Cedrick Frazier prepares to take over Hennepin County Attorney’s Office

Cedrick Frazier isn’t inside the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, yet, but he’s just across the street. During an interview with the Minnesota Star Tribune in downtown Minneapolis on Friday, Frazier discussed his transition team, becoming the first Black person to lead a county attorney’s office in Minnesota and the excitement of preparing to lead the largest public law office in the state. As he spoke, his future office at the Hennepin County Government Center loomed behind him out a bank of windows. “My focus is always moving forward,” Frazier said. “How do we make this office better than it was before? And that’s not a critical knock on the past county attorneys. It’s about, constantly, how do we move forward? How do we make it better for the residents of Hennepin County?” Frazier defeated Anders Folk by 1.7 percentage points to win the office and replace Mary Moriarty in January. It was the tightest margin of victory in a Hennepin County Attorney’s race since Amy Klobuchar squeaked past Sheryl Ramstad Hvass by less than 1 percentage point in 1998 and spoke to the closely divided nature of what public safety approach citizens want to emphasize in Hennepin County. Advertisement On Thursday, that tension over the direction of public safety in Hennepin County’s most populous city again remained palpable when the Minneapolis City Council rejected Mayor Jacob Frey’s nomination of Bill Peterson to be police chief . Frazier knows he’s entering a job where he will have to operate alongside city, county, state and federal offices. He will also have to deal with the uncertainty of what criminal activity leaps into the public consciousness for an office that prosecutes more than 10,000 cases per year. “People want accountability when something harmful happens to themselves or their family or within their community,” Frazier said. “People also want systems that work for everybody, that we don’t have huge disparities where they feel like their community, or particular communities, are being targeted or getting harsher penalties than other folks.” He believes his political acumen working across agencies and building consensus will mesh with his experience of living in communities where crimes like gun violence had a disproportionate impact, and it will allow him to explain the office’s decision-making in a meaningful way.