. Minneapolis had 48 murders in 2019 and 62 in 2025. That is not “back to normal.” It is a city that never fully climbed out.

Carjacking is the street version of the same collapse. Statewide incidents hit 426 in 2024, up 5.5% from 2023. In 2025 they fell to 294. Of those 294, 215 were in Minneapolis. Cops can make the stop. They cannot invent a prosecutor who will charge it as what it is.

Hennepin and Ramsey counties hold about a third of the state’s population and have accounted for the large majority of Minnesota murders in recent years. A published analysis of Twin Cities homicides after May 2020 found the weekly homicide rate in those two counties more than doubled and estimated roughly 183 excess homicides over the following 136 weeks. Gang and felony-related shootings did not vanish because a council pledged “community safety.”

Officers were still being assaulted: 981 incidents in 2025. Firearms still dominate the murder file — about 70% of 2025 murders. Rape reports stayed high: 2,188 in 2025, with more than a third of victims under 18. A clearance rate of 33% on Group A offenses statewide means most crime never becomes a closed case.

The charging desk is part of the war.
Minnesota does not have a statewide “district attorney.” The people who decide whether an arrest becomes a case are county attorneys. In Hennepin County, that is Mary Moriarty.

Her office’s own description of carjacking work is the problem in one paragraph. For a 12-month window she cited, agencies reported 349 carjacking incidents. Police submitted about 105 cases. Her office charged 63 — and only 13 of those 63 as carjacking. The rest were pleaded down or charged as something else. That is how “we charged it” becomes a press line while the street still calls it a carjacking.

In 2025 she announced Hennepin County would stop charging most felony cases that start with a low-level traffic stop and would generally refuse cases built on consent searches. That is a standing order to cops: do not find the gun, the dope, or the fugitive on a tail light, because we will not take the case.

On juveniles, independent review of her charging data found her office charging youth cases at a lower rate than her predecessor and using more pre-charge diversion — while Hennepin juvenile person crimes ran far above the rest of the state. A no-prison plea in a rape case that later drew federal charges is the same pattern: the county closes the file; the victim lives with the offender.

Keith Ellison’s office took the four officers. Career street criminals and gang shooters do not get that urgency. Officers notice.

Two sets of rules: Moriarty’s guards and Judge West’s eraser.
This is the hypocrisy in numbers.

Mary Moriarty tells the public that talk of crime is “fear mongering.” Hennepin County still bought her a private detail. Records show the county paid Relative Intel LLC $513,223 from November 2023 through August 2026 for close-protection escorts at $175 an hour. Contracts were amended until the cap hit $500,000. She gets armed contractors. You get a 911 hold and a declined charge.

The same political class that charged cops in 2020 — and that Moriarty’s office has been willing to put in the dock, including a State Patrol trooper she later had to dismiss — will not give ordinary neighborhoods that kind of coverage. Defund your police. Invoice the taxpayer for hers.

Then look at the bench. In 2025 a Hennepin County jury convicted Abdifatah Yusuf on six counts of aiding and abetting theft by swindle in a Medicaid / home-care scheme prosecutors put at $7.2 million. Promise Health billed for care the state said was not real. Money moved to personal accounts and cash. Judge Sarah West threw out the jury’s guilty verdict. She called the case too circumstantial and said a brother might have done it without Yusuf’s knowledge. Related charges against co-defendants were dismissed in other courtrooms. A jury did its job. A judge undid it. Taxpayers ate the loss.

That is the split screen. Officers get prosecuted for the shift they worked. Fraud defendants get a second chance the jury already denied. The county attorney who will not charge a tail-light gun case spends half a million dollars so she never has to live like the people she lectures.

Walz’s “worst day” — for a child-sex convict, not for cops.
On June 10, 2026, the Minnesota Board of Pardons — Governor Tim Walz, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and Chief Justice Natalie Hudson — granted a full pardon to Tou Lue Vang. Vang had pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct after repeatedly sexually assaulting a girl beginning when she was 10. He lost legal status because of that conviction and faced removal to Laos. Clemency papers listed immigration consequences. The pardon wiped the conviction that underpinned deportation. ICE still removed him after Secretary of State Marco Rubio revoked status.

