What Kamala Harris’s years as a prosecutor inform us about her

Simply over three months in the past, Vice-President Kamala Harris walked as much as a microphone to make a speech that will outline each her previous and her future.

A day earlier than, President Joe Biden had dropped out of the election race and endorsed her to succeed him as Democratic candidate. With solely a brief interval of campaigning forward of her, Harris had no time to waste.

There’s a saying in politics: outline your self or be outlined by your opponent. And in that second, when Harris made her first pitch to the American individuals, she outlined herself not simply when it comes to her document within the White Home or as a US senator, however the years she spent as a California prosecutor.

“I took on perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say: I know Donald Trump’s type,” she stated of her Republican challenger.

The road has been repeated typically at her marketing campaign rallies and stump speeches, because the 60-year-old has sought to border this election as a contest between a hard-bitten prosecutor and a convicted felon, consistently reminding voters of Trump’s authorized troubles.

However a glance again at Harris’s time out and in of California’s courtrooms reveals her enduring wrestle to outline herself, what her opponents say is a historical past of pivoting on points relying on the political climate, in addition to her uncanny potential to grab the second when others have counted her out.

Harris’s time in regulation enforcement started simply out of regulation faculty in Alameda County, California – which incorporates the cities of Berkeley and her hometown of Oakland.

In the course of the Nineties, within the midst of the federal government’s “war on drugs”, Oakland struggled with violent crime.

For a junior prosecutor, the job was daunting. However the severity of the instances you needed to cope with meant it was thought-about a prime job for a younger and impressive legal professional, stated Teresa Drenick, who labored with Harris on the time.

“It was like a potboiler of an atmosphere. The amount of grief and agony you ingested every day was hard to process. For us, it was intense. The stakes being high, the crimes being so serious,” she informed the BBC.

“It was near the height of the crack-cocaine epidemic. There were gang murders, street corner murders taking place. There was a lot going on in Oakland that enabled you as a prosecutor to handle some of the most serious cases that a prosecutor is ever going to handle.”

Ms Drenick and Harris had been on the identical trial staff collectively. She admired Harris’s confidence in entrance of a jury, and her respect for her colleague solely grew when Harris was transferred to a unique staff in the identical courthouse targeted on baby sexual assault.

“She was very, very caring of victims of child abuse. She was able to speak to them in a way that allowed them to open up to her,” she said.

It was at this time that Harris dated Willie Brown, a local political kingmaker and speaker of the California State Assembly who helped launch the careers of some of the state’s other most prominent political leaders, including Gavin Newsom, the current governor, and San Francisco Mayor London Breed.

Brown appointed her to two state boards and introduced her to some of San Francisco’s highest-profile Democratic donors. The short-lived romance ended by the time Brown was elected as the city’s mayor in 1995. Three years later, Harris took a job at the San Francisco district attorney’s office.

During her relationship with Brown, who was 30 years her senior, Harris had begun mingling with some of the city’s political heavyweights.

San Francisco’s political machine, which Harris has described as “a bare-knuckled sport”, has launched the careers of some of the nation’s biggest political stalwarts including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the late Senator Dianne Feinstein.

Harris forged relationships with both of them, rising alongside contemporaries like Newsom, as she found her feet in the political world.

Her swift rise through San Francisco’s rough-and-tumble politics were defined by days in courtrooms representing victims and nights at glitzy political galas.

This was also around the time that Harris met one of her closest friends – and most significant donors – Laurene Powell Jobs, the widow of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs.

Jobs donated $500 to Harris’s 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney, which she won, toppling the man who had hired her. Twenty years later, the billionaire philanthropist donated nearly $1m to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, according to Fortune Magazine. It’s not known how much she has directly contributed to Harris’s bid for the presidency, but the amount is considered substantial.

On the day before Easter in 2004, just four months into Kamala Harris’s tenure as the district attorney of San Francisco, a gang member brandishing an AK-47 rifle fatally shot a 29-year old police officer named Isaac Espinoza.

The slaying stunned the city, with many politicians and prominent members of the police calling for the death penalty.

