White House
It’s presidential election season, an every four-year ritual that many Americans have come to hate. But there’s not much we can do about it. It’s here. We have to cope with it. And once again we have to decide between the lesser of two evils.
There’s not much that I can say about Republican nominee Donald Trump. It’s not an exaggeration to say that just about every voting age American citizen has made their minds up about “The Donald.”
But there’s a new player on the field that I do want to talk about, Kamala Harris. The former senator from and attorney general of California is the Democratic nominee. And she’s a bit of an unknown. So I want to give you a look at her history with law enforcement and how she might affect the way you do your jobs, should she become president.
Kamala Harris first appeared in the pages of POLICE in May 2004. As the then district attorney of San Francisco, she was featured in an editorial I wrote about how California officials were not doing everything they could do to protect officers in the state. The editorial discussed the murder of San Francisco Police Officer Isaac Espinoza and how Harris was handling the prosecution.
Officer Espinoza, 29, was working plainclothes on the night of April 10, 2004, when he and another officer spotted a man behaving suspiciously. They approached in their police vehicle, and the man opened up on them with an AK-47. Espinoza was killed and his partner was wounded. David Hill, 21, was arrested for the crime.
Immediately after the suspect was arrested and before Espinoza was buried, DA Harris announced that she would not seek the death penalty in the case. Her actions infuriated local officers, the police union, and the city’s police leadership. Even California’s most powerful senator at the time, Diane Feinstein, came out in favor of the death penalty for cop killers. She did it at Officer Espinoza’s funeral with Harris looking on. But that didn’t matter to Harris. All she wanted to do was curry favor with the city’s liberal elite.
Fortunately, Officer Espinoza’s killer is doing life without parole. So unless someone ends life without parole sentences, he will never be free again.
Harris’ next stop on her rise to power came in 2010 when she was elected attorney general of California. I believe if you have the right connections and are a member of the Democratic Party, it’s easy to win high office in California. She served in that capacity for six years. And I don’t have space to discuss everything she did that affected California cops. There was some good, some bad, and some meh.
Then Harris made the big time: the U.S. Senate. She replaced the retiring Barbara Boxer in 2016, and her views toward law enforcement started taking some interesting turns. One thing you need to know about Harris is that she has been called a “political chameleon,” and from everything I have read about her, I believe it’s true. I believe she will change her views any time there is an opportunity for her to gain advantage and based on the audience she is addressing. It's my opinion she turns with the wind like a weathervane.
If you need evidence of this just look at all the positions she ran on in the 2019 Democratic Presidential primaries and compare them with what she has said since Joe Biden dropped out of the race in July.
One changing Harris position that is of particular interest to law enforcement is that during the George Floyd Riots in June 2020, she praised the defund the police movement and said money being spent on police should be redirected to other needs. She also specifically called to “demilitarize the police.” After Harris was added to the Joe Biden ticket for the 2020 election, she clammed up about defunding police. Biden spokespeople said Harris supported increasing the right kind of funding for law enforcement. (Word games are fun. Aren’t they?)
I believe it’s going to be very hard for anyone to defeat Kamala Harris in this election. The Democrats are absolutely supercharged to elect the first woman president, first woman of color president, and that will be difficult for anyone to overcome. So I think she will win.
But pay no attention to what she says now. I believe what local law enforcement agencies should expect once she is in office is a quick pivot to progressive reforms that can bring the Department of Justice’s consent decree army to your town. Your best defense is to make sure your policies, training, and procedures are all constitutionally defensible. Even that may not be enough to prevent the federal lawsuits from flying because they will surely attack you for any past issues.
It's my opinion, Harris’ administration will be more progressive than Biden’s. It will even be more unfriendly to police than the Obama administration. And I believe its demands on your agencies will change based on her need to score points with key constituencies. I believe you should get ready for a wild ride.
