When george floyd was killed last month it unleashed demands that went far beyond justice for one man some are calling it a battle for americas soul as demands for reform moved from the streets to City Councils to congress and even the white house were fortunate to be speaking with a man at the front of the battle lines our guest today is Keith Ellison the attorney general of minnesota is a man of many firsts the 1st muslim to be elected to congress in 2006 and the 1st black american to be elected to a statewide position in the state of Minnesota Attorney general allison great to be with you today i wanted to ask you your 1st about the case in which you are now the person responsible for prosecuting those 4 officers that were involved in the case and murdering george floyd what can the public expect by way of timeline and what we can know about the case i know theres much that we dont know but how are you proceeding right now. Well we just received an assignment for a judge we have judge peter cahill whos in typically just a court judge has been a defense attorney hes been a prosecutor has been a judge for many years so we consider that a good but draw we now are facing. A whole scheduling order which will set times and dates poor you know pretrial motions for the determination of other Critical Issues in the case we arent dissipating a motion for change of venue weve already received signals to that effect and theyll be others when will the case be tried really dont know yet because of the call that the endemic theres a number of people in track in jail now who are awaiting trial we cant just dump them and so were not exactly sure when the case will be tried im hoping it sooner rather than later but it could be could be as late as early next year so how do you i mean i know you and i weve known each other for a long time and i know this case and this situation are something that must have seared deep into your soul you are now responsible for the scales of justice in this case you know about the rodney king case and and that none of those officers was really held to the kind of account that many thought they should have been and thats that led to riots id like to just get inside your heart for a moment and understand where youre at and how you proceed with something that so a motion only. Wrought if you will. Well you know its true that i come here with a whole set of human experiences but at this moment im feeling the. Enormous weight of delivering a just outcome justice is not vengeance and were going to make sure that we are scrupulously fair honest and were going to be transparent and were going to only charge the highest ethical charge that we can if we dont have facts to present to support a charge we will not make that charge were going to make sure that we operate at the highest ethical standards in this i mean whether or not you are a member of the community or youre a member of Law Enforcement the goal here is to make sure that there is fairness and justice that is done and we expect that that will be done and its true that i come from a background where civil rights have been a priority my whole life but all i really wanted is to have fairness not more not less the point here is that nobody has been made the law george blood is not beneath the law he has a full protection of the law but also the defendants are not above the law nor are they beneath the law and were just going to charge the had the ethical standard and put a case in front of a jury that we believe they will convict on because that is our duty and that is our ethical requirement just today President Trump signed an executive order on policing reform lets take a listen to what he said the vast majority of Police Officers are selfless and courageous Public Servants they are great men and women do you agree with him i guess i do but i think that that also misses the point you can have a good person and a system thats not constructed properly and still get Better Outcomes i mean we need to do some systemic reform to get Better Outcomes but that in itself for example. Well what it means is that if youre an officer who swell who went to the academy and joined the force because you wanted to help people you should not have to work alongside somebody who is there to express their racism and bias and need to sort of punish people who do that and who operate on that basis dont deserve to wear the badge like you might if youre there for the right reasons and there needs to be a system of accountability that will rule that will prevent people like that from entering the force and will rout them out if they should get on the force i believe we have a system of policing there essentially. Sort of forces officers to have their highest loyalty be to the lowest bad actor in the force and so thats not a good system and so we need a system where good lawyers can be and operate at their highest ethical standards and that they dont have to worry about reprisal on the job so i mean look of course its a little a little too little and a little too late and he could start by just doing what the Obama Administration was doing and pick up there but you know clearly this is a posthoc rationalization designed to look like hes doing something when really he hasnt been doing anything regarding the Police Community relations of no since he swore result well we just had another killing in atlanta rashard brooks i would love to get your thoughts and insights into that situation and how atlantas managing it. Well i cant say that i know enough about the case to comment on it i will say that it is another example of a you know black man killed by the police. You know where many people who do know more about it than i do feel its unjustified you