Jill Schramm/MDN North Dakota Attorney General Drew Wrigley, left, greets Erica Reeve-Rustad, right, at a Ward County Bar Association meeting in Minot Friday. Behind them are Stephen Williamson, left, and Pete Hankla.

Violent crime in North Dakota has become a serious issue that warrants another look by state policymakers, according to N.D. Attorney General Drew Wrigley.

“We have an urgent situation going on in the state,” Wrigley told the Ward County Bar Association in Minot Friday. “The public has to be protected, and we are not doing it well enough.”

An even greater concern is the danger to law enforcement officers in dealing with repeat, violent offenders, he said. He cited an officer-related shooting in Fargo last week that occurred when a task force sought to arrest an individual with a history of assaults on law enforcement and fleeing.

“It’s chilling to see what these officers went through,” said Wrigley, who had viewed the bodycam video. “To watch this is harrowing.”

He noted the offender previously had been sentenced to five years on a firearms offense, served less than two years and was released not long before the incident that nearly resulted in the death of officers on Jan. 29.

“This is happening with routine,” he said of these violent incidents.

He blames that frequency on policies that provide for no extra time served for these offenses and early release programs. It is not necessarily a sentencing issue related to judges, he said. Often it is a bureaucrat who releases a prisoner before the time specified by a judge, returning the person to further threaten communities, he said.

“Truth in sentencing has a lot of resonance with people,” Wrigley said. “They can’t believe that a judge can pass a sentence and someone else gets to conclude when a person gets out of prison.”

Sentencing practices have an additional negative effect on the ability to recruit and retain law officers, he said.

“It is impacting, quite dramatically, people going into law enforcement. I hear this not anecdotally – routinely – across the state,” he said. “It is impacting their quality of life in their work and it’s making them question, too often, whether they want to stay in that line of work.”

In response to growing violence involving firearms and convicts who were prematurely released, the Attorney General’s Office introduced a set of proposals to the 2023 Legislature. However, that bill failed.

The Legislature did approve additional funding for the crime laboratory, which lacked staff to test firearms or analyze fingerprints and had hundreds of backlogged rape kits needing testing, Wrigley said.

“Those things were addressed. There is no rape kit backlog any longer. We did get a lot of significant increases in the numbers of FTE (full-time equivalents) for our lab, additional equipment, additional personnel. That’s an important matter for all law enforcement across the state. So are these other matters,” he said of sentencing for violent offenders.

Solutions include finding ways to ensure county state’s attorney offices have a full contingent of prosecutors and addressing an overload of cases facing judges, Wrigley said. He also said he can support alternative sentencing when appropriate for offenders who are nonviolent or may need addiction treatment, but he urges using prison space to keep violent offenders away from the public.

Law enforcement is paying attention to whether the state is paying attention, he added.

“Little things, like us turning our back on officers being assaulted, arrests being resisted, people fleeing through our community and endangering lives. It shouldn’t take a 16-year-old getting T-boned at an intersection here in Minot for people to care, anymore than it should take a shootout with Fargo police in July for people to say, ‘Wow, this is dangerous work,'” he said. “We are going to shed more and more daylight on these things.”

Wrigley plans to shed some of that light during the 2025 legislative session.

“I take ownership that it didn’t go through this time,” he said of the defeated legislation. “I failed. But it’s not going to happen again.”