KAMALA HARRIS IS A COP WHO WANTS TO BE: THE CALIFORNIA SENATOR AND FORMER PROSECUTOR HAS A LONG RECORD OF PUSHING ILLIBERAL POLICIES.

AuthorBrown, Elizabeth Nolan

IN THE YEARS since former California Attorney General Kamala Harris entered national public life--first as a U.S. senator, now as a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination--one strain of criticism has surfaced again and again. It can be captured in just five words: Kamala Harris is a cop.

The phrase, which the candidate's critics use frequently, is meant to conjure more than just Harris' history as a hard-nosed San Francisco prosecutor. It's colloquial. To label someone a cop in this way is never to invoke the best behavior one might expect from police officers. It implies the person is a bully, a bootlicker, a professional tattler--the sort of person who shuts down unauthorized lemonade stands run by kids. A cop, in this context, is someone who will always defer to authority and the status quo, someone who is unaccountable and not to be trusted. Calling someone a cop invokes the worst sorts of police overreach, a legalistic authoritarianism that exists for its own sake.

During her 28-year tenure as a county prosecutor, district attorney (D.A.), and state attorney general (A.G.), Harris proved quite willing to live up to the epithet. In the public eye, she spoke of racial justice and liberal values, bolstering her cred as one of the Democratic Party's rising stars. But behind closed doors, she repeatedly fought for more aggressive prosecution not just of violent criminals but of people who committed misdemeanors and "quality of life" crimes.

Every attorney general fights for state power and police prerogatives. It's part of the job. But over and over again, Harris went beyond the call of duty, fighting for harsher sentences, larger bail requirements, longer prison terms, more prosecution of petty crimes, greater criminal justice involvement in low-income and minority communities, less due process for people in the system, less transparency, and less accountability for bad cops.

In the early days of her presidential campaign, Harris has sought to define herself as a liberal reformer who has kept up with the times. But a review of her career shows a distinct penchant for power seeking and an illiberal disposition in which no offense is small or harmless enough to warrant lenience from the state. Now she wants to bring that approach to the highest office in the land.

THE PATH TO POWER

HARRIS WAS RAISED in Berkeley, California, the daughter of a Stanford economist and a respected breast cancer researcher. After her parents split up, she spent her high school years in Montreal, then attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the University of California's Hastings College of Law. In 1988, with one year left in law school, she took an internship in the Alameda County, California, District Attorney's Office. Upon graduation, the county offered her a job, provided she passed the state bar exam, which she did on her second try.

Harris served as an assistant Alameda County prosecutor until 1998. But her side career in politics would soon receive a kick start from the Bay Area's well-established political favor system, in which the friends of Democratic power players were often rewarded with cushy government positions. In 1994, Harris was appointed as a member of the California Medical Assistance Commission, which oversaw payments to hospitals from the state's Medicaid program--a part-time job that paid $72,000 a year for a few hours of work per month.

Harris was selected for the position by Willie Brown, whom the Los Angeles Times Magazine described in 2004 as "a fixture in California politics for years" and "something of an unofficial deal-maker and influencer." Brown, then 60, was the Democratic speaker of the state Assembly. He was also Harris' boyfriend, and it wasn't the first time he had gotten her a lucrative state appointment. Earlier that year, Brown had appointed her to a nearly $100,000-per-year spot on the state's Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board, which handles disability and unemployment insurance claims. Harris quit after six months.

It wasn't exactly an inspiring entry into public service, which may explain why neither job is mentioned in Harris' 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold (Penguin Press). But it was the beginning of a career as a successful cog in the Bay Area Democratic machine.

Throughout the mid- to late '90s, Harris appeared in San Francisco media, mostly as part of the city's liberal political/philanthropic glitterati. Even after decoupling romantically from Brown, the pair remained friends and political allies, often showing up together at fashionable San Francisco and Los Angeles events.

Harris has always had a knack for maintaining public visibility and for converting that visibility into personal prestige and power. She saw a bump in both in February 1998, when she left her job in Alameda County and went to work as head of the career criminal division at the San Francisco District Attorney's Office, then headed by Terence Hallinan. A longtime player in the city's liberal political circles, Hallinan had been elected D. A. in 1995. He never sought the death penalty, pushed for the legalization of prostitution, believed in alternatives to jail for drug crimes, fought against trying juvenile offenders as adults, threatened law enforcement officers with personal civil liability for not reading arrestees their Miranda rights, and made it a priority to take domestic violence cases more seriously. The city's police union hated him. If there was ever such a thing as a "progressive prosecutor," Hallinan was it.

Harris would work as a deputy district attorney under Hallinan for less than two years before leaving in 2000 for the San Francisco City Attorney's Office, in what an outgoing colleague in the San Francisco Examiner called a "wonderful high-visibility new position for Kamala Harris." This allowed her to dodge fallout from her association with Hallinan, who had come under fire for low prosecution rates. In 2002, she announced she would run against her former boss in the following year's election.

She was by all accounts a formidable opponent. In a 2019 story about the campaign for Politico, former police union president Gary Delagnes called Harris "intelligent" and "ruthless." Her campaign was built around the argument that although she supported Hallinan's ideas, he had been ineffective and irresponsible, letting too much crime go unpunished. It was a frame that let her run to his right without explicitly identifying as "tough on crime"--and it worked. Harris narrowly won a three-way race with Hallinan and lawyer Bill Fazio.

Besides her emphasis on increasing prosecutions, Harris also had the city's money and power at her disposal. She "counts among her supporters and friends San Francisco's glitzier crowd of liberals," the Examiner reported in October 2003, at which point Harris had already "spent about half a million dollars on her campaign." After she blew through a voluntary $211,000 spending cap that she had previously agreed to abide by, she was rebuked by the city ethics commission, resulting in a $34,000 penalty.

It didn't matter. In January 2004, she was sworn in as San Francisco's district attorney.

By the end of her second year in elected office...

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