How Kamala Harris can lose the cop’s badge and still look tough | Judith Levine

Kamala Harris has struggled to establish a clear political identity, and much of the trouble comes from her record as a prosecutor in California. In 2004, as San Francisco district attorney, she declined to seek the death penalty for a man convicted of killing a police officer (he received a life sentence). Ten years later, when the state supreme court ruled capital punishment unconstitutional, Harris, then the state attorney general, appealed against the decision.

As California attorney general - a position she held from 2011 to 2017 - Harris launched reforms such as the program to prevent recidivism among young first-time nonviolent drug offenders. The program, Back on Track, offered individual support and job training and replaced jail time with community service - a "revolutionary" idea at the time, noted Mother Jones editorial director and veteran Harris-watcher Jamilah King. Yet Harris's office opposed the release of non-violent offenders from California prisons, in defiance of a court order to reduce overcrowding.

Harris made some downright retrograde decisions as well, such as defending wrongful convictions won through proven official misconduct and, most famously, supporting legislation to fine, even lock up, parents of habitually truant students.

She tried to please both sides by calling herself a "progressive prosecutor". During the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries, she ran to the left of Joe Biden on most criminal justice issues, including solitary confinement and marijuana legalization. The anti-policing and prison abolitionist communities were not persuaded, however. Journalist and law professor Lara Bazelon wrote a damning op-ed headlined "Kamala Harris was not a 'progressive prosecutor'." Activists launched the hashtag #KamalaIsACop. Yet in 2024, even as such mistrust lingers, Republicans are painting their opponent as a "defund-the-police" radical masquerading as a cop.

Now the Harris campaign feels it's found a winner: "Prosecutor versus felon" portrays the Democrat as a tough seeker of justice, experienced in vanquishing Donald Trump's "type"- sexual "predators", business fraudsters, tax cheats. "Prosecutor had a 'cop' connotation to it when she initially ran," Democratic pollster Celinda Lake told the Atlantic. "It does not now. It has a connotation of standing up, taking on powerful interests - being strong, being effective - so it's a very different frame."

For voters worried that Democrats are too soft on crime, the image may be compelling. But for others whose support Harris needs, a prosecutor is always a cop, and a cop is not the good guy. How can she own her record honorably and show critics that she can do better?

Harris can reframe her stances on criminal justice according to the principles of restorative justice - and use that frame to define the contrast between herself and Trump.