close
close

Association-anemone

Bite-sized brilliance in every update

    • Harris was once tough on crime. How does she see the police now?
    asane

    Harris was once tough on crime. How does she see the police now?

    Online Niel Posted on

    Which Harris is running for president? Is it the Harris of 2009 who wrote that “serious and violent criminals must be locked up” or the Harris of 2019 who made it a priority to release them?

    Jeffrey Seaman and Paul Robinson
    | Opinion contributors

    play

    Which Kamala Harris Is Running For President? And which Democratic Party does she represent?

    Democrats want you to think Vice President Harris was once a tough, no-nonsense prosecutor. Republicans want you to believe she was a “pro-crime” progressive who voiced her support defunding the police.

    The problem is that they are both right. Harris was a crime fighter who valued law enforcement. Then Harris rebranded herself as a progressive prosecutor to appeal to the left wing of her party. Now she is silent to avoid controversy. But the real problem isn’t that Harris has changed, it’s the Democratic Party.

    The uncontroversial truths Harris told as San Francisco District Attorney cannot be repeated in today’s Democratic Party because they have become too contested. The Democratic Party, like Harris, doesn’t seem to know where it stands on crime. Democrats should read Harris’s 2009 book to find his way back to sanity.

    Harris Wasn’t Always a ‘Progressive Prosecutor’

    The conservative claim that Harris has always been a radical progressive on crime is simply not true. When she was chosen San Francisco District Attorney in 2003, her views were quite moderate, combining a strong desire to prosecute criminals with support for social interventions to prevent crime.

    Harris shared his views on criminal justice in a 2009 book, “Smart on Crime.” Kamala Harris in 2009 called for “more police on the streetdeployed more effectively’ as one of its top priorities. She also criticized what she called “the partisan liberal argument … that the police are an unwanted occupying force in poor neighborhoods.”

    She pointed out, correctly, that the police are desperately sought after by law-abiding residents of poor and minority neighborhoods. The prospect of cities looking to eliminate the police or create police-free zones would have horrified Harris 2009.

    As Harris wrote: “Not to send the police because someone assumes they are not wanted or because it is somehow not “right” for the community to answer to its offenders before the fundamental principles of democracy. … All communities want and have the right to law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies must investigate and prosecute all crimes and make all streets safe.”

    while she always opposed the death penaltyher record as a San Francisco DA was far from progressive. She cracked down on drug courts, which she saw as letting down drug dealers. She wrote about the need to punish thieves regardless of their motivations. And she’s fought for higher bail to keep dangerous criminals behind bars and reduce gun violence.

    2009 Harris possessed, in her words, “the desire to prosecute offenders to the fullest extent of the law.”

    Opinion: Harris lies about Trump and flip flops about politics. What does it really represent?

    But then the Democratic Party changed. And so did Harris.

    After The Black Lives Matter movement rose to national prominence in 2014, progressives have increasingly turned against enforcement. Suddenly the police were racist. The prison was racist. Law enforcement was racist. The left wing of the Democratic Party has forgotten the truths that Harris wrote in his book: that police are not occupying forces, and that while there is of course always room for police reform, high-crime communities need more police , no less.

    Looks like Harris forgot his book too.

    When he first ran for president in 2019, he played with progressives to win votes. She adopted “progressive prosecutor” tagged and attacked Joe Biden for being too tough on crime. She repeated the claim that Michael Brown was killed (despite a Justice Department investigation to the contrary), attacked in the shadows “systemic racism” in the justice system and advocated for a number of policies designed to get criminals back on the street.

    Ironically, despite her repositioning, her record was simply too conservative for progressives. Then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard fired up Harris on the Democratic debate stage for being too tough on crime by prosecuting drug offenders and fighting to keep criminals in prison.

    As Democrats have moved left on crime, so has Harris

    Following the riots that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, progressives called for depolicing. Democratic Party leaders backed off and stood by.

    Harris helped raise bail funds for the protesters and rioters spreading chaos in Minneapolis and praised the mayor of Los AngelesEric Garcetti, for cutting $150 million from the police budget. Over 20 cities they cut their police budgets. Crime has increased.

    Opinion: The cements for Harris’s CNN interview shift center on fracking, the border. It’s disappointing.

    After the disastrous consequences became clear, Democratic leaders scrambled to drop the “Defund the Police” slogan, but their messages about crime remained muddled and uncertain. The Democratic Party has been caught between common-sense moderates who urge law enforcement and radical progressives who demand more police cuts and prison closings. Today, Democrats continue to sidestep the issue to avoid an intraparty civil war. Harris is no exception.

    Which Harris is running for president? It is Harris from 2009 who wrote that “serious and violent criminals must be locked up” or the Harris of 2019 who made freeing serious criminals a priority? The Harris of 2009 calling for more police on the streets or the Harris of 2020 praising de-policing? We don’t know because she won’t say explicitly. And he won’t say because the Democratic Party is divided between those who want to lock up criminals and those who want to lock up cops.

    For the good of their country and their party, Democrats need to rediscover common sense about crime. As Harris wrote in her 2009 book“Achieving justice for victims and preventing future victimization is ultimately our mission.”

    This should not be controversial, but it is in today’s Democratic Party. And it will remain controversial until Democrats speak the explicit truths loudly that Harris did in 2009 but won’t in 2024.

    Jeffrey Seaman is a Levy Scholar and Paul Robinson is the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law. They are the most recent co-authors of “Confronting the Failures of Justice: Getting Away with Murder and Rape.”

    Online Niel
    View all posts

    You Might Also Like