COLUMBIA, Mo. (KMIZ)
Among many items on the ballot, Missouri voters will decide who they feel will best serve as the state’s attorney general in the upcoming Nov. 5 election.
Republican and current Attorney General Andrew Bailey is running for a full term. He was appointed in January 2023 after his predecessor, Eric Schmitt, was voted into the United States Senate. He also served in Iraq and has previous experience as an assistant prosecutor and with the Missouri Department of Corrections.
Bailey’s opponent in the race is Democratic candidate Elad Gross. Gross previously served as an assistant attorney general for Missouri and volunteered as a special public defender. He has experience as a constitutional and civil rights lawyer.
Crime
To fight crime, both candidates said they will focus on strengthening relationships and supporting local prosecutors and law enforcement. The difference is that Gross plans to focus on violence prevention, while Bailey said he will focus on prosecution.
“We will continue to build these relationships and find new and innovative ways to hold criminals accountable, and ultimately the number one priority is finding justice for victims,” ​​Bailey said.
Bailey believes the attorney general’s role is to advocate for the rule of law, support law enforcement and get justice for victims, and he intends to work with other elected leaders to address crime at the state level. He claimed his office increased criminal prosecutions nationwide by 133% in one year.
Meanwhile, Gross has a plan to prevent violence before it happens. He said the plan would include coordinating a statewide effort to provide resources to those who need them and using focused deterrence to target people at risk of becoming involved in crime, especially youth.
“I think we need to focus as much of our attention on preventing that before it happens and making sure that people have these resources, have the path to make right choices so that we don’t bury our children,” said Gross.
Consumer protection
Both Gross and Bailey said a strong consumer protection division is a vital part of the Attorney General’s Office and intend to expand the office to help better protect Missourians.
If elected, Bailey said he wants to expand the office’s consumer protection activities by increasing staff assigned by the General Assembly.
He touted victories under his current leadership the past two years, including what he said was recovering more than $400 million from defrauded Missourians in his second year in office.
“We haven’t hit the ceiling yet,” Bailey said. “We’ve created some real efficiencies in that process and have staffed to an appropriate level to be able to fight and win to protect Missourians from fraud.”
However, Gross said he would like consumer protection to have more weight in the office than it currently does. He would like the attorney general to hold large telecommunications companies accountable for the large volume of phone scams targeting Missourians and propose an app for citizens.
Gross has proposed creating a Missouri Attorney General app that would help educate Missourians about fraud prevention and make coordination easier for the office. He said the app would allow people to send a potential scam directly to the Attorney General’s Office and also provide scam notifications in people’s areas.
“We’re gathering the evidence right there,” Gross said. “We’re streamlining the prosecution, and we can also warn other people about what we’re seeing.”
LINKS: Extended interviews with Republican candidate Andrew Bailey and Democratic candidate Elad Gross
Other priorities
Gross also plans to establish new divisions within the Attorney General’s Office, including a civil rights division to prevent government abuse of power and an environmental division to protect natural resources like drinking water.
Currently, the office works on environmental and natural resource law under its state affairs division, according to the state’s website.
Gross said the funding is already available to create those divisions, but said the office is currently “disrupted.”
“We need someone who will run that office the right way,” Gross said. “Having a consumer protection department that works, having a civil rights department that works, having an office that works brings money to the people of the state of Missouri.”
Gross argued that the office is understaffed and said his spending priority would be to get the office staffed to the right level.
However, Bailey claims that is not true. The current attorney general said his office has reduced both its vacancies and turnover figures during his two years in office.
“This year we will be fully staffed, and that’s a testament to the work we’ve done in recruiting and through retention,” Bailey said.
ABC 17 News has reached out to the Attorney General’s Office for current and past staff numbers, but has not yet heard back as of Wednesday.
Other priorities in Bailey’s tenure would be to combat issues such as “large-scale technological censorship” and to stop border crossings from Mexico.
Both candidates also plan to hold the federal government accountable.
“Ensure we rein in rogue state federal bureaucratic agencies that exceed the scope of their statutory authority and violate the separation of powers doctrine codified in the United States Constitution,” Bailey said. “It has been a central role of my office for the past two years and will remain so.”
Gross believes the Attorney General’s Office should be impartial in hiring the best lawyer for the job.
“I don’t care who the administration is over in DC, if they’re screwing people over here in the state of Missouri, we’re going to hold them accountable,” Gross said.