During this summer of tear gas and turmoil, Kamala Harris has not been quiet.On "The View," the California senator spoke about "reimagining how we do public safety in America."On the Senate floor, she sparred with Rand Paul after the Kentucky Republican blocked a bill to make lynching
Kamala Harris, then a district attorney, at the African American Cultural Center in San Francisco, June 12, 2004. On “The View,” the California senator spoke about “reimagining how we do public safety in America.”
Indeed, an examination of that record shows how Harris was far more reticent in another time of ferment a half-decade ago. The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met in Berkeley, California, in the social protest movement of the 1960s, Harris has said she went into law enforcement to change the system from the inside. Yet as district attorney and then attorney general — and the first Black woman to hold those jobs — she found herself constantly negotiating a middle ground between two powerful forces: the police and the left in one of the most liberal states in America.
All of which poses a question: Is Harris essentially a political pragmatist, or has she in fact changed? And is she the woman to lead a police reform effort from the White House?Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, defeating her former boss, Terence Hallinan. He was seen as one of the nation’s most progressive district attorneys, unafraid to confront police, once even indicting the city’s police chief, albeit briefly.
In 2007, she stayed quiet as police unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings. Gloria Romero, the former state Senate majority leader, who authored the bill, said many San Franciscans publicly supported the move, but not Harris. “At that time, Kamala was a very progressive DA, and some of the criticisms now are a bit of revisionist history,” Renne said.
“We regularly received calls from officers saying, ‘We can’t believe that you’re discharging this case. This was a good case.’ Well, no, it wasn’t,” Henderson recalled. Harris has said that she learned of the crime lab problems only when they became public and has acknowledged that her office was too slow in putting a policy in place. Her aides had earlier been working toward a written policy, but Silard said he believed it had been delayed amid negotiations among several agencies. “The implication that she buried it is ridiculous,” he said, adding that she had initiated the review.
“It was tense,” Tait said. He called Harris’ office, asking her to conduct an outside investigation. Harris phoned him two days later to say she would not intervene, he said. Brian Nelson, a top aide to Harris while she was attorney general, said she was reluctant to big-foot district attorneys, having been one herself.
In San Francisco, police killed 18 people during Harris’ six years as attorney general. But if there was a single flashpoint, it was the shooting of 26-year-old Mario Woods in December 2015. Widely circulated cellphone videos showed officers surrounding Woods — disturbed, strung out on methamphetamines and armed with a steak knife. Five officers fired 46 rounds, hitting him with 21.
“We weren’t absent,” said Venus Johnson, a former associate attorney general who advised Harris on criminal justice issues, adding that there were frequent discussions with San Francisco officials. “We weren’t putting our heads in the sand. We were actively involved.” After the Supreme Court ordered California to reduce prison crowding, Nelson said, Harris saw a “seminal reform opportunity.” She created a division in her office to help counties devise alternatives to incarceration.
“That was very useful to us,” said Melina Abdullah, an African studies professor at California State University, Los Angeles, and a founder of the L.A. branch of Black Lives Matter. “As a Black woman who also went to Howard University, who is also from Oakland, she gives me a symbolic sense of pride.”
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