As presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris leans into her prosecutorial background on the 2024 campaign trail, she’s coming under fire for a clip featured in a recent Dave McCormick television ad in which she says it is “wrongheaded thinking to think that the only way you’re going to get communities to be safe is to put more police officers on the street.”
A trip down memory lane shows that comment wasn’t a one-off. During the summer of 2020, when thousands of progressive Americans were taking to the streets to demand a more liberal approach to policing, then-senator Harris said during a live-streamed social-justice conference panel that “it is old, tired, wrong, status quo thinking to think you get more safety by putting more police officers on the street.”
At the time, Harris was working to shore up support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 to create a national standard for excessive use of force and expand the federal government’s investigatory power over local police departments, among other progressive police-reform proposals.
Four years later, the comments the vice president had made at “JusticeCon: A Path Towards Freedom” while she was a senator could come back to bite her as she tries to win over independent voters in the final sprint to Election Day.
“We know the reality of it is that when you go to upper-class suburbs, you don’t see that police presence,” Harris said during the virtual conference on June 19, 2020, roughly two months before then–presidential candidate Joe Biden tapped her as his running mate. “But what you do see,” she continued, are “well-funded schools,” “high rates of home ownership,” “small businesses that have access to capital,” “people and families who have access to health care.” Added Harris: “We have to reimagine how we achieve public safety, understanding that the best way to do that is invest in communities, and in particular, the educational needs, economic needs, or public-health needs, mental-health needs, and so on.”
That roughly 45-minute panel discussion featured similarly progressive remarks from Prince George’s County executive Angela Alsobrooks, Maryland’s Democratic Senate nominee who is facing former two-term Republican governor Larry Hogan in November. Though deep-blue Maryland went for Joe Biden by more than 30 points in 2020 and leans Democratic down-ballot, Hogan’s high name recognition, popularity, and anti–Donald Trump disposition means that Republicans still have a shot at flipping the state, which is typically completely out of reach for the GOP.
“As we talk about defunding the police, I think the true term is probably ‘realigning’ — making sure that our funding really aligns with the priorities of our community,” Alsobrooks said during the “JusticeCon” panel in June 2020, a few days after she announced plans to redirect $20 million originally budgeted to expand a police training facility in Prince George’s County to instead create a new mental health and addiction facility. “For those who think we’re taking away when we take away funding, we ask of the police sometimes more than they’re qualified to do.”
Also during that June 2020 panel interview, Alsobrooks goes on to lament that police officers are often unable to help those with addiction and mental-health issues:
[If] we realign dollars from our police budgets and send them to places that can help us to deal on the front end with mental illness, can help us to deal with those who have addictions, then that’s not defunding the police, that’s just doing what makes good old-fashioned sense. Saying police officers are not equipped. And in many cases, because they’re not equipped, they do a horrible job… They’re not able to handle situations that we can handle better if we realign those resources to make sure we deal with those situations before they encounter police.
The Harris and Alsobrooks campaigns did not respond to National Review’s requests for comment about their comments during the social-justice conference, which also featured remarks from Biden, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.), and Senator Elizabeth Warren (D., Mass.), among other high-profile Democratic lawmakers and progressive organizers.
“Defund the police” adjacent rhetoric never polled well but was embraced at the time by left-wing activists, professors, and some Democratic lawmakers who were eager to enact progressive criminal justice reforms in the wake of the George Floyd protests. Years later, public backlash to a pandemic-era spike in crime and the enacting of progressive public safety reforms in blue cities across the country has elevated public safety as a critical election-year issue and resulted in the ouster of many progressive district attorneys nationwide, even in ultra-liberal havens like San Francisco and Portland.