know the the problem is is that theres no trust anymore i mean you know there is a presumption that the it was Excessive Force it was extra judicial and rob because it happened so frequently that you know i mean the presumption of is is just that this this is ron so clearly people are standing up there doing something about it the mayor has acted swiftly i want to commend her for doing that and we need to make sure that theres true justice rendered next case. When you were a young man and you wrote about this in a book called my country tis of thee and you were in detroit and you had your own experiences growing up with police news to think about those encounters tell us a little bit about that well i mean you know i often felt like the problem was that you had a group of people who whether they were good people or bad people they could kind of do whatever they wanted to their discretionary latitude was miles and nothing you said or did really mattered and so that was i felt that way i felt that this is i feel in general that this is an under prosecuted phenomena you know excessive use of force by police and im not talking about the case im prosecuting im talking about you know in general this is a this is a serious issue and again i think that officers who join the force for the right reasons will not object to greater levels of accountability because they dont have anything to fear but its ones that do have something to fear because they havent obeyed the law that are the problem and minimized me i also add speed but i thinking. Community violence and even corruption is part and parcel of this issue of. Excessive force because communities that are over police are often under protect you know and if if the police dont operate on a high ethical standard where theyre protecting the community and prohibiting violations of law what you will see is a lot of occasions where this Excessive Force youll also see a lot of occasions where communities are are actually crime ridden and so these things are part of the same phenomena of bad and ethical policing if somebody is going to gratuitously smack you in the head with with their fists or a baton or shoot you then what why would net sane person take a few extra bucks when they arrest somebody for some sort of a crime where some sort of a drug crime why wouldnt they you know use why wouldnt they sexually abuse a female or someone as the officer didnt know klahoma city officer holds clark who if you know about that case the issue of police abuse is tied to Police Corruption in general and where you get rid of one you probably will get rid of the other which is why if you look at the Camden CountyPolice Department which was dismantled and was restructured on ethical boundaries they seem dramatic decreases not only in Excessive Force but in murder itself in Community Based violence theyve seen productions in that so this issue of when police when you hear people who apologize for Excessive Force say well we have to do this to have a Safe Community and back the opposite is true in fact if you have a high ethical standard among your police that saves people from Police Abuses it also eliminates it reduces Public Safety problems too. Theres been a lot of calls in the black lives matter protests to defund the police and this is really been picking up in minnesota as well how do you approach that are you supportive of the notion of Defunding Police are people understanding what that really me. You know i have not made that call myself i let i allow the the people who have made that call to to articulate that that message but what i have done is said to the Broader Community wait a minute before you judge and dismiss listen to what theyre saying theyre saying that they dont want less safety they want more and that people like george floyd were not getting the benefit of any safety what theyre saying is do we really need 4 guys with guns to towns and chuckles to respond to a fake 20. 00 bill right are we are we saying theyre in a city where 1700. 00 rape kits have not been processed were a minority of rape assault sexual assaults are actually clear were only about where less than half are about half of murders are cleared shouldnt we be saying that the police to Port Department needs to do a better job and if that department had the trust and support of community wouldnt Community Come forward and say were willing to help you protect the public but because we dont really trust you were not willing to tell you anything and so this is not some wild out of the blue idea we restart in Fresh Start School districts what if we restarted in 1st started some Police Departments we had chronic problems and were chronically engaged in corruption Excessive Force abuse of fines like ferguson was what if we restarted and fresh started some Police Departments that might be something that everybody wants people who are not out there protesting but who are concerned about justice and people who are out there protesting and who believe that some departments are so rotten to the core that you really need to maybe dismantle them and rebuild them but i myself have not made that call but i do say listen to the voices in the streets dont dismiss them theyre smarter than you think they are. Do you feel keith that were at an Inflection Point on race in this country does this feel different to you this time i mean youve been witness to so many other protests and points that seem like maybe this was going to be something that we had you know moved to a healthier place im just sort of into this this year are we going to be looking back a few years from now on say wow we missed a big opportunity here we certainly have the opportunity to be at an Inflection Point we have a great