Vice President Harris' record of backing a bail fund for Black Lives Matter convicted protesters is at the forefront of law enforcement minds as she attempts to paint herself as a law-and-order candidate.
"Let's be clear about something: If Kamala Harris becomes the next president of the United States, she will be an unmitigated disaster for public safety in this country," Joe Gamaldi, the national vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police and an active Houston Police Department lieutenant, told Fox News Digital.
"She has loudly and proudly supported bail reform and has even donated and encouraged other people to donate to a fund that helped get murderers, rapists, people who were shooting people in the streets, out on bail," he said. "We're not talking about helping bail out the mom who stole a candy bar from the store to help feed her kids; we're talking about violent criminals."
KAMALA HARRIS-BACKED 'FREEDOM FUND' THAT PUT MURDERERS, RAPISTS BACK ON STREETS STILL UP AND RUNNING
Gamaldi said bail reform has not worked in "any urban community."
"It is what has led to 16 American cities experiencing the highest murder rate in recorded history back in 2020-2021," he said. "And we're still living with the fallout of that.
"Over the last three years in the United States, we've averaged over 20,000 homicides a year, and we haven't seen those numbers since the mid 1990s," he said. "And now we're going to have Vice President Harris, who is the presumptive nominee at this point, is going to run on a platform of supporting bail reform after seeing the horrific consequences we've seen in our urban communities."
Joseph Imperatrice, an NYPD detective and founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC, told Fox News Digital that America needs a president who will "put the bad guys behind bars."
"America needs a leader that's going to keep bad guys behind bars, and unfortunately, Kamala Harris hasn't done that," he said. "It was proven during the riots by intentionally bailing out the bad guys."
"This isn't a Democrat or Republican issue, this is a humanitarian issue," Imperatrice said. "This is an accountability issue."
After more than a dozen years as San Francisco's district attorney and then as California's attorney general, Imperatrice indicated that Harris' track record included a mix of soft-on-crime policies and progressive discrimination.
"But unfortunately, we've seen over the last couple of years pandering to the left, pandering to activists," he said.
"She has turned the corner," he said. "She's not the prosecutor that we once knew, and now she's allowing bad guys to not only stay out of jail, but she's helping them to get out of jail, which is causing a big problem."
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Charles "Cully" Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former prosecutor, told Fox News Digital that Harris uses the "exact same language" as Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Bernie Sanders when they previously called for the defunding of police in the wake of George Floyd's death while being detained by Minneapolis police in 2020.
"I know the language of the right and the left," he said. "And this is exhibit A in a dog whistle to the left.
"So, the reason that the media is now fawning all over her and trying to protect her and calling her the cop candidate is because they're engaged in projection," he said. "She's anti-cop."
Stimson said that when politicians and prosecutors say that they want to "reimagine" the criminal justice system, they are "pro-criminal."
"'Reimagine' means pro criminal, that's all it means," he said. "The George Gascons, the Larry Krasner, the Alvin Bragg, the Kim Foxxs have enacted their policies [as district attorneys]. They refuse to prosecute all misdemeanors. They watered down felonies to misdemeanors. They don't send violent juveniles to adult court. And the list goes on and on and on."
Stimson pointed to Harris' applause of Los Angeles' defunding of the police department by $150 million in 2020 under the leadership of then-Mayor Eric Garcetti.
"When she applauds – those are her words, not mine – Garcetti and other police departments, taking $150 million from the LAPD, a huge chunk of money and sprinkling it, that is defending," he said. "So, we have to apply common sense and logic to this. Taking $150 million away from it, and you're defunding it."
Harris, a prominent opponent of the cash bail system during her previous presidential campaign, promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund in June 2020 to help bail Black Lives Matter rioters out of jail, but only a fraction of the more than $41 million actually went to freeing rioters.
MINNESOTA MAN FREED BY KAMALA HARRIS-SUPPORTED BAIL FUND NOW CHARGED WITH MURDER
Minneapolis station FOX 9 reported that the fund spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to free an alleged knife murderer and a convicted rapist who was facing charges of sexual assault and kidnapping, among others.
Another criminal, George Howard, 48, also reaped the benefits of the fund. He was allegedly involved in a road rage altercation on an Interstate 94 entrance ramp before he shot another driver, according to Minneapolis police, weeks after bailing out on domestic assault charges.
The Minnesota Freedom Fund admitted to its role in putting Howard back on the streets.
"We are aware of reports of the tragic and fatal shooting in Minneapolis earlier this week allegedly involving George Howard, an individual the Minnesota Freedom Fund had previously provided with bail support," the group wrote on social media at the time. "MFF believes that every individual who has been arrested by the law enforcement is innocent until proven guilty, and if a judge deems them eligible for bail, they should not have to wait in jail simply because they don’t have the same income or access to resources as others."
Harris, who is now the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, is working on picking a vice president, with her most likely selection being a handful of Democrat governors from the Midwest.
Fox News Digital has reached out to the Harris campaign for comment.
