Kamala Harris, then a district attorney, at the African American Cultural Center in San Francisco, June 12, 2004. On “The View,” the California senator spoke about “reimagining how we do public safety in America.”
Indeed, an examination of that record shows how Harris was far more reticent in another time of ferment a half-decade ago. The daughter of an Indian mother and Jamaican father who met in Berkeley, California, in the social protest movement of the 1960s, Harris has said she went into law enforcement to change the system from the inside. Yet as district attorney and then attorney general — and the first Black woman to hold those jobs — she found herself constantly negotiating a middle ground between two powerful forces: the police and the left in one of the most liberal states in America.
All of which poses a question: Is Harris essentially a political pragmatist, or has she in fact changed? And is she the woman to lead a police reform effort from the White House?Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003, defeating her former boss, Terence Hallinan. He was seen as one of the nation’s most progressive district attorneys, unafraid to confront police, once even indicting the city’s police chief, albeit briefly.
In 2007, she stayed quiet as police unions opposed legislation granting public access to disciplinary hearings. Gloria Romero, the former state Senate majority leader, who authored the bill, said many San Franciscans publicly supported the move, but not Harris. “At that time, Kamala was a very progressive DA, and some of the criticisms now are a bit of revisionist history,” Renne said.
“We regularly received calls from officers saying, ‘We can’t believe that you’re discharging this case. This was a good case.’ Well, no, it wasn’t,” Henderson recalled. Harris has said that she learned of the crime lab problems only when they became public and has acknowledged that her office was too slow in putting a policy in place. Her aides had earlier been working toward a written policy, but Silard said he believed it had been delayed amid negotiations among several agencies. “The implication that she buried it is ridiculous,” he said, adding that she had initiated the review.
I thought she already erased much of her actions on Wikipedia?
Open the fucking comment section
United States Latest News, United States Headlines
Similar News:You can also read news stories similar to this one that we have collected from other news sources.
Source: cnnbrk - 🏆 393. / 55 Read more »
Source: DEADLINE - 🏆 109. / 63 Read more »
Source: MSNBC - 🏆 469. / 51 Read more »
Source: USATODAY - 🏆 100. / 63 Read more »
Source: enews - 🏆 466. / 52 Read more »