Harris Cracked Down on Violent Offenders; Showed Leniency on Less Serious Crime
“Her record as a prosecutor navigating both paths has left her open to criticism that she either betrayed liberal ideals or prioritized them over law and order.
Reporting from San Francisco, Calif., and Washington, D.C.
From the moment that Kamala Harris took her place among 57 counterparts at the 2004 California District Attorneys Association annual conference, it was an open question how, if at all, the first Black, Asian American and female D.A. in the state’s history would fit in.
Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican American, did not even blend in back home in liberal San Francisco County’s law enforcement circles. The county had never before elected a woman, a Black person or an Asian American as its district attorney, much less all three at the same time. She was equally rare nationwide: When Ms. Harris won in December 2003, she became one of only three elected Black district attorneys in the entire country.
“They looked at her like she had four heads,” said Debbie Mesloh, Ms. Harris’s communications director at the time, about her appearance a month later at the district attorneys’ conference in Santa Barbara, a conclave of conservative, throw-the-book-at-them prosecutors.
“It was an organization of mostly older Caucasian Republican men,” said Gilbert Otero, the former district attorney of Imperial County, who was there. Ms. Harris, he said, had “these beliefs that didn’t normally jibe with our crowd. She and I had a little spat at one roundtable over the death penalty and the three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy — me for both and her against.”
But over time Mr. Otero came to view Ms. Harris as a law enforcement ally. He endorsed her as the Democratic candidate for state attorney general in 2010. One of her first trips after she won was to tour a tunnel dug by Mexican traffickers to transport drugs into Mr. Otero’s county.
“She kept her promise that she would show up,” Mr. Otero said. “It meant a lot to law enforcement down there.”
Vice President Kamala Harris’s rise from strong-willed law enforcement official to standard-bearer in liberal Democratic politics is unusual and, some might conjecture, mutually incompatible. Navigating both paths has left her open to criticism as the Democratic presidential nominee that she either betrayed liberal ideas or prioritized those ideals over law and order. Certainly her star potential fueled speculation that she intended to use her elected positions as steppingstones to higher office — which, ultimately, she did.
But a close examination of her 12 years as an elected prosecutor, including interviews with more than 30 people who worked with her, shows a coherent record that is for the most part consistent. Ms. Harris seemed particularly focused on protecting the most vulnerable victims by cracking down on violent offenders while seeking alternatives to incarceration for less serious criminals. Her priorities as a prosecutor became especially clear once she was given the authority by voters to establish them, after more than a decade spent working for other district attorneys. Those efforts were not always successful or politically advantageous, yet she undertook them anyway.
Ms. Harris’s defenders argue that her professional history makes perfect sense to anyone who grew up as she did, in a working-class Black neighborhood in Berkeley governed by mostly white leaders. Her former chief of administration in the district attorney’s office, Paul Henderson, recalled their first conversation in the early 1990s, when Ms. Harris was starting out as a prosecutor in Oakland and he was graduating from law school.
“We talked about living in a community where the entire decision-making process was removed from those being impacted by those decisions,” Mr. Henderson said in an interview. “And she said, ‘Why can’t we be in those rooms?’”
She soon made her way in.
Tough on Child Abuse
Among the three candidates for San Francisco district attorney standing on the debate stage in the fall of 2003, two were white males: Terence Hallinan, the liberal incumbent who was also Ms. Harris’s former boss, and Bill Fazio, a more conservative criminal lawyer who had been defeated by Mr. Hallinan in the previous election.
The third candidate, Ms. Harris, had positioned herself as the moderate in the race. She was also the former girlfriend of the outgoing San Francisco mayor, Willie Brown, and a frequent presence in the local society pages. Mr. Hallinan had not-so-subtly encouraged voters to see her as someone who had not gotten as far as she had on professional merits alone.
“He has an interest,” Mr. Hallinan speculated about Mr. Brown, “in having a friend in the district attorney’s office.”
Ms. Harris framed her distinctiveness in a wholly different manner. “I’m the only one up here,” she informed the debate audience, “who’s been a prosecutor all my professional life.”
That characterization, while accurate, was not exactly foretold. Although Ms. Harris has said she was inspired to become a prosecutor in part to help people like a high school friend whose father was molesting her, her own family was puzzled by the decision.
“With some of them I had to defend the decision like one would a thesis,” Ms. Harris said in 2019. Her argument, she said, was that justice was better served when life-or-death decisions were handled by people “who went to our church, had children in our schools, coached our Little League teams and knew our neighborhoods.”
