Kamala Harris has elicited some of her biggest cheers on the campaign trail by comparing her background as a government lawyer prosecuting “predators”, “fraudsters” and “cheaters” with her opponent’s felony conviction.
“I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris told the crowd at the Democratic Convention last month. “I have been dealing with people like him my entire career”.
But Trump has used the record of the Democratic candidate, who served as a courtroom prosecutor, district attorney and attorney-general in California before being elected to the Senate, to paint her as soft on crime.
He is likely to press her hard on this issue in the first presidential debate next week, after his campaign called her a “weak-on-crime district attorney” in a statement on Friday.
So what does her record actually look like?
Where does Harris stand on the death penalty?
As San Francisco’s newly elected district attorney in 2004, Harris declined to seek the death penalty against David Hill, who was charged with the murder of city police officer Isaac Espinoza — a move in line with her stance throughout her campaign at the time.
“She held to that” promise, said John Donohue, professor at Stanford Law School. “If that had been all that had happened, I would say: ‘well, she stuck to her principles’ . . . What then maybe led some people to think there was some equivocating was her later position as the attorney-general of the state of California”.
In 2014, Harris, now the state’s chief legal officer, appealed against a ruling by a federal judge that found the death penalty unconstitutional, on the basis that it was a flawed decision — a move seen by anti-capital punishment advocates as an about-face.
The relatively liberal Ninth Circuit court of appeals sided with Harris on procedural grounds, holding that the district court was not authorised to weigh new constitutional theories in such a case.
“I don’t think it necessarily would have ended the death penalty in California, certainly not cleanly, if she had just deferred, but it would have sent a message and would have been supportive of getting rid of the death penalty if she had taken that step,” Donohue said.
How has Harris handled issues of child sex abuse?
A pillar of Harris’s legal work has been her efforts to change the handling of cases involving underage victims of sexual abuse in a bid to avoid inflicting further harm.
She “has really demonstrated a sensitivity to these issues and solid progress on them,” said Diane Rosenfeld, lecturer at Harvard Law School.
Harris’s push to treat sexually abused children as victims rather than charge them with prostitution was a “huge breakthrough,” Rosenfeld added.
After focusing on prosecuting child sexual assault cases in California’s Alameda County, Harris set up a unit as San Francisco district attorney and later worked with the US Department of Justice on a national programme aimed at preventing child abuse.
The San Francisco unit was “pretty far sighted,” said Rosenfeld. Trauma experienced by sexual assault victims, especially children, means they “might not have the ability to recall details in the same linear way that an investigator wants to hear evidence of sexual abuse”. A unit where prosecutors are trained to receive this information “is to be commended”.
What is Harris’s position on immigration?
Immigration will be a hot-button issue during the debate, as the number of people apprehended on the US south-west border hit a record of nearly 2.5mn last year.
Trump has blamed US President Joe Biden’s administration for illegal crossings, calling Harris a “failed border tsar”. The vice-president has emphasised her role as attorney-general of a border state while vowing to toughen up border security.
“I went after transnational gangs, drug cartels, and human traffickers that came into our country illegally,” Harris told crowds earlier this year. “I prosecuted them in case after case, and I won”.
Her record in California is mixed. As San Francisco district attorney, she brought cases charging employers for exploiting immigrant staff, in one instance targeting a contractor who failed to pay workers.
But she also backed a San Francisco policy, siding with then mayor Gavin Newsom, that compelled local police to report juvenile undocumented immigrants it arrested to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that was later at the heart of ex-president Trump’s controversial immigration crackdown.
Is Harris pro-police?
During a speech at a sheriff’s office in Michigan last month, Trump sought to paint Harris as anti-police, claiming with no evidence that the country was engulfed in a “Kamala crime wave”. Violent crime has fallen since Trump was in the White House.
But Harris has repeatedly “put [her] record against” Trump’s to signal that as an ex-prosecutor, she would be a more effective top cop.
That record has been criticised from both ends of the political spectrum, with conservatives faulting her for being too liberal and progressives pointing to the mass incarceration of African Americans in California, stemming from decades of “tough on crime” state policies.
Her rapport with the police force has had twists and turns. Her relations with local police were strained by her decision as San Francisco district attorney not to pursue the death penalty against a man charged with the murder of a city officer.
In 2020, she expressed support for the “defund the police” movement as protests erupted across the country following the murders of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd at the hands of law enforcement officers.
But the Biden-Harris campaign later stressed the pair did not support cutting police funds.
Earlier in her legal career, Harris came under attack from civil rights activists for not being more active in probing murders of black individuals by police in California.
What is Harris’s relationship with Wall Street?
During a speech in July, Harris told crowds that “during the foreclosure crisis, I took on the big Wall Street banks and won $20bn for California families, holding those banks accountable for fraud”.
“Donald Trump was just found guilty of 34 counts of fraud,” she added, in reference to his conviction in a case about hush money payments made to a porn actress ahead of the 2016 presidential election.
Harris has repeatedly cited the multibillion-dollar settlement reached in 2012 with the five largest US mortgage servicers, including JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, over allegedly wrongful foreclosures and other mortgage-related misdeeds.
The deal came after Harris pulled out of settlement discussions in 2011, arguing the proposed agreement was “inadequate” and would “allow too few California homeowners to stay in their homes” — a bold move that ultimately swelled the final settlement by more than four times.
The deal has since been criticised for not delivering enough funds to homeowners.
But Nancy Wallace, professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, praised Harris’s efforts. “Kamala was the first AG [attorney-general] to push back against these institutions, who were willing to cover very little of the cost”.
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