But Harris, who had made opposition to capital punishment a key part of her political campaign to become the city’s top prosecutor, instead decided to pursue a life sentence without parole. She made her decision public just 48 hours after the murder, without informing the widow first.

“She did not call me,” Espinoza told CNN in 2019. “I don’t understand why she went on camera to say that without talking to the family. It’s like, you can’t even wait till he’s buried?”

The backlash was swift. Speaking at the officer’s funeral, Senator Feinstein demanded his killer “pay the ultimate price”. While walking out of the church service, she told reporters that had she known Harris was against the death penalty, she probably wouldn’t have endorsed her.

“[T]here can be no exception to principle,” Harris later wrote in an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, defending her decision.

Long-time civil rights attorney John Burris, who supported Harris’s decision at the time, said he thought it was “politically was not wise for her, but it was a philosophical position she took”.

“She was fairly daring in her place and he or she did take quite a lot of warmth for it,” he informed the BBC. “That was a pretty progressive stand.”

The incident might have been the tip of her political ambitions, however Harris, who had grown up with a single mom within the working-class metropolis of Oakland, carried on.

“Is she a political animal? Absolutely not. Is she naturally skilled? Yes,” stated Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s two profitable campaigns for California legal professional basic in 2010 and 2014. “For her, politics is the means to the end. She is focused on the end result and the impact she can have on people’s lives less than the process.”

Harris appeared to soak up some classes from her first main choice as San Francisco district legal professional. 4 years later, she once more declined to pursue the demise penalty after a dramatic killing, however this time, she higher understood how her choice would reverberate.

Tony Bologna had been driving in San Francisco along with his three sons when their car was barraged by gunfire. Bologna and two of his sons had been killed; his third son was critically injured.

Shortly after the killing, police arrested Edwin Ramon Umaña, an undocumented member of the MS-13 gang who had evidently mistaken the 49-year previous Bologna for a sworn enemy.

This time, Harris opted to ship the tough information about her prosecutorial choice to Bologna’s widow Danielle herself, recollects Matt Davis, who was representing Danielle Bologna in a civil go well with towards the town on the time.

“It was no surprise that Danielle had a very strong, negative reaction to the news,” Mr Davis informed the BBC in a latest interview. “She made it clear that she was upset, and Kamala listened to her and expressed her sympathies but stayed pretty firm.”

The assembly left an indelible impression on Davis. He had befriended Harris in regulation faculty in San Francisco, and when she had first revealed her plans to run for D.A., he remembers considering she didn’t have an opportunity.

However he says that painful dialog made him realise he had underestimated her.

“That was not an easy thing to do,” Mr Davis stated.

Over the span of her regulation enforcement profession, Harris’s allies sought to color her as a “progressive prosecutor” dedicated to prison justice reform but additionally powerful on crime.

It was a advantageous line to stroll in a liberal metropolis within the nation’s largest left-leaning state, and one which critics on each side of the political aisle say she didn’t stick with.

As district legal professional, she adopted a so-called “smart-on-crime” philosophy, which included initiatives to maintain non-violent offenders out of jail by steering them into job coaching applications and making certain younger offenders remained in class.

Niki Solis, an legal professional within the San Francisco public defender’s workplace who labored reverse Harris within the early 2000s, stated she had been receptive to her issues about how younger victims of intercourse trafficking had been being charged with prostitution, versus being handled as victims.

“I realised that she understood issues that a lot of her predecessors and a lot of [district attorneys] up and down the state failed to understand or even acknowledge,” stated Ms Solis.

Trump and his allies on the fitting have sought to play up this time in her profession, depicting her as a part of a “San Francisco liberal elite”. However on the left of politics, she has been accused of not being reform-minded sufficient, with some on social media nicknaming her “Kamala the cop”.

However by the point Harris was elected as California’s legal professional basic, in 2010, her progressive tendencies appeared to have given solution to political pragmatism.

“She was seeking more of a national profile. She wanted to make a mark. There was definitely an expectation of an interesting future to come,” said Gil Duran, who worked for Harris in the attorney general’s office for a few months.

“The legal professional basic – normally a sleepy backwater of an workplace – was now dwelling to a rising star.”

