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Kamala Harris Says ‘We All End Up in the Same Place’

by | Nov 2, 2020

Recently Kamala Harris tweeted a video where she’s talking nonsense about “equity” and “equality” — pandering to the left’s progressives — which ends with her saying, “equitable treatment means we all end up in the same place.”

End up at the same place. Well, it’s Kamala Harris … so we can deduce that she’s talking about jail. We all end up in jail. “A cell for you, a cell for you, and a cell for you! Everyone gets a cell!”

The Trump train has been working overtime to paint Kamala Harris as the most radical left-leaning figure in the Democratic party, but this is a misstep: it’s inaccurate. They could illustrate how Kamala Harris is a longtime pro-cop prosecutor with a history of locking people up in prison. In that respect, it can be shown that Harris is the Democratic candidate most unsupportive of the goals of the progressive base in terms of immigration, criminal justice reform, and police accountability. Harris’s history puts her at the other end of the spectrum of the Black Lives Matter movement, squarely in the same category as Joe Biden, whose 1994 crime bill was responsible for sending thousands of minorities to prison. Harris sought to do the same as San Francisco DA and later AG in California.

For example, when Harris was the District Attorney of San Francisco, she supported measures that required police to turn over undocumented juvenile immigrants to federal authorities if they were arrested, “regardless of whether or not they were actually convicted of a crime.” Harris’s position was in direct contrast to the progressive wing’s sponsorship of a bill called The Trust Act, which sought to limit the cooperation with ICE at the state level and designate San Francisco as a “sanctuary city.” After three years, that bill passed, but it was without Harris (or Obama’s) support. David Campos, a former member of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and proponent of the bill, had this to say about Harris: “Kamala was always seen as a very law and order type who was not very supportive of pro-immigrant legislation. At the best, she was not involved and at the worst, she opposed.” Her pro-jail stance carried over to police accountability as well: Harris was against having her office to investigate officer-involved shootings, and likewise, she did not support statewide standards mandating the use of police body cameras. Had George Floyd been murdered under Kamala’s watch, it’s a strong likelihood it would not have been caught on camera, and had Breonna Taylor been murdered under her watch, her office would not have investigated.

Harris was equally unsupportive of criminal justice reform. As law professor Lara Bazelon wrote in the Wall Street Journal, “progressives urged her to embrace criminal justice reforms as a district attorney and then the state’s attorney general, Ms. Harris opposed them or stayed silent.” According to the Wall Street Journal piece, “Harris fought tooth and nail to uphold wrongful convictions that had been secured through official police misconduct that included evidence tampering, false testimony and the suppression of crucial information by prosecutors.” A memo surfaced which showed that Harris and her deputies knew about police wrongdoing, yet Harris failed to alert defense attorneys of clients impacted by the police misconduct. A judge later condemned Harris for this violation of defendants’ constitutional rights while Harris contested the judge’s ruling–and she lost. As a result, over 600 cases handled by a corrupt police technician were dismissed. This is but one example of how Harris is decidedly pro-jail, pro-corruption, and pro-police: not quite the far-left radical that the Trump team would have you believe. A half dozen other examples documented in a January 2019 New York Times piece that show Harris consistently supported prosecutorial misconduct and police wrongdoing that resulted in wrongful convictions, some resulting in life sentences and even the death penalty. On the death penalty, Harris is no better than she is on police reform: she appealed a judge’s ruling that the death penalty was unconstitutional and incredulously claimed that such a ruling “undermines important protections that our courts provide to defendants.” She opposed DNA testing that would later prove a death-row inmate was innocent. Likewise, Harris defended a Kern county prosecutor who falsified a defendant’s confession, which was later used to threaten a life sentence.

Harris’s indefensible support for police misconduct isn’t limited to death penalty cases: it seems that hard time is Kamala’s one-size-fits-all solution for even the pettiest of crimes. In what is perhaps the most outrageous example of Harris’ overzealous “lock ’em up” mindset, she sent police officers to lock up the parents of children who had missed school. Yes, she sent people to jail for truancy. What’s worse, her office failed to do their due diligence in some truancy cases before throwing on the handcuffs. In one example, a young girl suffering from sickle cell anemia missed school due to hospitalization, and as a result, that poor girl’s mother had handcuffs put on her, and she was stuck in a police cruiser while filmed by local news media. Recounting this policy, Kamala Harris later laughed about it.

These are just a few examples from Kamala Harris’s record. Keep these in mind when Harris touts anything about “equity” or “equality” — as history has shown, Harris seems to believe that everyone is guilty until proven innocent, and if we’re all headed to the same place, under Kamala’s watch, that place is a prison cell.

Richard Booth

Richard Booth

Richard Booth is the Glenn D. Wilburn Fellow and contributor to the Libertarian Institute. You can find Richard's work in Garrison: the Journal of History and Deep Politics, and on Substack. Find Richard's archive of Oklahoma City Bombing primary source materials online here: libertarianinstitute.org/okc

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