Harris also played pivotal role in turning San Francisco into homeless drug den
Presumptive Democratic nominee for the 2024 presidential election Kamala Harris has had a long career in politics – making her start as a prosecutor in San Francisco, before becoming California’s attorney general, and later a California senator.
As Harris campaigns, questions have been raised about her record while a prosecutor, particularly the effect her policies had on the black community, and other minorities groups.
Harris worked as a district attorney at the Alameda County district attorney’s office before moving to the San Francisco city attorney’s office from 2004 to 2011. There she provided legal services to the city, and represented them in civil claims – heading the division on children and families.
During her time as a district attorney, securing convictions was part of Harris’ focus, which built on California’s tough-on-crime policies after several serial killers ran rampant during the 1970s. High-profile cases include the Night Stalker, the Zodiac killer, the Hillside Strangler, and the Manson family.
While California’s tough-on-crime image was popular politically, the black community was the most affected, with incarceration rates five times higher than their share of the total population in California, a problem that remains today. Although Harris did not write any of the laws she enforced them.
A study from Vera, showed in 2015, the prison inmate numbers for California had increased by 225% between 1983 and 2015. By 2018, California had 127,972 people in the prison system. Despite only making up 6% of California’s population, blacks attributed 28% to the prison population, and 20% of the jail population.
Another report from The Sentencing Project, a Washington D.C.–based research and advocacy center, found that black Americans are incarcerated at a state average of 1,240 per 100,000 residents.
In 2011, the United States Supreme Court ruled that California’s prisons were so overcrowded they inflicted cruel and unusual punishment on inmates. Harris fought against this ruling, and went on to oppose the early release of prisoners in 2014, citing the need for inmate firefighting labor. By the time Harris left her post as a U.S. senator in 2021, the incarceration of black men was still a huge issue, with consistent overcrowding up to 200% over capacity in some instances. Prisons also lacked adequate medical personnel, and in some instances, up to 54 inmates were sharing one toilet at a time.
According to a report from the American Prospect, Harris spent years fighting orders to reduce prison populations.
“Working in tandem with Gov. Jerry Brown, Harris and her legal team filed motions that were condemned by judges and legal experts as obstructionist, bad–faith, and nonsensical, at one point even suggesting that the Supreme Court lacked the jurisdiction to order a reduction in California’s prison population,” the report reads.
As attorney general, Harris launched the California Department of Justice’s Division of Recidivism Reduction and Re-Entry, while simultaneously resisting releasing thousands of non-violent inmates with a low-risk of recidivism, according to the American Project.
“Observers worried that the behavior of Harris’s office had undermined the very ability of federal judges to enforce their legal orders at the state level, pushing the federal court system to the brink of a constitutional crisis. This extreme resistance to a Supreme Court ruling was done to prevent the release of fewer than 5,000 nonviolent offenders, whom multiple courts had cleared as presenting next to no risk of recidivism or threat to public safety,” the report states.
Harris’ record for wrongful conviction during her time as San Francisco’s D.A. was also heavily criticized. A self–described “progressive prosecutor,” Harris wrote in her 2019 memoir “The Truths We Hold,” that her role was to protect people from the inequality that leads that person to commit crimes.
“The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for those who are overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice. It is to recognize that not everyone needs punishment, that what many need, quite obviously, is help,” Harris wrote in her memoir.
An African-American man from San Francisco, Jamal Trulove, had a different experience while Harris was a D.A. Trulove was wrongfully convicted, and spent six years of his life in prison.
“I never talked to no detective, no police officer, no D.A., nobody,” Trulove said, adding he was simply arrested and charged with murder.
Trulove stated in an interview with Vice Harris was present at his sentencing to “celebrate” his conviction.
“She [Harris] showed up at the two most pivotal times in this first trial, me being convicted, and me being sentenced. She wanted to be present for a celebration of a conviction,” Trulove said.
Trulove comes from the Sunnydale projects, and stated the police were keeping tabs on himself and his brothers from a young age, and were watching others in their neighborhood.
“They already had me labeled because I’m from this community as a potential gang member, potential killer, potential drug dealer. You gotta wake up to the fact that, you know, things are set up against us…places like this have been developed for predominantly African-American people to not be able to succeed beyond it,” Trulove said.
