Exploring how a President Harris might handle criminal justice issues

Ever since Kamala Harris appeared on the political stage, first in California, then nationally, there's been a debate about her criminal justice philosophy. Is she tough on crime or a reformer? It's an either/or that she's long resisted.

"We protest, 'build more schools, less jails!'" she said at the Chicago Ideas conference in 2013, "I agree with that, conceptually. But you have not addressed why I have three padlocks on my front door!"

At the time, she positioned herself as "smart on crime," also the title of a book she published in 2009. She wanted to reform the system to reduce recidivism and incarceration, but the policy also had to include "a broad consensus that there should be serious and severe and swift consequence to crime."

Niki Solis, a long-time deputy public defender in San Francisco, recalls Harris' 2003 challenge of the incumbent district attorney, Terence Hallinan. Solis says she liked Hallinan, but that some voters had come to perceive him as "too liberal."

"[Harris] came in to correct that," Solis says. "It was a law-and-order approach, without a doubt."

Solis says Harris supported pre-existing reforms and programs, but sought to tighten them up. The example she gives is San Francisco's Collaborative Courts program, which offers defendants pre-trial diversion to alternatives such as drug treatment. Solis says the Harris D.A.'s office continued working with that program, but restricted eligibility. People charged with crimes such as elder abuse or sexual exploitation of a child would not qualify.

For Harris, innovation in criminal justice comes with a "high assumption of risk." In that 2013 talk, she said authorities always have to worry that a criminal who's been diverted away from traditional punishment will then "go out tomorrow and kill a baby and a grandmother, and then everyone will look at us."

Despite those risks, Solis says Harris looked for ways to reform the system, especially for more vulnerable populations. For instance, Harris ended the practice of bringing prostitution charges against underage girls.

"She had a whole new policy of treating children who are trafficked as victims rather than as criminals," Solis says.

Harris also stuck to a campaign promise not to seek the death penalty — even when her office brought charges against a man who killed an on-duty police officer named Isaac Espinoza in 2004.

"The rank and file police officers were furious," says John Burke, a retired San Francisco police lieutenant who had worked out of the same station as the murdered cop. He says the death penalty was still considered standard practice in cases such as that, and the criticism of Harris was intense.

"Diane Feinstein, then a senator representing California, went at Kamala Harris," Burke says. "At Isaac Espinoza's funeral. This is a cop funeral, at St Mary's cathedral, I'm certain there were a thousand people inside," he says. "And the cops loved [Feinstein] for that."

But the police's bitterness toward Harris didn't last. Burke was in a gang squad doing drug cases at the time, and he says he had no trouble getting the Harris D.A.'s office to file charges — something police liked.

"I didn't see any real problems when I presented cases. If you had the evidence, they charged the case," he says.

"She was just viewed as being very pro-law enforcement," says Steven Greenhut, with the free market think tank the R Street Institute. As a columnist for the Orange County Register, he started following Harris once she was elected California Attorney General, in 2010.

"She backed expanded asset forfeiture, where police confiscate property even if the owner wasn't convicted of a crime," he says. He also points to Attorney General Harris' dogged efforts to defend criminal convictions attained by local D.A.'s. In one such legal battle on a case apparently tainted by official misconduct, a panel of federal judges sternly criticized the Attorney General's office for its intransigence.

Harris was also criticized by activists and politicians on the left for not using the A.G.'s office to weigh in on police shootings. She was reluctant to pull rank on local prosecutors, and she didn't support legislation that would have mandated fatal police shootings be investigated by the state's Department of Justice.

But there are also activists who look back with approval on Harris' record as attorney general.

"She was steadfast in both wearing the hat of someone who has extensive law enforcement experience as well as wearing the hat of someone with extensive civil rights experience," says Lenore Anderson, president and co-founder of Alliance for Safety and Justice. She also worked for Harris in the San Francisco D.A.'s office. Anderson points to Harris' pursuit of banks in the aftermath of the 2008 mortgage crisis.

"Getting money back in the hands of homeowners who were at risk of losing their homes," Anderson says. "Those are the kinds of things that you want to see from your chief law enforcement officer in your state."

And reformers point to other initiatives by Harris during those years, such as the creation of OpenJustice, a web portal where the public can more easily view crime and policing statistics.

In 2019, then-Sen. Harris prepared for a run for the presidency and published another book, The Truths We Hold, in which she referred to herself as a "progressive prosecutor."

In 2020, when thousands of people protested the murder of George Floyd, Harris appeared to embrace their cause. "This is a movement. I'm telling you. They're not going to stop," she said in an interview on CBS's The Late Show. ""They're not going to let up. And they should not. And we should not."

Harris also tweeted out a call for people to donate to a bail fund for the protesters in Minnesota.

But four years later, the Harris campaign deflects questions about her support for the protests. And, given the recent voter backlash against self-avowed "progressive prosecutors" in San Francisco and Portland, Ore., the campaign also avoids referring to her as having been a "progressive prosecutor."

Instead, in a statement to NPR, it refers to her as a "pragmatic prosecutor."

“During her career in law enforcement, Kamala Harris was a pragmatic prosecutor who successfully took on predators, fraudsters, and cheaters like Donald Trump.”

The campaign's apparent hope is that in 2024, the tough-on-crime image is the one that wins elections.