09 August 20
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09 August 20
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FOCUS: 'Top Cop' Kamala Harris's Record of Policing the Police
Danny Hakim, Stephanie Saul and Richard A. Oppel Jr., The New York Times
Excerpt: "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 a federal crime, and she is among the Democrats sponsoring policing legislation that would ban choke holds, racial profiling and no-knock warrants.
Indeed, an examination of that record shows how Ms. Harris was far more reticent in another time of ferment a half-decade ago.
Since becoming California’s attorney general in 2011, she had largely avoided intervening in cases involving killings by the police. Protesters in Oakland distributed fliers saying: “Tell California Attorney General Kamala Harris to prosecute killer cops! It’s her job!”
Then, amid the national outrage stoked by the 2014 killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., came pleas for her to investigate a series of police shootings in San Francisco, where she had previously been district attorney. She did not step in. Except in extraordinary circumstances, she said, it was not her job.
Still, her approach was subtly shifting. During the inaugural address for her second term as attorney general, Ms. Harris said the nation’s police forces faced a “crisis of confidence.” And by the end of her tenure in 2016, she had proposed a modest expansion of her office’s powers to investigate police misconduct, begun reviews of two municipal police departments and backed a Justice Department investigation in San Francisco.
Critics saw her taking baby steps when bold reform was needed — a microcosm of a career in which she developed a reputation for taking cautious, incremental action on criminal justice and, more often than not, yielding to the status quo.
The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met in Berkeley in the social protest movement of the 1960s, Ms. 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.
Ms. Harris declined to be interviewed for this article. But over the years, she has proudly labeled herself both a “top cop” and a “progressive prosecutor.”
In her 2009 book, “Smart on Crime,” she wrote that “if we take a show of hands of those who would like to see more police officers on the street, mine would shoot up,” adding that “virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat.”
Earlier this summer, in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, she told The New York Times that “it is status-quo thinking to believe that putting more police on the streets creates more safety. That’s wrong. It’s just wrong.”
All of which poses a question: Is Ms. 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?
An Officer’s Death
Ms. 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 the police, once even indicting the city’s police chief, albeit briefly.
Mr. Hallinan also had a low conviction rate, and Ms. Harris viewed his office as dysfunctional. The police union endorsed her in a runoff.
But in April 2004, barely three months into the job, Ms. Harris found herself at odds with the police after a gang member gunned down an officer named Isaac Espinoza.
During her campaign, Ms. Harris had opposed the death penalty, in part, as being discriminatory toward people of color, and she did not seek it for Officer Espinoza’s killer. Rank-and-file officers were infuriated. Heather Fong, the new police chief, called it an affront to those who “risk their lives for the sake of the public’s safety.”
Then, at the funeral, Ms. Harris was blindsided when Senator Dianne Feinstein called for the death penalty.
The blowback “totally traumatized her,” said Peter Keane, a former member of the Police Commission, which oversees the city’s Police Department. Throughout her tenure, he said, Ms. Harris had “traditional prosecution, pro-police, instincts. She has always tried not to be a target of the police.”
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 Ms. Harris.
“There could not have been a more profound wall of silence,” said Ms. Romero, a Bernie Sanders supporter who has been critical of the Democratic establishment. “It’s easy to call yourself progressive today, but I mean, come on, it’s easy to reinvent yourself.”
Police use of force had been a contentious issue in San Francisco long before Ms. Harris took office. From 2001 to 2004, The San Francisco Chronicle reported, there were more complaints about use of force in the city than in San Diego, Seattle, Oakland and San Jose combined. Ms. Harris pursued few on-duty cases of force-related misconduct, though that was not unusual at the time.
Most district attorneys prosecuted officers in “only the rare case,” said Louise Renne, who as San Francisco city attorney once employed Ms. Harris. She and other supporters of Ms. Harris said it was unfair to criticize her through the prism of today.
“At that time, Kamala was a very progressive D.A., and some of the criticisms now are a bit of revisionist history,” Ms. Renne said.
Timothy P. Silard, Ms. Harris’s former chief of policy and one of a number of current and former aides who spoke on her behalf, said Ms. Harris experienced hostility in the department from the beginning. He recalled commanders and homicide detectives who refused to speak to her or look her in the eye during meetings in which she demanded they solve more murders in poor neighborhoods. Instead, they addressed white men — her subordinates.
“Did she set out as a professional prosecutor to anger the cops?” he asked. “No. Why would she do that? But did she shy away from doing bold things and important things because it was something the police department or police union didn’t like? Never.”
From 2002 to 2005, Black people made up less than eight percent of the city’s population but accounted for more than 40 percent of police arrests. Mr. Silard and Paul Henderson, who was Ms. Harris’s chief of administration and now directs a city agency that investigates complaints about the police, said Ms. Harris told her staff not to prosecute arrests based on racial profiling.
“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,” Mr. Henderson recalled.
Ms. Harris also created a “re-entry” program called “Back on Track” that aimed to keep young low-level offenders out of jail if they went to school and kept a job.
As police chief of East Palo Alto, Ronald Davis studied the program. “Re-entry was not a prevailing thought in law enforcement,” he said. “She said this is a unique opportunity to reduce recidivism.”
But some say she did not do enough.
“We never thought we had an ally in the district attorney,” said David Campos, who was a supervisor and police commissioner while Ms. Harris was district attorney and is now chairman of the San Francisco Democratic Party. “You have someone saying all the right things now, but when she had the opportunity to do something about police accountability, she was either not visible, or when she was, she was on the wrong side.” (Mr. Campos backed Mr. Sanders’s presidential bid.)
In 2010, Ms. Harris’s office was caught up in a scandal over a police crime-lab technician who had been skimming drugs and had a past conviction for domestic violence. A judge found that her office had failed to disclose the information to defense lawyers, as required. The judge also faulted her office for not having procedures for producing exculpatory information on police witnesses.
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