Elected countywide officials in Kalamazoo County don’t usually have primary opponents. But that isn’t the case for Kalamazoo County Prosecutor Jeff Getting. He faces Kalamazoo attorney E. Dorphine Payne in the Democratic primary August 2. The Kalamazoo League of Women Voters has a voter guide for this race.
Payne, an attorney in private practice since 2001 who got her law degree from the University of Notre Dame, says her campaign is historic.
"This is the first a woman has ever run for prosecutor. This is the first time a person of color has ever run for prosecutor."
Before opening her law office, Payne served for three years as an assistant prosecutor in Kalamazoo County specializing in juvenile justice. She says the Prosecutor’s Office needs to head in a different direction.
"I wrote a statement four months ago as to why I was going to be running. And that statement is that there is a divide and it threatens the safety of the citizens and the police. I'm not prophetic, I'm just awake and aware and willing to acknowledge the problems that we have, and have a passion to do something about them. I’m apolitical. That’s why I don’t need to try to denigrate my opponents. I just need to stay focused on what it is that I’m trying to get done, and what it is that I’m trying to communicate to the community and to potential voters, and hope that they hear me and hope that they join me."
Payne says she has "deep roots in the community" that will help her bridge the divide between people in the community and the criminal justice system, including police. She also says more attention needs to be paid to rooting out gender bias in the system, pointing to a Kalamazoo case in which a woman who complained about domestic abuse wound up in jail instead of the accused abuser.
Payne says the old “law and order, get tough on crime” approach doesn’t work anymore. But she, like her primary opponent, Prosecutor Jeff Getting, says violent criminals must be locked up. Getting says his office is doing just that, working with state and federal officials to identify, prosecute, and convict the county’s violent offenders. He says the focus is on "high-impact" cases targeting a small number of people who cause a disproportionate amount of the problems.
"Whether it's inter-partner violence, domestic violence, whether it's gun, whether it's gang violence, we have far too much violence in this community and it's resulting in a huge amount of damage."
Getting admits that he was surprised by the primary challenge, pointing to his involvement with diversionary programs like Kalamazoo County’s drug court that help keep non-violent offenders out of jail.
“Truthfully, it was a little bit of a surprise. We’ve done a very good job here in the Prosecutor’s Office since I was elected in 2012. We haven’t, to my knowledge, misstepped even once. The right people are being prosecuted. We’re way ahead of the curve in terms of criminal justice reform. We're dealing with incarceration and mass incarceration issues in a way that the rest of the state hasn't yet. We have a 13-percent commitment rate on our felonies; the rest of the state averages over 20. What the governor has outlined, what our legislature has outlined as criminal justice reform for the state we're already doing."
Getting served eight years as an assistant Kalamazoo County prosecutor in the 1990’s and later went into private practice specializing in criminal defense and family law.
The winner of Democratic primary on August 2 will face Republican Donald Smith in November.
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