Years before Vice President Kamala Harris rose to the top of the Democratic presidential field, as district attorney in San Francisco she promoted a third-strike crime policy against drug traffickers that was quickly repealed by law enforcement as too soft on them.
Harris served as San Francisco's district attorney from 2004 to 2011 before being elected California's attorney general. In her second year as the Golden City's district attorney, Harris proposed a drug enforcement policy that would have prosecuted drug dealers on their third arrest. Dubbed “Operation Safe Streets,” the proposal would have seen city police stop drug dealers twice, release them, and then finally prosecute them on their third arrest.
But the San Francisco Police Department refused to participate in the plan, detailing in a letter to Harris that such a proposal could lead to offenders returning to the city to reoffend shortly after being incarcerated.
“This proposal calls for detaining and releasing suspected drug dealers rather than arresting them under Penal Code Section 849(b), which would result in the police department charging the same suspect with selling drugs all three times if he or she is arrested a third time for selling drugs,” then-Police Chief Heather Fong wrote in a 2005 letter to Harris, which was obtained by Fox Digital.
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Democratic presidential candidate Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at a campaign event at IBEW Local 5 in Pittsburgh on September 2, 2024. (Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images)
“This proposal would result in a double standard where adults would be released but minors would be arrested. Furthermore, drug dealers who sell drugs near schools would be released after only a short time in custody,” Fong argued. “Unfortunately, this would undoubtedly send the wrong message to observant children who witness drug deals on a daily basis.”
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On April 29, 2004, just before a hearing in San Francisco, then-District Attorney Kamala Harris walked into the courtroom. (Photo by Paul Chin/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
In his letter to Harris, Fong added that while the left-leaning city is sympathetic to people struggling with drug addiction, the police department and the community do not hold drug dealers in high regard.
“The San Francisco Police Department fully supports treatment programs for drug users who wish to break the cycle of addiction, but the community and police are not sympathetic to those who sell drugs or seek to exploit the vulnerabilities of others,” Fong wrote.
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“We believe drug dealers should be held accountable for their actions, and therefore we believe the public would not look favorably on a 'lock and release' program.”
Fong ended the letter by telling Harris that the department would not participate in such a proposal.
“After carefully considering the pros and cons of this proposal, we decline to participate in such a program. We would prefer a program in which suspects who have been arrested three times for selling drugs and have not been arrested again would be grouped together for a District Attorney's warrant. Such a program would triple the evidence against the defendants and would certainly increase the number of juries that would be appealed in the case.”
Local outlet the Daily Journal reported in 2006 that DA Harris' chief of criminal affairs told Fong that the city should go ahead with the plan, even though it was risking negative media coverage for the program.
“It is true that there is some media in San Francisco that believes this policy is too tough on drug offenders because it puts more dealers behind bars,” then-Chief of Criminal Affairs Jeff Ross wrote, according to the outlet.
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“I think you would all agree that effective enforcement methods must be pursued, regardless of critical media coverage.”
The proposal ultimately failed and was never enacted.
Pedestrians cross a street in the Outer Sunset neighborhood near Ocean Beach on June 26, 2023 in San Francisco. (Photo by Lauren Elliott via Getty Images)
Fast forward to the current election cycle, and Harris' 2005 plan has been resurrected by California critics who argue the vice president's “tough” prosecutorial bravado is rewriting history.
The Harris campaign has aired ads touting her record of law and order, highlighting her longtime record as a prosecutor in San Francisco's Alameda County and as the state's attorney general.
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“As a tough prosecutor, Kamala Harris has always taken on men like Trump – rapists, con artists, fraudsters and criminals. She's used to men like Trump and she's used to putting them in their place,” said a narrator in an ad supporting Harris released last month.
According to the Daily Mail, state law enforcement and Republicans have pushed back against the ads.
“This campaign is trying to completely reshape reality,” said Republican Rep. Kevin Kiley, R-Calif. “Anyone who's ever lived in California, particularly in San Francisco or Los Angeles, where she was district attorney, knows what that reality was.”
“She was a champion of San Francisco's sanctuary city policy and wanted drug dealers not to be prosecuted until the third try. She herself describes herself in her book as a progressive prosecutor.”
San Francisco District Attorney Kamala Harris speaks to supporters before an anti-K press conference in San Francisco on Oct. 29, 2008. San Francisco's ballot measure, Proposition K, seeks to stop enforcement of laws against prostitution. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)
When Harris proposed arresting drug dealers in 2005, Kevin Cashman, who was deputy chief of the San Francisco Police Department, told the outlet that officers were “shocked” by the proposal.
“We quickly realized this was not effective in our mission of keeping San Francisco safe,” he told the Daily Mail.
“The district attorney named the strategy she recommended ‘Operation Safe Streets.’ We in the police department called it ‘capture and release,’ because we have to capture them, identify them, and then release them back into the community without any action being taken.”
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Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign about the 2005 proposal but did not hear back by publication deadline.
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