Audrey Fahlberg writes for National Review Online about disturbing comments from Kamala Harris’ past.
As presumptive Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris leans into her prosecutorial background on the 2024 campaign trail, she’s coming under fire for a clip featured in a recent Dave McCormick television ad in which she says it is “wrongheaded thinking to think that the only way you’re going to get communities to be safe is to put more police officers on the street.”
A trip down memory lane shows that comment wasn’t a one-off. During the summer of 2020, when thousands of progressive Americans were taking to the streets to demand a more liberal approach to policing, then-senator Harris said during a live-streamed social-justice conference panel that “it is old, tired, wrong, status quo thinking to think you get more safety by putting more police officers on the street.”
At the time, Harris was working to shore up support for the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act of 2020 to create a national standard for excessive use of force and expand the federal government’s investigatory power over local police departments, among other progressive police-reform proposals.
Four years later, the comments the vice president had made at “JusticeCon: A Path Towards Freedom” while she was a senator could come back to bite her as she tries to win over independent voters in the final sprint to Election Day.
“We know the reality of it is that when you go to upper-class suburbs, you don’t see that police presence,” Harris said during the virtual conference on June 19, 2020, roughly two months before then–presidential candidate Joe Biden tapped her as his running mate. “But what you do see,” she continued, are “well-funded schools,” “high rates of home ownership,” “small businesses that have access to capital,” “people and families who have access to health care.” Added Harris: “We have to reimagine how we achieve public safety, understanding that the best way to do that is invest in communities, and in particular, the educational needs, economic needs, or public-health needs, mental-health needs, and so on.”
