‘Kamala the Cop’ Doesn’t Sound So Bad in 2024

Five years ago, as Kamala Harris began her failed bid for the Democratic presidential nomination, The New York Times ran a sharply critical op-ed titled “ Kamala Harris Was Not a ‘Progressive Prosecutor.’ ” The piece put a stain on Harris’ record as a prosecutor in California at a time when the Democratic Party’s base was firmly to the left on criminal justice issues.

Today, Harris could practically wear the attack as a badge of honor.

It’s a sign of how dramatically the politics of crime have shifted in the last few years — even within her own party.

During the 2020 Democratic primary campaign, the vice president treated her time as the former district attorney in San Francisco and attorney general of California as a liability and largely fled from her record in an effort to win over the progressive left. Especially in those pre-pandemic days, “progressive prosecutors,” who sought to blunt the often-harsh impact of the criminal justice system on defendants and their communities, were still ascendant in liberal jurisdictions.

In the intervening years, rising crime rates during the pandemic and concerns over homelessness and drug addiction have fueled voter anxiety, a political reality Democrats have acknowledged.

The truth about Harris’ record as a prosecutor is that it was always more complicated than it was portrayed by her harshest detractors. She was not the tough-on-crime caricature deplored by the left nor the bleeding-heart activist still depicted by the right.

But as she positions herself to replace President Joe Biden on the 2024 ticket and prepares for a head-to-head matchup with former President Donald Trump in the fall, her past as a prosecutor — once an anchor — may now prove to be an asset, particularly given the considerable legal problems of the man she would be running against.

Americans today rate crime and violence among their top concerns in the country, with 61 percent of registered voters saying that they believe that the criminal justice system is not tough enough on criminals; in 2020, just 48 percent of respondents said that was the case. National sentiment seems to have been driven in large part by a rise in crime during the pandemic that Biden and Harris inherited; but even as recent statistics have shown a marked decline in crime rates across the nation , voters have continued to express concerns on this front.

Indeed, the political profile of the “progressive prosecutor” itself has taken a major hit. In deep-blue areas like San Francisco and Portland, voters have ousted prosecutors who came to office promising to incarcerate fewer people and to seek more lenient sentences for defendants in a system that they deemed overly punitive. That voter frustration has been evident in other liberal jurisdictions as well, with homelessness and drug addiction attracting the concerns of large swathes of Democrats as well.

Earlier this year, in a development that seemed to capture the fall of the progressive prosecutor in practically cinematic fashion, former Baltimore prosecutor Marilyn Mosby — once a national face of the progressive prosecutor movement — was herself convicted on federal charges of mortgage fraud and perjury .

These days, moreover, the calls from the left to “defund the police” that followed the murder of George Floyd in 2020 are now clearly and firmly outside the Democratic political mainstream . Some of the country’s biggest and most Democratic cities — San Francisco, Washington, New York and elsewhere — have recently implemented policy changes expanding police powers and enhancing criminal penalties.

Meanwhile, the Biden administration has largely sought to project a pragmatic, tough-on-crime approach in the mold of the president himself while also trying — with decidedly mixed results — to pursue limited criminal justice reform efforts. One Biden official took stock of the political landscape recently by telling POLITICO , “Well-meaning ideas have gone too far, and we need a sensible approach.”

All of this could make the phrase “Kamala the Cop” — once a phrase used by Harris’ detractors on the left — a de facto campaign slogan.

Then there is the fact that Harris would be running against Trump, a man who recently became a convicted criminal in Manhattan and who remains under indictment by the Justice Department in two major criminal cases — one for retaining classified documents after leaving office and refusing to return them despite many opportunities to do so, and the other for an unprecedented effort to remain in power after losing the 2020 presidential election .

Those two prosecutions have recently hit major roadblocks thanks to judges that Trump himself appointed , but if Trump loses his reelection bid, they may once again become major threats to his future and his freedom . Obviously no one in or around the White House or the Justice Department will say it outright, but one of the simplest — and most readily accessible — reasons for voters to cast their ballots against Trump this year would be if they want him to go to prison .

Harris would be well positioned to highlight the contrast between herself as a prosecutor and Trump as a convict/defendant. It would not be new terrain for her, either, as illustrated by a 2019 campaign ad from Harris that has already gone viral since Biden announced that he would step aside as the party’s presumptive nominee. “I prosecuted sex predators. Trump is one,” the ad said. “I shut down for-profit scam colleges. He ran one. I held big banks accountable. He’s owned by them. I’m not just prepared to take on Trump, I’m prepared to beat him.”

The facts have only gotten worse for Trump on this front — not just in the form of the pending criminal cases but a series of major civil cases as well.

A jury last year concluded in a civil case that Trump had sexually abused the writer E. Jean Carroll and defamed her by lying about it. He now owes her nearly $90 million .

Earlier this year, Trump was also ordered to pay a judgment exceeding $450 million after the New York Attorney General’s office prevailed in its case alleging that Trump fraudulently inflated his net worth to secure financial benefits. Both cases are now on appeal.

Needless to say, Harris would not be able to cruise to victory on these facts alone, particularly since Republicans have sought to link the politics of crime to illegal immigration — a policy area that she has held in her portfolio during her time as vice president. Last week at the RNC , Republicans hammered Harris on the administration’s record at the border, and the subject is sure to remain a focal point of attacks from the right if she secures the nomination.

For Harris’ part, she is likely to point to Trump as the villain in that story, particularly after he encouraged congressional Republicans to kill a bipartisan immigration deal earlier this year that would have increased enforcement along the southern border. Trump’s intervention and his party’s acquiescence in Congress appear to have represented an effort to prevent Democrats from regaining ground on this issue in an election year.

Still, the turn of events is a remarkable one for Harris. Once seemingly out of step with her party’s base on issues that were central to both her professional and political identities, she now finds herself on a glide path to the nomination, as Democrats rally around her in the hopes of moving past weeks of public turmoil over Biden’s reelection bid and staving off Trump’s return to the White House.

In the days and weeks ahead, Harris’ time as a prosecutor is sure to be revisited. Despite what you may hear, her record defies easy categorization or simplistic accounts — even as it warrants serious and close scrutiny.

Those on the left who have portrayed Harris as a criminal justice hard-liner will have to reckon, for instance, with Harris’ decades-long opposition to the death penalty — a position that earned her the rebuke of the late Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, who was then arguably at the height of her political power in California. Those on the right who have sought to present Harris as soft on crime will have to deal with Harris’ effort to crack down on school truancy and absenteeism — a position that may have gained more salience in recent years, as many Americans have been forced to reckon firsthand with the consequences of learning losses resulting from school closures during the pandemic.

The actual work of prosecutors is much trickier than political commentators — and even prosecutors themselves — often portray it in the political arena. There are no silver bullets to eliminate crime, and there are relatively few cases of unambiguous injustices or wrongful convictions of the sort that tend to attract the biggest headlines and the loudest critics on the left.

Regardless, Harris and her team will almost certainly not see her legal resume as the problem that it was for her five years ago.