opportunity but theres nothing guarantee what we need is for people in your church your mosque or synagogue or temple in your Quilt Making Club in your bowling club whatever it is that you do you need to talk to your family and your social network about the issue of Racial Justice and inclusion you need to remind people that our country has way for 243 years had jim crow legal segregation for another 100 years after that and weve only had about 54 years of anything else which is been marked by Racial Disparities in everything from health to corrections to employment everything literally everything and institutional racism is just as affective as deep as defacto and would not deter legal racism we have races institutions which replicate racist results and now we think the only race is are people who wear white sheets where the truth is weve got a social problem if you look at the young lady who said that the black man who was watching birds in central park that she was going to tell she said im going to tell them that up black man is threatening my. Im sure that lady thinks of herself as a good person she probably has a black friend maybe she had a black roommate when she was in college. But shes using her racialized privilege to rain down hell and maybe death on somebody and shes embarrassed but it shouldnt theres because she got congress embarrassed because of what she did i mean if you just open up that if you like black people havent Starbucks Coffee black people going to the poor black people walk in their own building black people birdwatching i mean how many times of black folks do and just regular stuff theyre in trouble not by the police but by regular y citizens what im saying is i do believe some many of the people who made those calls probably dont harbor hatred in their heart for africanamericans but they do sort of think that they do have some like biases implicit sort of thinking that this person doesnt belong here this person shouldnt be here what are they doing here i think this person is not supposed to be here and this person is somebody who i can hurt if i choose to just by with a phone call and weve got explore that because after all our Police Departments are rated made up of our citizenry and of our citizenry holds those kind of biases that widespread then of course our Police Departments do in fact the Police Departments might just say all were doing is carrying out what people want us to do im not i dont call myself here that lady called me here because that man was quote unquote threatening her life one of them in did not have that woman on videotape lying like he did. He might be a statistic too and so what im saying is weve got to dig a little deeper and weve got to ask ourselves do we want liberty and justice for all or do we want liberty and justice for some because i would argue that being apart of humanity is far more rewarding than being superior to it there are many more benefits to be gained by be a part in solidarity with your fellow human beings then to existing artificially above them based on systems of oppression which you can call down whenever you snap a finger and so thats my argument join joint join your fellow human beings and dont dont try to be above us or with us and youll be a happier person you were active in the Democratic Party in fact i believe you were deputy chair of the Democratic National committee and when you look around the country to cities around the country democrats run a large part of the country theyre part of the you know game out there and they are interacting with Police Departments there mayors and governors what culpability or responsibility do your fellow democrats half of the conditions we have today and do they have a blind spot as were approaching the november elections is there a blind spot that they are not recognizing about their own responsibility for this. Yes we do have a blind spot but i have a lot of hope for us because in the course of time we have corrected once but our own hubert h. Humphrey minnesota said in a 947 i believe at the Democratic Convention at dillard delphia that we need to leave the dark shadow of states rights and walk into the bright sunshine of human rights a bunch of yellow cracks on the south walk out of the convention and said were going to go be dixiecrats and then 10 years later they were republicans the bottom line is that we have as democrats somehow even if were pushed into it here because of the of humanity we have done it we can do it we have done this and it is democrats under under Lyndon Baines johnson a sudden segregationist who signed more civil rights legislation than anyone you know and it was it was as much as i you know can critique bill clinton and i do he did you know fend off attempts to destroy affirmative action for example it was barack obama that you know didnt pursue Current Practice lawsuits against Police Departments which were chronically abusing people and you nish aided the 21st Century Policing effort to try to reform policing so we have it within us to do the right thing but we cannot say that weve been pure and theyve been bat the bottom line isnt we have the chance to be better to live up to our highest noblest ideals or to betray them Democratic Party has also said it were going to have you know basically cut welfare for poor people and on the other end not creating more jobs and on the other end assist in the hurt of the damage of unions and on the other hand allow big banks to just get bigger and bigger and bigger and bigger we dont weve been part of that weve been part of the massive incarceration we want to say oh it was next. Send an early man who said were going to unleash the war on drugs on black people and hippies that didnt happen but we played