KAMALA HARRIS IS A COP WHO WANTS TO BE PRESIDENT
IN THE YEARS since former California Attorney General Kamala Harris entered national public life—first as a U.S. senator, now as a leading candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination—one strain of criticism has surfaced again and again. It can be captured in just five words: Kamala Harris is a cop.
The phrase, which the candidate’s critics use frequently, is meant to conjure more than just Harris’ history as a hard-nosed San Francisco prosecutor. It’s colloquial. To label someone a cop in this way is never to invoke the best behavior one might expect from police officers. It implies the person is a bully, a bootlicker, a professional tattler—the sort of person who shuts down unauthorized lemonade stands run by kids. A cop, in this context, is someone who will always defer to authority and the status quo, someone who is unaccountable and not to be trusted. Calling someone a cop invokes the worst sorts of police overreach, a legalistic authoritarianism that exists for its own sake.
During her 28-year tenure as a county prosecutor, district attorney (D.A.), and state attorney general (A.G.), Harris proved quite willing to live up to the epithet. In the public eye, she spoke of racial justice and liberal values, bolstering her cred as one of the Democratic Party’s rising stars. But behind closed doors, she repeatedly fought for more aggressive prosecution not just of violent criminals but of people who committed misdemeanors and “quality of life” crimes.
Every attorney general fights for state power and police prerogatives. It’s part of the job. But over and over again, Harris went beyond the call of duty, fighting for harsher sentences, larger bail requirements, longer prison terms, more prosecution of petty crimes, greater criminal justice involvement in low-income and minority communities, less due process for people in the system, less transparency, and less accountability for bad cops.
In the early days of her presidential campaign, Harris has sought to define herself as a liberal reformer who has kept up with the times. But a review of her career shows a distinct penchant for power seeking and an illiberal disposition in which no offense is small or harmless enough to warrant lenience from the state. Now she wants to bring that approach to the highest office in the land.
THE PATH TO POWER
HARRIS WAS RAISED in Berkeley, California, the daughter of a Stanford economist and a respected breast cancer researcher. After her parents split up, she spent her high school years in Montreal, then attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and the University of California’s Hastings College of Law.
In 1988, with one year left in law school, she took an internship in the Alameda County, California, District Attorney’s Office. Upon graduation, the county offered her a job, provided she passed the state bar exam, which she did on her second try.
Harris served as an assistant Alameda County prosecutor until 1998. But her side career in politics would soon receive a kick start from the Bay Area’s well-established political favor system, in which the friends of Democratic power players were often rewarded with cushy government positions. In 1994, Harris was appointed as a member of the California Medical Assistance Commission, which oversaw payments to hospitals from the state’s Medicaid program—a part-time job that paid