In 1990, the year after Ms. Harris graduated from law school, she started in the district attorney’s office in Oakland. Eight years later, she joined the higher-profile district attorney’s office in San Francisco. Two years later, following disagreements with her boss, Mr. Hallinan, she jumped to the San Francisco city attorney’s office. By then her courtroom presentations had became required viewing for many of her colleagues.
A former prosecutor, Michael Weiss, recalled watching a closing argument she delivered as a prosecutor in San Francisco “without any notes, skillfully recalling every important detail, and the jurors paying rapt attention to every word. To this day, I’m not sure I’ve seen it done better.”
Ms. Harris, who beat Mr. Hallinan in a runoff election with 56 percent of the vote, quickly established herself as different kind of prosecutor in arguably the most liberal county in California.
She did not share Mr. Hallinan’s tolerance of open-air drug markets or his passion for legalizing marijuana, though she did decree that jail time would never be sought for those who possessed small amounts of marijuana. She came down harder on cases involving firearms or child abuse. She placed more resources in the office’s domestic violence and sexual assault units.
And she established a new program to combat sex trafficking, one that dispelled the view that the victims in such cases were somehow complicit. As she crisply informed one colleague, “There’s no such thing as child prostitutes. They’re survivors of rape.”
But Ms. Harris opposed the death penalty and had vowed to voters never to seek it. That promise was put to the test three months into her tenure when an undercover policeman, Isaac Espinoza, was gunned down by a 19-year old gang member. The new district attorney announced that she would abide by her campaign pledge four days after Mr. Espinoza’s murder. The police union expressed outrage, as did Senator Dianne Feinstein. Even some subordinates viewed the swiftness of her decision as a rookie mistake, especially given that she had not first explained her reasoning to Mr. Espinoza’s widow.
Ms. Harris apparently agreed. In the wake of the controversy, she started a more deliberative review process for death penalty cases that included outreach to the victims’ families.
Ms. Harris’s best-known innovation as district attorney was the Back on Track initiative, a pilot program she began in 2005 to address high recidivism rates among nonviolent drug offenders between the ages of 18 and 30. The program was both progressive in outlook and “very, very difficult for those who entered it,” said Lateefah Simon, who ran the program and is now a Democratic candidate for the House.
To qualify for Back on Track, Ms. Simon said in an interview, an offender had to enter a guilty plea and then get a job within 60 days. After a full year of employment, education, community service, regular meetings with a supervising judge and crime-free behavior, the charge would be expunged from the offender’s record. In its first two years, fewer than 10 percent of Back on Track’s participants reoffended.
Officials throughout California visited San Francisco in hopes of copying the Back on Track model back home. What was hard for them to replicate, Ms. Simon said, was “how Kamala went through her Rolodex with those manicured fingers’’ and used her contacts to find jobs for the young offenders at Goodwill and in Nordstrom clothing warehouses, among others. She also found a dental clinic that would fix their teeth before going in for job interviews.
Still, the county’s limited resources meant that Ms. Harris’s brainchild did not grow beyond the pilot stage. Fewer than 300 offenders graduated from Back on Track. Seven people who entered the program turned out to be undocumented immigrants whose ineligibility was not detected by program staffers, because of a screening loophole, until 2008, after one of the immigrants stole a woman’s purse and fractured her skull while getting away.
That crime was featured in a Republican National Committee ad in July, saying that the Democratic candidate for president “allowed illegal immigrant drug dealers to enter job training and have their criminal records wiped clean.”
An Upward Trajectory
By 2007, when Ms. Harris won re-election as San Francisco district attorney without opposition, her upward trajectory was a foregone conclusion. She had been featured on Oprah Winfrey’s show, was the state’s most high-profile Democrat campaigning for the presidential candidate Barack Obama and was already mulling a run for state attorney general.
But there were episodes that bedeviled her second term. In 2006, her office trumpeted a 28-count indictment against a prominent building contractor who had provided substandard concrete for major city construction projects. Two years later, as it became apparent that the charges were overblown, her office quietly whittled the charge down to a single misdemeanor, to which the contractor pleaded guilty.
Two years later, Ms. Harris’s office tried an actor and hip-hop artist named Jamal Trulove for murder, largely on the basis of a single eyewitness whose account had repeatedly changed. Mr. Trulove’s conviction was thrown out on appeal, but only after he had spent six years in prison. He sued, and the San Francisco Board of Supervisors agreed to pay Mr. Trulove $13.1 million. (Ms. Harris had attended Mr. Trulove’s sentencing but was not named in the lawsuit.)
