Transcript
MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:
Just over two decades ago, Kamala Harris launched her political career by running for a district attorney of San Francisco. The vice president, and likely Democratic presidential nominee, has been associated with law enforcement ever since, but not always to her advantage. NPR's Martin Kaste reports.
MARTIN KASTE, BYLINE: What kind of prosecutor was Kamala Harris, the progressive kind or the tough-on-crime kind? She's always resisted that either/or categorization. Here she is talking criminal justice reform in 2013 at the Chicago Ideas conference.
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KAMALA HARRIS: We run around with these signs - build more schools, less jails. Put money into education, not prisons. There's a fundamental problem with that approach, in my opinion. And it's this. I agree with that conceptually, but you have not addressed the reason I have three padlocks on my front door.
KASTE: That ambiguity was apparent from the start, according to the people who knew her as a prosecutor in San Francisco. Niki Solis, for instance. She still remembers watching Harris in court.
NIKI SOLIS: I've got to say she blew me away, so much so that I did something that I never do - is I went up to her and I said, that was an amazing closing argument.
KASTE: Solis doesn't usually compliment prosecutors because she's on the other side, the public defender's office. And she liked the DA that Harris successfully challenged in her first election in 2003, a DA that others saw as too liberal.
SOLIS: She came in to correct that. It was a law and order approach, without a doubt.
KASTE: Solis says Harris balanced her law and order tendencies with progressive reforms. For instance, Harris supported pretrial diversion, that is offering criminal defendants alternatives to trial, such as drug treatment, but not for people who committed certain kinds of crimes, such as elder abuse or sexual exploitation. Solis says Harris also introduced new reforms, such as no longer bringing prostitution charges against underage girls.
SOLIS: She had a whole new policy of treating children who were trafficked as victims rather than as criminals.
KASTE: As a candidate, Harris had pledged not to bring death penalty cases, a promise she kept, even when charging a cop killer just a few months into her first term.
JOHN BURKE: The rank-and-file police officers were furious, you know?
KASTE: That's John Burke, a recently retired San Francisco police lieutenant. He recalls how, after she announced she wouldn't seek the death penalty, she was lambasted by Senator Dianne Feinstein at the murdered officer's funeral.
BURKE: This is a cop funeral at St. Mary's Cathedral. There were - I'm certain there were a thousand people inside that funeral procession. And the cops loved her for that.
KASTE: Meaning they loved Feinstein for going after Harris. But the 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 DA's office to file charges on his cases, and police generally like that. Steven Greenhut is with the free market think tank R Street Institute.
STEVEN GREENHUT: She was just viewed as being very pro-law enforcement.
KASTE: He followed Harris closely once she was elected California attorney general in 2010.
GREENHUT: She fought the release of a man the Innocence Project found not to have been guilty. She backed expanded asset forfeiture, you know, where police confiscate property even if the owner wasn't convicted of a crime.
KASTE: And perhaps most frustrating to activists on the left, as attorney general, Harris refused to intervene in local investigations of police shootings. On the other hand, as AG, Harris created reentry programs for drug offenders leaving prison. She supported expanding the right to vote for felons, and she improved the public's access to crime and policing statistics. In 2020, when thousands of people protested the murder of George Floyd, then-Senator Harris appeared to embrace their cause.
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HARRIS: This is a movement. I'm telling you, they're not going to stop.
KASTE: Here she is that year on "The Late Show."
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HARRIS: The should not, and we should not.
KASTE: Harris also tweeted out a call for people to donate to a bail fund for the protesters in Minnesota. But four years on, her campaign is not talking about that, and it doesn't refer to her as, quote, "a progressive prosecutor." Instead, in a statement to NPR, it refers to her as a pragmatic prosecutor. And Harris is reminding people that as a DA and an AG, she was a law enforcer.
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HARRIS: In those roles, I took on perpetrators of all kinds.
KASTE: This is her speech at campaign headquarters earlier this week.
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HARRIS: Fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.
(CHEERING)
KASTE: The campaign's apparent hope is that in 2024, the tough-on-crime image is the one that wins elections.
Martin Kaste, NPR News. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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