Upon her ascension to national politics, Harris made a point of endorsing every faddish de-carceral policy proposal that popped into progressives’ heads.
Upon her ascension to the national political scene, Harris made a point of endorsing every faddish de-carceral policy proposal that popped into progressives’ heads.
K amala Harris and her fellow Democrats really want you to know that the vice president rose up the political ranks from her start as a hard-nosed prosecutor.
Her party’s nominating convention hammered the theme home in speeches from her allies in biographical video packages featuring the candidate bearing down on criminals as California’s attorney general. In her acceptance speech, Harris previewed her intention to wield her background as a cudgel against Donald Trump, who “was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans” and “separately found liable for committing sexual abuse.” In her first (long-awaited) interview with a major network, Harris talked up her status as the “only person in this race who prosecuted transnational criminal organizations who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings.”
In a dramatic departure from the last decade, Democrats now thirst for a “prosecutor-in-chief.” Harris is only giving her adoring public what they want. Indeed, that’s all she’s ever done. When Democrats wanted a criminal-justice reformer whose foremost concern was curbing law enforcement’s excesses, real and imagined, she was that, too. The problem for Harris is that she has established for herself a much longer track record as a dedicated — indeed, radical — proponent of policies that could hardly be described as tough-on-crime.
As veteran San Francisco–based columnist Debra Saunders observed in 2010, the record of which Harris is so proud as the city’s district attorney doesn’t bear passing resemblance to her characterizations of it. Harris reinterpreted San Francisco’s 1989 sanctuary-city statute barring local officials from notifying federal immigration officers about the arrest of undocumented juveniles — “or offenders who claim to be juvenile,” Saunders noted. “Under her watch (for lack of a better word), the city flew drug offenders to Honduras.”
“When federal authorities stopped this practice in 2008, the city sent eight Hondurans who had been convicted to group homes, from which they escaped,” she continued. Lawbreakers enjoyed sanctuary in a “Harris job-training program for offenders.” And when she was confronted with the fact that her program functionally employed people who were ineligible to work in the United States, she acknowledged that “we had not in the design of” that program “made provisions for screening” citizenship status.
Upon Harris’s ascension to the national political scene, she made a point of endorsing every faddish de-carceral policy proposal that popped into progressives’ heads.
“This story is just one example of why we need bail reform now,” she wrote in 2017, citing the case of a pregnant Chicago woman arrested on a traffic violation who was denied bail and forced to give birth while in pretrial detention. Harris was rushing to the front of a parade already in progress. Cash-bail reforms were already gaining steam, and the experiment has had decidedly mixed results. In the years since, sympathetic stories like those Harris promulgated have been buried under an avalanche of preventable disasters. In city after city, violent recidivist offenders have been set free to attack law-abiding citizens and law enforcement alike as a result of cashless-bail reforms.
“I’m running to fight for an America where no mother or father has to teach their young son that people may stop him, arrest him, chase him, or kill him because of his race,” Harris told a cheering throng at the outset of her first presidential campaign in 2018. The shibboleth maintaining that police officers were uniquely inclined to mete out deadly force based on their own prejudices endured despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said Harvard professor Roland Fryer in 2016, following the release of his study indicating that black Americans do experience more contacts with the police, and may even experience arrest-related force more often than white Americans, but that there is no evidence of racial bias when it came to the use of lethal force. And yet, whenever a cause célèbre involving deadly force against black Americans came down the pike — both in legitimately appalling incidences and in cases where the officers were exonerated by a court — Harris displayed no prudence or circumspection. Progressives were not in the market for prudence or circumspection, and she aimed to please.
In 2020, CNN’s Dana Bash confronted Harris with her claim in a 2009 book that she “would like to see more police officers on the streets.” But in that demonic year, asserting that a robust police presence equated to greater safety was anathema to the Left. So she jettisoned that position in favor of the more fashionable view: “It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety,” she told the New York Times in an interview headlined “Kamala Harris Is Done Explaining Racism.”
So, which is it? “I am very clear that we have got to, in America, reimagine how we are accomplishing public safety,” Harris said in response. But has she changed her mind? Harris declined to answer straight, relying instead on her endorsement of consequences for the worst offenders — rapists, molesters, and murderers. We can assume, however, that even violent criminality that fails to meet that measure shouldn’t merit preventative policing given the downsides associated with a law-enforcement presence in dangerous neighborhoods. At the time, that was what progressives wanted to hear.
“We can’t just speak the truth about police brutality in our nation,” Harris wrote later that year, “we must act to change our systems of justice and demand accountability.” What sort of accountability? “Let’s have a national registry of police officers who break the law,” she said in a conversation with activists. “Why? Because in a lot of cases, those cases don’t go to court. It’s an administrative hearing. The person might get fired. They just have to move to a new jurisdiction, their record doesn’t follow them, and then, you know what happens.”
That was an about-face from 2007, when, as the Times reported, Harris “stayed quiet as police unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings.” And for defensible reasons. Total administrative transparency creates incentives for “the potential abuse of the complaint-making process,” may “make it easier for disaffected parties to identify, locate, and potentially harm the officers who they believe wronged them,” and may “cause undeserved reputational harms to officers and departments.”
That logic proved compelling enough for Harris when her objective was to present herself as a “top cop.” And when she needed to make herself over into a crusader for progressive reforms, she did so. Now that the prime directive demands that she once again cast herself as a tough-as-nails prosecutor, she can be that, too.
This shouldn’t be enough to convince anyone of Harris’s sincerity, as her campaign tacitly admitted. In response to Donald Trump’s proposal to preserve and fund with taxpayer dollars the public’s access to in vitro fertilization treatments, the Harris camp dismissed it out of hand. After all, the former president has a long and established record of governing in ways that depart from his campaign-trail rhetoric. We should, therefore, disregard the Trump campaign’s claims designed to convince you that he has suddenly become a different person from the one you’ve grown accustomed to over the years.
That’s good advice. Harris’s voters would do well to follow it.