an unhealthy role too so lets not be high and mighty in sapir year lets say our hands arent all together clean but todays a new day and were going to do the right thing now and well invite our republican colleagues to join with us lets thats what the Democratic Party should be dont but trying to like look down your nose and all those bad debt republicans thats why whenever people start going up on trying to lump im like yeah yeah yeah thats easy easy easy easy it is an easy target but but what are we going to do because we were the ones who pushed grand leach bliley right ted to deregulate the banks no we were the ones who said were going to get rid of welfare not replace it with any jobs we were the ones who increased the incar serial state and we have the war on drugs were partners in that were the ones who get stuff that i write so lets lets not disappear here but lets heed the call from the streets do the right thing well we have the opportunity and bite our republican colleagues to do the same thing not out of partisanship but out of our pledge goal of lifting up the public interest. Keith just last question here a little bit on the personal side when you look at the country now its stressed out im stressed out youve got 44000000 people officially unemployed right now youve got. Youve got the protests that i find inspiring but also disturbing about through Police Brutality ive ive been out there ive seen them and great many great moments but theres stress in these peoples lives and of course we have over 110000 americans who died before they otherwise would have so this is all going right and youve talked a bit about how you look to your own faith which you practice the islamic faith i dont but im interested in how you we say into how you manage the expectations of you people are looking to you to lead them out of the stress so where does faith come into it for you. Let me tell you you know in times of stress my my prayers are a little bit more earnest theyre a little bit longer you know Islamic Press should only take 3 or 4 minutes 5 times a day but you know its times of stress and they go on a Little Congress in the usually do it calms me is so its me and it helps me get back up and be recharged it is something that for me you know the supplications you know that we say in islam are reminders that we have a a doing higher than to ourselves and that helps me keep the focus right but i would be among the 1st to say that if youre a sincere person of faith there are no faith if you just take a moment to reach arent you know commune with nature i mean you dont even have to be a person who is particularly religious but if you go out and you just breathe deeply and you inhale and you and you just look at the wonder of creation you know there thats a way to get back out there and do that and i would say to the people who are protesting remember that this stuff is stressful and it does take a toll on you but if were going to have a better world in a better life we need you to stay in the game so dont quit now a Martin Luther king used to call it male you jackson and ask her to sing to him and that replaced his soul and nobody was there when he listened there was just terrible waste in his and his spirit and he was able to get back out there and risk all manner of danger as he did that so i would say well a good example of what beautiful vision well attorney general Keith Ellison thank you for all youre doing and thank you for your time in fox today really grateful and i keep it up. Thank you steve well see you soon so whats the bottom line the United States has simply over militarized the civilian Police Forces this kind of policing never works it didnt work when the u. S. Did this in iraq or afghanistan it hasnt worked for israel and the palestinians in the west bank or gaza and its not working for america fortunately this country has forward thinking people like attorney general Keith Ellison who are in the arena wrestling over these issues and who have a vision of a healthier balance between liberty and social justice that may actually help save the United States down the road and thats the bottom line. Frank assessments tourism but income stream is dead in the water whats been the result seen perching go up more significantly and indepth analysis of the days global headlines inside story on aljazeera. That soon as the sun goes down the ballot box is a very challenging place to work i think on the list you always pushing boundaries part of the plan for most always on going love we are the while traveling from mild where all the media the only goal we go there and we give them a chance to tell their story told to old use their own we let me also you how worried you are about the increase in hostilities in yemen we listen this is the moment you stop already 30 action this is the moment it also trades on fighting over why didnt we meet with global news makers and talk about the stories that on the edges there are. Aljazeera. And. Join our Global Community because the crisis is just slapped isnt the place that blessing upon my sin upon my human hands equals Global Health keeping you up to date or situation where we have a human rights prices that persist beyond the Health Crisis your questions is a dialogue just nothing we are now approaching a crossroads this is an opportunity that we must use the stream on aljazeera. 0. 0 there im just on the attack and this is the news out live from coming up in the next 60 minutes a judge rejects President Trumps bid to block the publication of a damning book by his former National Security advisor john bolton. A powerful u. S. Attorney who is investigating president says he wont resign despite a replacement being named. A high profile come to you