Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has pitched herself as a prosecutor taking on “felon” Donald Trump, but she has previously equated American law enforcement with lynching and Jim Crow laws.
“When I say America has a history of systemic racism, I mean our institutions have inflicted violence on Black Americans: slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, policing,” she said at a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing.Police Use of Force and Community Relations” was released in June 2020.
“And it has led to black Americans being treated as subhuman across time, places and institutions,” she added, calling for an end to systemic racism.
But four years later, Harris is using her law enforcement experience to frame the 2024 election as a battle between prosecutors and convicted felons.
“Before I was vice president, and before I was elected to the Senate, I was the attorney general of California. And before that, I was a prosecutor who took on robbers, con artists and charlatans. So I know what Donald Trump is like.” She posted to X last month..
Governor Harris's confirmation hearing in which she lamented police policing came just three weeks after the tragic death of George Floyd, which sparked widespread unrest across the country and a national debate about policing.
Harris, the first Black senator elected from California, referenced the deaths of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, who was allegedly lynched while out jogging, and Breonna Taylor, who was killed during a no-knock warrant execution at her home.
“There is a movement led by people who, from the outside, seem to have very little in common, and they are marching in solidarity to demand an end to the black blood staining the sidewalks of our country,” she said. “And that gives me hope.”
The then-California senator echoed many of the activists who took to the streets at the time, stressing that America “must rethink what public safety looks like,” but that more police was not the solution.
“The current thinking that more police means more safety is wrong. It's wrong. And it influences much of city budgets and the thinking of policymakers,” she argued.
“[It] “It has distracted people from the smartest use of resources to make our communities safer, which is investing in our communities' health. And a healthy community is a safe community.”
At the time, many activists were calling for cuts to police budgets, and while Harris didn't go that far explicitly, she echoed many of their arguments about local funding for police officers.
She accused “our mayors and local leaders” of pouring “too much money” into “the militarization of police” and said that “two-thirds of America's public school teachers currently use their own money to purchase school supplies.”
Beyond policing, the future vice president lamented that racial disparities are “deeply entrenched in our education system, our housing system, our workforce, our health care delivery system and much more.”
Harris offered several proposals to improve the crisis, including a national use-of-force standard, independent investigations of allegations of police misconduct, local governments reporting police use-of-force incidents to the federal government and expanded pattern and practice investigations into police departments.
She also slammed Republicans for falling into a “naive trap” when it comes to police reform in the US.
“I was dismayed to hear my colleagues suggest that discussing the facts of systemic racism means accusing those within the system, and everyone within the system, of being racist,” she said. “This undermines the discussion.”
Days after the hearing, Harris took to social media to reiterate her own comments about the country's history of systemic racism.
“When I say America has a history of systemic racism, I mean that our institutions — slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynching, the criminal justice system — have inflicted violence on Black Americans and have led to Black Americans being treated as less than human,” she wrote to X.
A few days before her June 16 hearing, Harris also praised the “defund the police” movement, though she did not explicitly call for the budget to be zeroed out.
“This movement is rightly saying that we need to look at these budgets and see if they reflect the right priorities,” Harris said. Ebro in the Morning, a New York-based radio show“” was released on June 9, 2020.
Now that she is the Democratic presidential nominee, Trump and his allies have sought to debunk many of the far-left positions she took during the 2020 campaign, including on law enforcement.
The Trump campaign also highlighted Harris' promotion of the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund created during the Black Lives Matter protests that ultimately helped secure the release of people accused of murder, sexual assault and other violent crimes.
About two months after her June 2020 confirmation hearing, President Biden officially announced Harris as his running mate.
Republicans then slammed Democrats over the “defund the police” movement, which has seen public opinion shift quickly against it as crime soars across the country in the latter stages of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Biden He then bragged about his administration's efforts to “defund the police.” That includes funds allocated in the $1.9 trillion American Rescue Plan stimulus bill, which many Democrats have since used as a cudgel for attacks on law enforcement record.
Democrats also pushed back against President Trump and Republican criticism of law enforcement policies by spotlighting the police officers who were killed or injured in the events surrounding the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol.
Harris formally won the Democratic nomination earlier this month without going through a primary, and has taken a more centrist stance than she did in 2020, reversing some of her past positions on Medicare for All, fracking and illegal immigration.
The vice president also appears to have revamped his messaging strategy compared to the 2020 campaign, opting not to cling to his identity, which was a frequent theme during the 2020 debates.
In her acceptance speech last week, she made no mention of how she would become the first woman and first Asian American president in U.S. history, and she has largely refrained from discussing it during her campaign.
This contrasts with 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton's convention speech, in which she alluded to the possibility of Harris breaking the glass ceiling on November 5.
