In nearly every list of issues important to voters that’s been compiled over the last 40 years, crime and public safety have consistently hovered near the top. Through the 1980s and 1990s, both Republicans and Democrats—from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton—courted voter support by promising to be tough on crime. But by the 2010s, a stark partisan divide had emerged around issues of policing, crime, and criminal justice, with Democrats emphasizing police misconduct and alleged systemic racism and Republicans stressing law enforcement and public order.
Following a massive spike in crime after the George Floyd summer of 2020 and the many police- and criminal-justice reform measures enacted soon afterward, Democrats found themselves at a 23-point disadvantage on the crime issue, according to an NBC poll taken during the lead-up to the 2022 midterm elections. A year later, the Republican advantage had grown to 26 points. It’s only natural, then, that Vice President Kamala Harris’s record on criminal justice has become a topic of national conversation.
The question that many in the media are trying to answer: Will Harris approach the crime issue with a more conservative, “law-and-order” bent than many of her colleagues on the left, or will her policies be guided by the narratives that have animated decarceration and depolicing campaigns over the last 20 years?
During her last run for the Democratic presidential nomination, a handful of progressives and libertarians attacked Harris as “a cop,” too eager to court “the support of more conservative law-and-order types” back when she was a prosecutor in San Francisco and later California’s attorney general. Some of those arguments are resurfacing again now that President Biden has called off his reelection bid and endorsed Harris—but this time, they’re getting a more positive spin. In the Washington Post, Catherine Rampell argued last week that Harris stands to benefit from being “credibly tough on crime.” The same day, Politico cited polling data on the crime issue in support of an argument summed up by its headline: “‘Kamala the Cop’ Doesn’t Sound So Bad in 2024.” And in the New York Times, Nicole Allan (who critically profiled the vice president’s approach to criminal justice in 2019) wrote that Harris’s “prosecutorial background has transformed from a liability to an asset.”
This line of argument suffers from two deficiencies, however. The first is that it’s based on a more muddled picture than the one Harris’s progressive critics once painted. Second, even if the characterization of “Kamala the prosecutor” is mostly accurate, the public has every reason to believe that Harris has thoroughly excised any remnants of the pre-Ferguson-era prosecutor that she once was—and has perhaps done so even more forcefully than President Biden disavowed his own “tough-on-crime” past in 2019. And all indications are that she will stay the course Democrats have been on for more than a decade with respect to policing and criminal justice.
Take, for example, one of the common points of criticism progressives have focused on in questioning Harris’s commitment to criminal-justice reform: that she did not vocally support the now-infamous California ballot initiative, Prop. 47, which, among other things, significantly raised the threshold for felony theft. True, but neither did Harris vocally oppose the initiative. Progressive also objected to her appeal of a 2014 federal court ruling deeming the death penalty unconstitutional. (On that issue, she’s taken heat from both sides: law enforcement advocates criticized her for refusing to seek the death penalty for the murder of San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza, pursuant to a campaign pledge she made back in 2004.)
The presumptive Democratic presidential nominee’s record as a prosecutor may be “mixed” by today’s standards—especially compared with the records of the more progressive prosecutors that came after her—but it certainly wasn’t unambiguously “tough.” As San Francisco DA, for example, Harris spearheaded diversion programs that helped certain offenders avoid jail; she also pushed an implicit bias training initiative. And after ascending to the office of California attorney general, she endorsed (in 2011) the very progressive George Gascón (now the Los Angeles DA) to succeed her as San Francisco district attorney. Characterizations of Harris’s prosecutorial career are not as revealing at this point as her more recent (and less ambiguous) statements and actions on criminal justice.
Consider: in 2019, then-Senator Harris unveiled a sweeping legislative package that would have ended cash bail, eliminated the crack/powder cocaine sentencing disparity, legalized marijuana, banned both solitary confinement and the death penalty, and eradicated mandatory minimum sentencing in the federal system. That year, as she vied for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, she also contributed an essay to a compendium entitled Ending Mass Incarceration, published by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU, in which she lamented that the U.S. “incarcerates more of its citizens than any other nation in the world” and argued for “transformative structural changes,” focusing on directing more resources to public defenders. This was pre-George Floyd. In the wake of the 2020 riots, Harris coauthored (with Senator Corey Booker) the George Floyd Justice In Policing Act, which included provisions that would have lowered the standard of proof in police misconduct cases, restricted the use of no-knock warrants and neck restraints by police, and limited qualified immunity for cops. That year, in response to a question about defunding the police on The View, Harris voiced support for “reimagining how we do public safety in America,” going on to reject “the idea that to achieve safety, you put more cops on the street.”
While these initiatives were ultimately unsuccessful (though some cities did significantly cut police funding), Vice President Harris has, on multiple occasions, called on Congress to pass the Justice In Policing Act. She did so again this week, in an official statement triggered by the fatal police shooting in Illinois of Sonya Massey, who an officer said had attacked him with a pot of boiling water. Harris wrote that the viral bodycam footage “confirms what we know from the lived experiences of so many—we have much work to do to ensure that our justice system fully lives up to its name.”
Harris has been outspoken on other controversial police uses of force, in addition to the Floyd case. In 2020, she met with the family of Jacob Blake after he was shot by officers in Kenosha, Wisconsin. The shooting drew condemnation from Harris and others and also sparked violent riots that led to enormous damage in the small midwestern city.
The facts of the Blake case, however, turned out to be quite different from how Harris and others characterized them. It was later learned that Blake was shot after arming himself with a knife and turning toward officers while attempting to get into a vehicle occupied by children of whom he did not have custody following a fight with police (who were unsuccessful in their many less-lethal efforts to subdue him). And while the investigation in the Massey shooting is still unfolding, the details are already proving more complicated than the initial reactions on social media would suggest. Body-worn camera footage shows Massey throwing a pot of boiling water at the officer when she was shot.
The shooting of Massey may yet prove to be unjustified (the officer is already facing charges). But Harris’s decisions to condemn viral use-of-force incidents before all the facts are known and investigations can play out, and her use of those incidents to bolster support for reforms, suggest where she’ll stand on policing and public safety questions. So, too, does the vice president’s silence about the far more common instances of gun violence—like the 109 people shot and 19 people killed over the long Fourth of July weekend in Chicago—still plaguing swaths of major cities across the country.
Taken in sum, any assessment of Harris on the issue of crime and public safety is an essentially narrow one: Will she stick with the more progressive approach she’s taken over the last seven years, or revert to the slightly less progressive approach that characterized her career as a prosecutor some 20 years ago? When the question is put that way, the potential answers don’t seem so different.
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