Asked about the deportation, Walz did not talk like a governor who spent 2020 feeding officers to a mob. He asked whether the removal made anyone safer. Then he said: “Did it improve the idea that we can’t all be judged by our worst day?”

That is the tell.

A man convicted of first-degree criminal sexual conduct against a child gets the language of grace — worst day, kids left behind, don’t judge. Derek Chauvin, J. Alexander Kueng, Thomas Lane, and Tou Thao got the opposite. Walz handed their case to Ellison. No pardon board. No “worst day.” No “you can’t judge an officer by one call.” Twenty-two and a half years for Chauvin. Prison for the other three. A Democratic governor who will stretch mercy to block ICE will not stretch it to the cops he helped put in prison.

Rocco’s ask is the same standard in both directions. If “one bad day” is the test, apply it to the men who were working an arrest, not only to the man ICE was trying to remove.

Keith Ellison: race when it pays, law when it is a cop.
Walz did not pick a neutral lawyer in 2020. He picked Keith Ellison.

Ellison’s public life has a pattern. Racism is the first explanation when a police officer is on the other side of the table. Racism is not the first explanation when the scandal is fraud in communities that donate to him, or when the allegation is about his own conduct.

In 2018 his former girlfriend, Karen Monahan, accused him of dragging her off a bed and screaming at her. She said there was video. Ellison denied it. A DFL-hired investigator called the claim unsubstantiated because the video was never produced. Another woman, Amy Alexander, had accused him of assault years earlier; he obtained a restraining order against her. Divorce records later showed Ellison describing himself as a victim of abuse by his ex-wife. He still became attorney general. The standard he applies to cops is not the standard he applied to himself.

Before Congress he organized for Louis Farrakhan’s Million Man March and wrote that Farrakhan was not an anti-Semite. He later issued a 2006 letter “distancing” himself from the Nation of Islam. Reporting after that still placed him in rooms with Farrakhan. The worldview does not disappear because a campaign letter exists. In that worldview, American institutions — police first — are racist unless they are useful.

Then look at Feeding Our Future. In December 2021 Ellison sat with people tied to the feeding-program network, including men later charged. Audio has him saying he was “here to help” while they talked about putting money behind officials who would “protect communities of color.” Nine days later his campaign took $10,000 from people linked to that world. The federal case became one of the largest COVID-era frauds in the country. The attorney general who moved at wartime speed on four Minneapolis officers was “here to help” in a room that later looked like a fraud briefing.

That is the attitude Rocco is naming. Everything is racist when it is a cop’s use of force. Everything is “community,” “equity,” and “don’t judge a worst day” when the defendant is politically useful or the donor base is watching. Ellison will sue a contract-for-deed seller for targeting Muslims and announce charity crackdowns with a press release. He will not treat Minnesota’s pandemic fraud machine with the same moral heat he used on Chauvin, Kueng, Lane, and Thao.

If the rule is race first, the badge always loses. If the rule is the law, the attorney general does not get to pick which criminals count.

What “let cops be cops” means in the Senate
Rocco is not a career politician. He has said he ran because the party and the state went silent when officers needed a spine. In the Senate he will:

• Oppose budget games that shrink sworn staffing while crime and fraud rise.
• Support bills that aid law enforcement and block bills that hobble it.
• Back charging policy that puts career criminals and gang shooters in court, not back on the street.
• Demand that jury verdicts in taxpayer-fraud cases mean something.
• End sanctuary rules that reward illegal presence and starve legal residents of police time and jail space.
• Keep saying out loud what officers cannot say on the job: four men were sacrificed to a political moment, and Minnesota still pretends that was justice.

A one-year dip in the crime report is not a pardon for 2020. Murders are still above 2019. Minneapolis still takes most of the state’s carjackings. The police force is still short. The county attorney still declines the tools cops use to take guns off the street — then bills the county for her own guards. A judge still erases a fraud verdict. A governor still finds mercy for a child-sex convict facing ICE and none for the officers he sent to Ellison. An attorney general still sees racism in a knee and community in a fraud meeting. That is the war. End it.

Silence is not neutrality. In 2020, Democrats defunded, dismantled, diverted, and prosecuted. Then they told you it never happened. Vote like you remember.

Stop voting for the same people who got us in this mess in the first place.

Stop voting BLUE no matter who. Vote RED instead, and together we can make a better tomorrow.