Over the years, critics have scrutinized Vice President Kamala Harris’ record on crime – for being both too lenient and too harsh.
In an unprecedented move, she has been proclaimed the 2024 Democratic presidential nominee without having even been on the ballot during the primaries. But after overcoming that major hurdle, Harris faces a serious problem: no matter which way she turns, she finds people blasting her crime policies one way or another.
Critics on the right point out that shortly before Biden selected her as his 2020 running mate, then-Sen. Harris promoted a multi-million-dollar fund to bail out violent rioters during that year’s Black Lives Matter-backed George Floyd demonstrations.
Meanwhile, more liberal critics refer to Harris’ actions as California Attorney General, when she reportedly bragged about putting nonviolent offenders in jail.
The Democratic nominee remains in a unique and precarious position when it comes to the nation’s escalating crime epidemic – which has worsened due to the escalating border crisis she oversaw.
Kamala the riot enabler
Many conservatives have called out Harris’ actions during the deadly and violent Black Lives Matter (BLM)-backed riots of 2020, which began following the death of George Floyd.
The demonstrations resulted in over two dozen deaths and at least two billion dollars of property damage as cities burned nationwide.
The New York Post noted that many “of the businesses that were damaged were small, family-run operations.”
On June 1, 2020, during the height of the riots, Harris took to X (then known as Twitter) and encouraged people to donate to a far-left Minneapolis bail fund that supported participants in the riots.
The then-senator wrote: “If you’re able to, chip in now to the [Minnesota Freedom Fund (MFF)] to help post bail for those protesting on the ground in Minnesota.”
According to the Post, the specific donation link posted by Harris raked in $35 million in just two weeks.
Harris’ special link to the fund still appears to work as of August 9, 2024. It takes users to a landing page branded with the words “Kamala Harris for the People” and featuring a picture of a smiling Harris next to an array of donation buttons.
Furthermore, the landing page processes donations using ActBlue Charities Inc. – which is widely known as the main fundraising platform used by Democratic political candidates, including Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign.
The day after Harris announced her current campaign, FOX News reported that although she promoted the fund “to help bail Black Lives Matter rioters out of jail … only a fraction of the more than $41 million actually went to freeing rioters.”
“[T]he fund spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to free an alleged knife murderer and a convicted rapist who was facing charges of sexual assault and kidnapping, among others. Another criminal, George Howard, 48, also reaped the benefits of the funds,” FOX added:
He allegedly became involved in a road rage altercation on an Interstate 94 entrance ramp before he shot another driver, according to Minneapolis police – weeks after bailing out on domestic assault charges.
On its website, the fund Harris solicited donations for states that it supports abolishing “wealth-based pre-trial and immigration detention” in Minnesota. The MFF also states that it seeks “to end discriminatory, coercive, and oppressive jailing.”
Kamala and ‘defund the police’
Harris’ connection to groups that back soft-on-crime and anti-law enforcement policies extends beyond the riots of 2020.
This week, multiple news outlets ran stories highlighting the now-nominee’s alleged connection to the deeply controversial far-left “defund the police” movement.
On Wednesday, the Washington Examiner reported that Harris and her husband Doug Emhoff “cut checks to a progressive legal group that pushed to defund the police and make Washington, D.C., a permanent ‘sanctuary city’ for illegal immigrants,” according to documents.
The group, Legal Aid DC, “received a $1,000 donation from Harris and Emhoff in 2023” and an additional $1,000 two years earlier, the Examiner noted.
The Examiner report detailed Legal Aid DC’s recent ties to anti-police sentiment and movements:
[I]n June 2020, the [Legal Aid DC’s] housing law attorney Amanda Korber was quoted in a story pressing for fewer police officers in the district. Legal Aid DC shared the article on social media, writing, “As Legal Aid’s Amanda Korber noted in the article, we are concerned, especially given the ongoing protest movement, about any solution that involves more police and policing in DC public housing. #BlackLivesMatterDC.”
In 2021, Legal Aid DC shared an article on social media glorifying the Black Lives Matter movement, touting a quote by Minneapolis City Councilman Jeremiah Ellison declaring, “I think the police will view a leftist protester with a gas mask as more dangerous than a right-wing protester with a semiautomatic rifle.”
Then, on Friday morning, FOX News published an op-ed by former Administrator of the Small Business Administration Linda McMahon stating that the term-and-a-half Harris spent as California’s attorney general “emboldened a culture of theft.”
Harris’ tenure as California’s head prosecutor “produced a poisonous cocktail of activist prosecutors, pro-crime initiatives and efforts to undermine police,” McMahon wrote.
She added that the left-wing crime policies Harris pushed as attorney general set the stage for the Golden State’s ongoing shoplifting epidemic:
Shoplifting in California has become so rampant that it’s no longer just a petty crime. It’s an $8 billion per year industry where organized “rip crews” strip an entire store, resell the goods, and return to steal again. Even while rates of other crimes have declined, reports of shoplifting have increased through the first half of 2024.
McMahon indicated that Harris’ alleged anti-law enforcement stance continued after she left the attorney general role.
“Four years ago, Harris [then a U.S. Senator] called for defunding the LAPD [Los Angeles Police Department] and encouraged protesters who were physically assaulting police officers,” wrote McMahon. “Her political legacy is a deep wound in the public safety of California’s cities – and as vice president, she’s taken these policies national.”
