With the 2024 election fast approaching, presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris has made her background as a criminal prosecutor a central talking point for her campaign, but the vice president has a history of supporting law enforcement only when it’s politically expedient.
Harris’ stance on crime seems to swing from doggedly going after criminals to helping bail out rioters and railing against the police whenever the political winds shift. Now, Harris’ sudden ascent to the top of the Democratic ticket has her promoting a tough-on-crime image again.
In her first campaign appearance since President Joe Biden dropped out, Harris boasted to her supporters she had taken on “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules. So hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type.”
“Before I was elected vice president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general,” she said. “Before that, I was a courtroom prosecutor. In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds.”
Leftists are starting to embrace the title “Kamala the Cop,” a designation the Harris campaign might have been quick to dismiss — or even denounce — less than four years ago.
Between 2004 and 2011, Harris served as San Francisco’s District Attorney. She then became California’s Attorney General until 2017.
“As a career prosecutor, I have always known one central truth: the public and law enforcement need each other to keep our communities safe,” Harris said in 2015.
Though she liked to present herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, during her time at the DA’s office Harris implemented implicit bias training and spearheaded pretrial diversion programs that kept criminals out of jail.
“As a career prosecutor, I took on violent criminals, transnational gangs, big banks, and oil companies. I’m ready for the fights ahead,” Harris stated on social media in 2017 after becoming a senator. “I am a prosecutor at my core. It’s about seeking the truth. Let’s find the facts,” she emphasized later that year.
Harris then touted her experience as a prosecutor while running for the Democratic nomination in 2019, claiming that she is the only one “who can successfully prosecute the case against four more years of Trump.”
Only a few months later, Harris announced a legislative proposal aimed at ending cash bail, legalizing marijuana, and eliminating minimum sentencing, among other measures. In June 2020, Harris co-authored a bill to severely limit qualified immunity for law enforcement and lower the standard of proof in police misconduct cases.
Then she infamously urged her millions of followers on X (formerly Twitter) to “chip in” to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bailed out Black Lives Matter rioters in Minnesota. Among those bailed out was a convicted rapist facing charges of sexual assault and kidnapping.
The riots were among the most violent and costly in U.S. history, with damages reaching up to $2 billion, according to Axios.
During the height of the violent protests, Harris supported defunding the police and praised the city of Los Angeles for taking that step.
A recent tweet from RNC Research shows a resurfaced video of Harris saying it is “outdated” to think police officers make communities safe, a complete reversal from her stance back in 2015.
“It is outdated, 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,” Harris said at a 2020 campaign event in Detroit. “What we have to do, and what we will do is reimagine public safety,” Harris told the crowd.
Police officers from Democrat-led cities have voiced their concerns about the vice president potentially taking the White House.
“She will be an unmitigated disaster for public safety in this country,” Joe Gamaldi, Houston PD lieutenant and national vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police, told Fox News.
“America needs a leader who will keep bad guys behind bars, and unfortunately, Kamala Harris hasn’t done that,” NYPD Detective Joseph Imperatrice said. He also criticized Harris for bailing out “the bad guys” during the 2020 riots.
Arianna Villarreal is a summer intern at The Federalist.
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