Vice President Kamala Harris praised the radical “defund the police” movement in a newly unearthed radio interview from June 2020 that underscores her record as the most far-left senator in 2019.
GovTrack’s scorecard ranked her as the most liberal senator in 2019, further left even than socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT). However, though it appears the list was still on its website as recently as this week, it is no longer there. The National Desk reported that GovTrack founder Joshua Tauberer said, “The page that you are referring to was based on a single calendar year. Several years ago we discontinued creating new single-calendar year ‘report cards.’” Tauberer said a single year of data was “not sufficient to create a reliable portrait of the activity of legislators.” Tauberer did not explain why this particular page from 2019 was deleted.
“So this whole movement is about rightly saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” Harris told New York radio program “Ebro in the Morning” on June 9, 2020.
“Defund the police–” she continued, “–the issue behind it is that we need to reimagine how we are creating safety”:
And when you have many cities that have one-third of their entire city budget focused on policing, we know that is not the smart way and the best way or the right way to achieve safety. For too long, the status quo thinking has been you get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that’s wrong, because, by the way, if you want to look at upper middle class suburban neighborhoods, they don’t have that patrol car.
Later in the interview, she claimed American cities were “militarizing police” but “defunding public schools.”
Only 25 percent of Americans supported slashing police budgets, a Pew Research poll found in 2020. By 2021, support for defunding police dropped to 15 percent.
🚨 BREAKING: Kamala Harris praises the ‘defund the police’ movement in newly uncovered audio: pic.twitter.com/ZwqHvAxLlm
— Conservative War Machine (@WarMachineRR) July 26, 2024
It was not the first time Harris praised the defund the police movement. On the same day in 2020 the Republican National Committee’s Research Team posted a video of Harris telling ABC News that “I applaud” former Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti’s (D) defunding the city’s police.
In a June 26, 2020, interview on Watch What Happens Live, Harris claimed putting more cops on the streets is “just wrong.”
“For far too long, the status quo thinking has been to believe that by putting more police on the street, you’re going to have more safety. And that’s just wrong. That’s not how it works,” she said.
In 2021, Harris, as vice president, said, “It is wrong-headed 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.”
Some members of Harris’s staff also support defunding police. Brian Fallon, Harris’ current Communications Director, called to “Defund the police” in a 2020 tweet:
Defund the police
— Brian Fallon (@brianefallon) June 4, 2020
Only 39 percent of registered independents say Harris is “qualified” to be president, an Economist/YouGov poll recently found.
Wendell Husebo is a political reporter with Breitbart News and a former RNC War Room Analyst. He is the author of Politics of Slave Morality. Follow Wendell on “X” @WendellHusebø or on Truth Social @WendellHusebo.
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