Kamala the ‘cop’
While Harris continues to take heat from the right, however, many on the left are confronting her over her earlier career – which showed her to be the polar opposite of the soft-on-crime figure conservatives make her out to be.
Progressive critics point to both Harris’ aforementioned tenure as California attorney general (2011-2017) and her previous seven-year stint as San Francisco’s district attorney (2004-2011).
Law professor and criminal justice reform advocate Lara Bazelon suggested Harris was actually too tough on criminal defendants in a January 2019 op-ed for The New York Times. The Times published Bazelon’s op-ed mere days before Harris announced her poorly-received bid for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination.
Last month, Bazelon clarified on social media that despite her sharply critical op-ed, she is supporting Harris in the 2024 election – citing the goal of stopping former President Donald Trump from returning to the White House.
“Time after time, when progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent,” Bazelon wrote in her 2019 op-ed:
Most troubling, Ms. Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.
George’s story
“Worst of all, though, is Ms. Harris’s record in wrongful conviction cases,” Bazelon went on, citing the case of George Gage, a black defendant with no previous criminal record.
Gage’s stepdaughter – who had been described by her own mother as a “pathological liar” – accused him of sexually abusing her. Bazelon wrote that Gage was convicted following a case that “largely hinged on the stepdaughter’s testimony.”
However, after Gage’s conviction, “the judge discovered that the prosecutor had unlawfully held back potentially exculpatory evidence,” including the stepdaughter’s reputation as an unreliable witness, Bazelon noted:
In 2015, when the case reached the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, [then Attorney General] Harris’s prosecutors defended the conviction. They pointed out that Mr. Gage, while forced to act as his own lawyer, had not properly raised the legal issue in the lower court, as the law required.
The appellate judges acknowledged this impediment and sent the case to mediation, a clear signal for Ms. Harris to dismiss the case. When she refused to budge, the court upheld the conviction on that technicality. Mr. Gage is still in prison serving a 70-year sentence.
Due to Gage already being in his 70s at the time, he is effectively serving a life sentence for a crime he in all likelihood did not commit.
Bazelon highlighted several more cases in addition to Gage’s in which Harris’ office fought to keep racial and ethnic minority defendants in prison, despite evidence showing they may be innocent.
Bazelon concluded her op-ed by stating that if Harris “wants people who care about dismantling mass incarceration and correcting miscarriages of justice to vote for her, she needs to radically break with her past.”
“A good first step would be to apologize to the wrongfully convicted people she has fought to keep in prison and to do what she can to make sure they get justice,” the professor wrote. “She should start with George Gage.”
‘Filled with contradictions’
Less than a week after Bazelon’s op-ed, the left-wing outlet Vox published an analysis piece also largely criticizing then-candidate Harris’ record on crime from a progressive position.
“A close examination of Harris’s record shows it’s filled with contradictions,” the Vox article stated:
She pushed for programs that helped people find jobs instead of putting them in prison, but also fought to keep people in prison even after they were proved innocent. She refused to pursue the death penalty against a man who killed a police officer, but also defended California’s death penalty system in court. She implemented training programs to address police officers’ racial biases, but also resisted calls to get her office to investigate certain police shootings.
Then, in July 2020, the similarly left-wing magazine The American Prospect ran an article titled “How Kamala Harris Fought to Keep Nonviolent Prisoners Locked Up.”
Harris “repeatedly and openly defied U.S. Supreme Court orders to reduce overcrowding in California prisons while serving as the state’s attorney general,” wrote the article’s author, Alexander Sammon.
“Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad-faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population,” Sammon elaborated.
Sammon’s article was published following reports that then-Democratic nominee Joe Biden was considering selecting Harris as his running mate.
However, just under two weeks later, Biden announced that he had picked Harris to join the Democratic ticket.
The exchange that ‘ended a campaign’
Former congresswoman and candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination Tulsi Gabbard, then D-HI, famously confronted Harris’ record on crime during a Democratic Primary debate in 2019.
Many observers considered the short exchange was a turning point for Harris’ ill-fated 2020 candidacy – with some going even further and stating that it “ended” the then-senator’s bid.
“Sen. Harris says she’s proud of her record as a prosecutor and that she’ll be a prosecutor president, but I’m deeply concerned about this record,” Gabbard said at the beginning of the exchange.
“There are too many examples to cite, but [Harris] put over 1,500 people in jail for marijuana violations and then laughed about it when asked if she ever smoked marijuana,” the Gabbard said as the crowd began to erupt into raucous applause.
“She blocked evidence that would have freed an innocent man from death row until the courts forced her to do so,” Gabbard continued:
She kept people in prison beyond their sentences to use them as cheap labor for the state of California, and she fought to keep [the] cash bail system in place. That impacts poor people in the worst kind of way.
Harris replied that she pushed for “reform” while she was attorney general.
Gabbard did not seem to buy her response.
“The bottom line is, Sen. Harris,” Gabbard said, “when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people’s lives you did not. And the people who suffered under your reign as prosecutor – you owe them an apology.”
While in Congress, Gabbard was a member of the left-wing Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Gabbard has since left the Democratic Party and is now a registered independent.
She now supports the Trump/Vance ticket in November’s presidential election, and was reportedly under consideration to become Trump’s running mate before he picked Vance.
