By Noah Rothman
Friday, August 30, 2024
Kamala Harris and her fellow Democrats really want
you to know that the vice president rose up the political ranks from her start
as a hard-nosed prosecutor.
Her party’s nominating convention hammered the theme home in speeches from her allies in biographical video packages
featuring the candidate bearing down on criminals as California’s attorney
general. In her acceptance speech, Harris previewed her intention to wield her background as a
cudgel against Donald Trump, who “was found guilty of fraud by a jury of
everyday Americans” and “separately found liable for committing sexual abuse.”
In her first (long-awaited) interview with a major network, Harris talked up
her status as the “only person in this race who prosecuted transnational
criminal organizations who traffic in guns, drugs, and human beings.”
In a dramatic departure from the last decade, Democrats
now thirst for a “prosecutor-in-chief.” Harris is only giving her adoring
public what they want. Indeed, that’s all she’s ever done. When Democrats
wanted a criminal-justice reformer whose foremost concern was curbing law
enforcement’s excesses, real and imagined, she was that, too. The problem for
Harris is that she has established for herself a much longer track record as a
dedicated — indeed, radical — proponent of policies that could hardly be
described as tough-on-crime.
As veteran San Francisco–based columnist Debra Saunders observed in 2010, the record of which Harris
is so proud as the city’s district attorney doesn’t bear passing resemblance to
her characterizations of it. Harris reinterpreted San Francisco’s 1989
sanctuary-city statute barring local officials from notifying federal immigration
officers about the arrest of undocumented juveniles — “or offenders who claim
to be juvenile,” Saunders noted. “Under her watch (for lack of a better word),
the city flew drug offenders to Honduras.”
“When federal authorities stopped this practice in 2008,
the city sent eight Hondurans who had been convicted to group homes, from which
they escaped,” she continued. Lawbreakers enjoyed sanctuary in a “Harris
job-training program for offenders.” And when she was confronted with the fact
that her program functionally employed people who were ineligible to work in
the United States, she acknowledged that “we had not in the design of” that
program “made provisions for screening” citizenship status.
Upon Harris’s ascension to the national political scene,
she made a point of endorsing every faddish de-carceral policy proposal that
popped into progressives’ heads.
“This story is just one example of why we need bail
reform now,” she wrote in 2017, citing the case of a pregnant Chicago woman arrested on a
traffic violation who was denied bail and forced to give birth while in
pretrial detention. Harris was rushing to the front of a parade already in
progress. Cash-bail reforms were already gaining steam, and the experiment has
had decidedly mixed results. In the years since, sympathetic stories like those
Harris promulgated have been buried under an avalanche of preventable
disasters. In city after city, violent recidivist offenders have been set free to attack law-abiding citizens and law enforcement alike as a result of cashless-bail reforms.
“I’m running to fight for an America where no mother or
father has to teach their young son that people may stop him, arrest him, chase
him, or kill him because of his race,” Harris
told a cheering throng at the outset of her first presidential campaign in
2018. The shibboleth maintaining that police officers were uniquely inclined to
mete out deadly force based on their own prejudices endured despite the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
“It is the most surprising result of my career,” said
Harvard professor Roland Fryer in 2016, following the release of his study
indicating that black Americans do experience more contacts with the
police, and may even experience arrest-related force more often than white
Americans, but that there is no evidence of racial bias when it came to the use
of lethal force. And yet, whenever a cause célèbre involving deadly force
against black Americans came down the pike — both in legitimately
appalling incidences and in cases where the officers were exonerated
by a court — Harris displayed no prudence or circumspection. Progressives
were not in the market for prudence or circumspection, and she aimed to please.
In 2020, CNN’s Dana
Bash confronted Harris with her claim in a 2009 book that she “would like
to see more police officers on the streets.” But in that demonic year,
asserting that a robust police presence equated to greater safety was anathema
to the Left. So she jettisoned that position in favor of the more fashionable
view: “It is status quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the
streets creates more safety,” she told the New York Times in an
interview headlined “Kamala Harris Is Done Explaining Racism.”
So, which is it? “I am very clear that we have got to, in
America, reimagine how we are accomplishing public safety,” Harris said in response. But has she changed her mind?
Harris declined to answer straight, relying instead on her endorsement of
consequences for the worst offenders — rapists, molesters, and murderers. We
can assume, however, that even violent criminality that fails to meet that
measure shouldn’t merit preventative policing given the downsides associated
with a law-enforcement presence in dangerous neighborhoods. At the time, that
was what progressives wanted to hear.
“We can’t just speak the truth about police brutality in
our nation,” Harris wrote later that year, “we must act to change our
systems of justice and demand accountability.” What sort of accountability?
“Let’s have a national registry of police officers who break the law,” she said
in a conversation with activists. “Why? Because in a lot of cases, those cases
don’t go to court. It’s an administrative hearing. The person might get fired.
They just have to move to a new jurisdiction, their record doesn’t follow them,
and then, you know what happens.”
That was an about-face from 2007, when, as the Times reported, Harris “stayed quiet as police
unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings.”
And for defensible reasons. Total administrative transparency creates incentives for “the potential abuse of the
complaint-making process,” may “make it easier for disaffected parties to
identify, locate, and potentially harm the officers who they believe wronged
them,” and may “cause undeserved reputational harms to officers and
departments.”
That logic proved compelling enough for Harris when her
objective was to present herself as a “top cop.” And when she needed to make herself over into a
crusader for progressive reforms, she did so. Now that the prime directive
demands that she once again cast herself as a tough-as-nails prosecutor, she
can be that, too.
This shouldn’t be enough to convince anyone of Harris’s
sincerity, as her campaign tacitly admitted. In response to Donald Trump’s
proposal to preserve and fund with taxpayer dollars the public’s access to in
vitro fertilization treatments, the Harris
camp dismissed it out of hand. After all, the former president has a long
and established record of governing in ways that depart from his campaign-trail
rhetoric. We should, therefore, disregard the Trump campaign’s claims designed
to convince you that he has suddenly become a different person from the one
you’ve grown accustomed to over the years.
That’s good advice. Harris’s voters would do well to
follow it.
No comments:
Post a Comment