The most vexing scandal during Ms. Harris’s tenure occurred when she was running for attorney general. Prosecutors in her office had determined that a technician in the city’s crime lab was behaving erratically and could not be counted on to provide testimony. But it took three months before this opinion was conveyed to the defense attorneys whose cases rested on crime lab analyses.
Finger-pointing ensued between the D.A.’s office and the city’s police department. The technician, Deborah Madden, later pleaded guilty to stealing drug samples for her personal use. Hundreds of convictions were soon thrown out because of potentially tainted evidence.
Though Ms. Harris’s former subordinates maintained in interviews that she was unaware of the crime lab scandal when it first materialized, her political opponents maintained that she was guilty of incompetence and possibly a cover-up.
“It was hugely significant in the primary,” said Brian Brokaw, her campaign manager at the time. “She had to stop campaigning to deal with it.”
Ms. Harris managed to eke out a victory in November against Steve Cooley, the Los Angeles County district attorney.
Jailing Parents
As attorney general, Ms. Harris expanded a program she had started in San Francisco to combat truancy, a phenomenon that comprised nearly 30 percent of the state’s public school student body in 2011. As district attorney, she had her office send out letters to the parents of truant children and threaten the parents with fines or even imprisonment if they did not ensure that their children attended class.
No parent went to prison, but that changed when Ms. Harris took the anti-truancy program statewide. “Not every parent needed to be incarcerated,” said Tori Verber Salazar, the former district attorney of San Joaquin County. “But some did. And she gave us the hammer.”
In Orange County, a police sweep in 2013 resulted in the arrest of six parents of truant students, including a mother whose daughter had not attended school because she suffered from sickle-cell anemia. In 2019 as a presidential candidate, Ms. Harris expressed regret for jailing parents, saying “that was certainly not the intention” of the initiative.
In other instances, her office acted on behalf of California’s governor, Jerry Brown, to fight federal judicial mandates to relieve the state’s chronically overcrowded prisons. At one point her attorneys unsuccessfully resisted a court order to release certain nonviolent inmates, saying they were needed to help fight wildfires in the state. At another point they contested a federal court order granting transition surgery to an inmate who had been repeatedly assaulted in a male prison. (The inmate was paroled before the case was adjudicated and ultimately had the surgery as a private citizen.)
In both cases Ms. Harris later told reporters she was dismayed to learn of her office’s efforts.
But Ms. Harris did not shrink from using her perch to wade into national issues. Following a succession of police misconduct cases nationwide in 2014 and 2015, her office started a police training course to address implicit bias. She also directed the California Department of Justice to adopt a program providing resources for body cameras. Both were heralded by her press office as firsts in the nation, though participation in each was voluntary.
More substantively, Ms. Harris wielded her clout during the 2008 home foreclosure crisis by scuttling a modest settlement offer from the major banks to several affected states. “I don’t know that this will work for California,” she said.
In 2012, the banks agreed to about $20 billion in homeowner relief for California, mostly in loan forgiveness rather than cash subsidies. But Ms. Harris had succeeded in getting a settlement in a year’s time that was roughly four times the original offer, according to two of her former associates.
Ms. Harris’s legal battle that may have been the most emotionally satisfying to her was when she openly defied her state’s position. As a candidate for attorney general in 2010, she pledged not to defend Proposition 8, the California ballot initiative ratified in 2008 that exclusively recognized marriage as between a man and a woman.
Once in office, she went a step further. Siding with two gay California couples in a federal lawsuit seeking to overturn Proposition 8, her attorneys filed an amicus brief with the U.S. Supreme Court, arguing that the state law was unconstitutional. On June 26, 2013, the court agreed that opponents of same-sex marriage lacked legal standing.
Two days later, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit formally lifted the injunction against same-sex marriage in California. That same day, two of the plaintiffs in the federal lawsuit, Kris Perry and her partner Sandy Stier, walked into San Francisco’s City Hall to get married. Ms. Harris was in town and heard of the nuptials.
She found the two on the City Hall balcony. “She was beaming from ear to ear, saying, ‘Isn’t this incredible?’” Ms. Perry said.
Ms. Harris quickly got down to business. She pulled out a piece of paper, read the wedding vows, and 30 seconds later, the formalities were over.
As the brides kissed, the attorney general held her fists in the air. Then she was on her way.
Robert Draper is based in Washington and writes about domestic politics. He is the author of several books and has been a journalist for three decades. More about Robert Draper“
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