On the national stage, Harris began to make her mark. In 2012, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Harris threatened to walk away from negotiations on a financial settlement between state attorneys general and five US banks. California was set to receive around $4 billion in the initial deal, and Harris eventually secured $18 billion for the state.

The Harris campaign has highlighted this case on the campaign trail as more proof she’s willing to stand up to powerful interests.

But more recent reporting shows that only $4.5 billion of the settlement ended up going towards California homeowners who had been ripped off by lenders.

In moves that angered some liberals, she implemented a school truancy program state-wide, which some county prosecutors used to arrest parents. And she defied a Supreme Court order to reduce overcrowding in the state’s prisons.

She also reversed her previous position on the death penalty in 2014 when, as attorney general, she appealed a lower court’s ruling that found it was unconstitutional. Now, the prosecutor who once refused to sentence violent murderers to death on the basis that “there is no such thing as a exception to precept” was defending the state’s right to do just that.

Hadar Aviram, a criminal justice and civil rights professor who petitioned Harris to leave the decision in place, was one of many critics of her stance.

“You are not under any obligation to defend things that are morally unjust,” she told CNN in 2019 of the episode. “If you truly believe that they’re morally unjust and you have an opportunity to take a stand, I think it’s an imperative to do so.”

Former San Francisco city attorney Louise Renne, who worked with Harris when she first left Oakland, said the torrent of criticism she faced over her support for the death penalty was unfair.

“The thing is when you’re state attorney general, you have to defend the law. That’s your obligation,” she told the BBC. “ I don’t regard that as a weakness or a valid criticism at all.”

But Harris was selective about which laws she enforced. In 2004, when Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco’s mayor, decided to allow same-sex weddings, in violation of state law, Harris helped officiate a few of the ceremonies, calling it “one of the most joyful” moments of her career.

Her long record as a prosecutor would prove tricky when, after being elected to the US Senate in 2016, Harris decided to run for the Democratic presidential nomination.

She chose to kick off her 2020 presidential run just blocks away from the Alameda County Courthouse, the same place where she first uttered the words, “for the people” – which would become part of her campaign slogan.

But in the midst of her campaign, George Floyd, an unarmed black man, was murdered by a police officer during an arrest, igniting a nationwide racial reckoning and demand for criminal justice reform. Her past defence of the death penalty, and resistance to prison reform, earned her criticism from her party’s left-flank.

She dropped out of the presidential race before the primary contests to choose a Democratic contender had even begun.

Now, as Harris campaigns for president against Donald Trump, she is again calling attention to her prosecutorial bona-fides, but reframed in a new political atmosphere.

While many cities, including San Francisco, experimented with progressive police reform after Floyd’s murder, a spike in crime and homelessness during the pandemic has triggered a public backlash against so-called “soft on crime” policies. Republicans have also heavily focused on political messaging around crime and public safety in recent years.

Harris’s past as a prosecutor is no longer such a liability, and in a race against the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes, the narrative aligns with the political moment.

Notably, at the Democratic National Convention this summer, abolishing the death penalty was dropped from the party platform.

And while in 2020, Harris was trying to win over left-leaning Democrats, she is now explicitly making a pitch for moderate Republicans who may be fed up with Trump. To do that, she has shifted a number of her positions – from border security to single-payer health care – to the centre.

This has led to accusations from her opponents that she is a flip-flopper.

She’s “a chameleon”, Trump’s running mate and Ohio Senator JD Vance told CNN in August. “She pretends to be one thing in front of one audience and she pretends to be something different in front of another audience.”

But Mr Duran, Harris’s former colleague in the attorney general’s office, sees it less as a matter of political scrupulousness and more simply a sign of her political pragmatism.

“I believe she does have conviction however it’s actually laborious to run a marketing campaign in your convictions alone, for essentially the most half,” he stated. “The Kamala Harris we’re seeing now is very much poll and focus-group driven.”

What Harris actually stands for has been a query that has dogged her all through her profession – and continues to comply with her on her bid for the Oval Workplace. However to Mr Brokaw, her former marketing campaign supervisor, she has all the time operated on her personal phrases.

“She has carved her own path and left a whole bunch of people behind who counted her out and underestimated her,” he stated.