Trulove said the sentiment in his community about having a black female district attorney, Harris actually is Indian and Jamaican, was one of hope – that Harris would have a “more sympathetic way” of prosecuting people in the black community.
In 2007, Trulove’s friend Seu Kuka was killed. After a year, no one had been arrested, and no one had interviewed Trulove.
“The police were still, you know, trying to get a conviction by all means necessary. When I was arrested for it, the community knew I didn’t do it, and it was a ‘here we go again.’ See, this is why we don’t trust, you know, law enforcement because it gets to a point where somebody didn’t do something, and someone goes to jail for it,” Trulove said, adding he never had a history of crime up until that point.
Ultimately Trulove’s conviction was overturned, however, Harris has yet to answer for what her office did to an innocent man.
Despite Harris’ tough–on–crime rhetoric, a 2014 law passed during Harris’ tenure as AG – in which she played a key role – is so unpopular a movement has now begun to have the laws undone, and showed how Harris consistently flip-flopped on her own policies.
Proposition 47, also known as the “Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act,” reclassified certain non-violent felonies, reducing theft under $950 to a misdemeanor, and converted narcotics possession from a felony to a misdemeanor.
The law has caused a huge amount of crime on California streets, turning downtown San Francisco into a homeless encampment, with open–air drug use and theft becoming a frequent issue. Retailers are barely able to stay afloat after gangs of thieves easily walk out of stores with hundreds of dollars of inventory.
A new ballot initiative is gaining popularity from both Republicans and Democrats, called the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act, or Prop 36. The act would amend Prop 47, and will be included on the ballot this coming November.
If the reform passes, narcotics like cocaine, heroin, and fentanyl will be illegal to possess while carrying a firearm – penalties would also increase for selling deadly quantities, with traffickers potentially facing murder charges if the drug trafficking results in a fatality.
Harris was responsible for writing up the ballot initiative when Prop 47 was first introduced, stating the law change would reduce prison populations, saving the state hundreds of millions of dollars per year – of which the savings would be used to pay for mental health services, K-12 education, and truancy programs.
Drug treatment programs, however, have been underutilized, and petty crime has skyrocketed because there are no consequences for crime. Republicans have accused Harris of misrepresenting the bill.
A Los Angeles–based criminal defense lawyer, Nicole Castronovo, told Fox News Digital in an interview that Harris’ past actions as a prosecutor will cause trouble for her in the future.
“She’s one of these people who’ve talked out of both sides of her mouth, and she’s going to have trouble with both the left and the right with the stances she’s taken over the years,” Castronovo told Fox News Digital.
Harris also acknowledged during an interview with Jake Tapper on CNN’s “State of the Union” in 2019 that a state truancy law she sponsored in 2010 resulted in some parents being arrested and jailed. Prosecutors were given authority to fine and/or jail a parent for up to one year and a $2,000 fine if their child’s school attendance was not satisfactory.
MSNBC reported Sunday that no parents were jailed because of the 2010 law. However, a bill sponsored by Harris in 2014 – Senate Bill 1317 – which was modeled on her previous truancy law for San Francisco, resulted in some parents being jailed. Harris further stated in 2011 that she would be putting parents on notice if their children were not attending school.
Harris’ 2020 report card as a U.S. senator was not much better, with GovTrack.US stating her record showed she joined the least amount of bipartisan bills, with only 14% of her support going to bills introduced by a lawmaker not part of the Democratic Party.
Harris also ranked more left than her Democrat colleagues, wrote the fewest laws, got bills out of committee the least often, held the fewest committee positions, and was second most absent during congressional votes.
Sexual abuse victims were also let down by Harris in her prosecutor role after she failed to take action against a Catholic priest who had abused students. Furthermore, Harris went as far as to keep documents regarding clergy sex abuse from lawyers and reporters to protect victim identities, according to CBS.
Extremely disturbing details about how Kamala Harris, as California’s top prosecutor, failed to prosecute a single case of child s*xual abuse by pedophiles.
Her office went even further by hiding the records documenting these s*x crimes against children.
Not one pedophile was… pic.twitter.com/I47E4X0gqH
— Shadow of Ezra (@ShadowofEzra) July 22, 2024
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