Next year, Alabama will elect a new Attorney General for the first time in nearly a decade. For law enforcement, this will be an extremely important decision.
The partnership between law enforcement and the Attorney General’s Office has historically ebbed and flowed—while some AGs have stood up and really fought for the men and women in blue, other Attorneys General have taken them for granted.
Having witnessed this first-hand as police chiefs, we write to endorse Katherine Robertson for Alabama’s next Attorney General. She is the law enforcement candidate in this race.
As the law enforcement coordinators for the Attorney General, we served alongside Katherine throughout her nine-year tenure as Chief Counsel. We support Katherine because she is tough, she has fought with us and for us, and she is one of the leading criminal justice minds in the State of Alabama.
As the Attorney General’s Chief Counsel, Katherine assists the Attorney General in setting priorities for the office and ensuring that those priorities are effectively executed.
When she joined the office, our state was on a collision course for public safety—we were spending more time talking about offenders than victims and more time talking about how to get offenders out of prison than keeping them in. Katherine played a pivotal role in the state’s about-face.
Around the time she joined the team, the AG’s Office had little to no interaction with our legislature. She immediately went to work fixing that, with her first success being the passage of the Fair Justice Act in 2018.
That bill sped up the appeals process in capital cases to better ensure that the families of victims didn’t wait the rest of their lives for justice. She joined with Governor Ivey’s office to draft and pass significant changes to the Pardons and Paroles Board, which served to refocus the board on public safety rather than prison overcrowding.
She worked to pass the Deputy Brad Johnson Act to deliver more honest sentencing and less access to “good time” and early release, particularly when it comes to violent offenders. She delivered the office a victory on the state’s first-ever law to combat gang crime, securing harsh mandatory minimum sentences for those who committed gun crimes in the name of a gang.
She developed a new state strategy to make child exploitation easier to prosecute and helped heighten penalties for false reports to police. Last session, she drafted and passed the Speedy Trial Act, giving the judiciary a new mechanism to address violent crime backlogs in courtrooms around our state.
But in addition to her significant legislative accomplishments, Katherine has also been in the trenches with law enforcement and with crime victims in the courtroom and beyond.
She has faithfully served on the board of VOCAL for years, Alabama’s only crime victims’ advocacy organization. She has served on prison study commissions established by two governors.
She has advocated across the state for opioid funding to be used to support law enforcement and negotiated one of the state’s large settlements to include specific funding to integration and connectivity of Alabama’s courts—an important tool judges need to make wise decisions on bail and sentencing.
She was even invited to testify before Congress during National Police Week to showcase Alabama’s advancements in criminal justice and public safety. There simply isn’t space here to cover all the ways—out in front or behind the scenes—that Katherine Robertson has advanced the cause of public safety in Alabama.
Alabama needs an Attorney General who is ready to fight crime. Law enforcement needs an Attorney General who will have our back in the good times and the bad.
We have the opportunity to elect an Attorney General who has proven trustworthy and effective on both — that person is Katherine Robertson.
She will be ready to lead on Day 1, and Alabama will be better for it.
Chris Carden has over twenty-five years in law enforcement, previously serving as Chief of the Sylacauga Police Department and the Attorney General’s Law Enforcement Coordinator.
Tommie Reese has over thirty-five years in law enforcement, previously serving as Chief of the Demopolis Police Department and the Attorney General’s Law Enforcement Coordinator.
