Kamala Harris’s Prosecutorial History: A Lens on Her Current Political Identity

Roughly three months prior, Vice-President Kamala Harris approached a podium to deliver an address poised to characterize both her history and her future. The day before, President Joe Biden had withdrawn from the electoral contest and endorsed her as his successor for the Democratic nomination. With a limited timeframe for campaigning, Harris had no opportunity for delay. A common adage in politics states: define yourself or be defined by your adversary. In that moment, as Harris presented her initial appeal to the American populace, she framed herself not solely through her tenure in the White House or as a US senator, but by the years she served as a prosecutor in California. “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 declared regarding her Republican opponent. This statement has been frequently reiterated at her campaign rallies and speeches, as the 60-year-old has aimed to portray this election as a confrontation between a seasoned prosecutor and a convicted felon, consistently reminding voters of Trump’s legal challenges. However, an examination of Harris’s involvement in and outside of California’s legal system highlights her ongoing struggle for self-definition, what her detractors describe as a pattern of adapting positions based on political circumstances, and her remarkable capacity to capitalize on opportunities when others have dismissed her. Harris’s career in law enforcement commenced immediately after graduating from law school in Alameda County, California, which encompasses the cities of Berkeley and her native Oakland. Throughout the 1990s, amidst the government’s “war on drugs,” Oakland grappled with severe violent crime. For a junior prosecutor, the role was formidable. Yet, the gravity of the cases handled meant it was regarded as a premier position for a young and driven attorney, according to Teresa Drenick, who collaborated with Harris at that 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 were part of the same trial team. She admired Harris’s self-assurance before a jury, and her esteem for her colleague deepened when Harris was reassigned to a different team in the same courthouse, focusing on child 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 commented. During this period, Harris was romantically involved with Willie Brown, a prominent local political figure and speaker of the California State Assembly, who was instrumental in advancing the careers of several other distinguished political leaders in the state, including current Governor Gavin Newsom and San Francisco Mayor London Breed. Brown appointed her to two state boards and introduced her to some of San Francisco’s most influential Democratic benefactors. The brief relationship concluded by the time Brown was elected as the city’s mayor in 1995. Three years later, Harris accepted a position at the San Francisco district attorney’s office. While in a relationship with Brown, who was 30 years her senior, Harris had begun to socialize with some of the city’s political heavyweights. San Francisco’s political machinery, which Harris has characterized as “a bare-knuckled sport,” has fostered the careers of some of the nation’s most significant political stalwarts, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the late Senator Dianne Feinstein. Harris cultivated relationships with both, advancing alongside contemporaries like Newsom, as she established herself in the political arena. Her rapid ascent through San Francisco’s competitive politics was marked by days in courtrooms representing victims and evenings at lavish political galas. This was also around the time Harris met one of her closest confidantes – and most substantial donors – billionaire philanthropist Laurene Powell Jobs. Jobs, who was married for decades to the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, contributed $500 to Harris’s 2003 campaign for San Francisco district attorney, which she won, unseating the individual who had hired her. Two decades later, the wealthiest woman in Silicon Valley donated nearly $1m to the Biden-Harris re-election campaign, according to Fortune Magazine. The exact amount she has directly contributed to Harris’s presidential bid is not publicly known, but it is considered significant. On the day before Easter in 2004, just four months into Kamala Harris’s term as the district attorney of San Francisco, a gang member wielding an AK-47 rifle fatally shot Isaac Espinoza, a 29-year-old police officer. The killing shocked the city, prompting numerous politicians and prominent police officials to advocate for the death penalty. However, Harris, who had made her opposition to capital punishment a central tenet of her political campaign to become the city’s chief prosecutor, instead opted to pursue a life sentence without parole. She announced her decision publicly just 48 hours after the murder, without first notifying the widow. “She did not call me,” Renata 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 public outcry was immediate. Speaking at the officer’s funeral, Senator Feinstein demanded his killer “pay the ultimate price.” As she exited the church service, she informed reporters that had she been aware of Harris’s opposition to the death penalty, she likely would not have endorsed her. “[T]here can be no exception to principle,” Harris later articulated in an opinion piece in the San Francisco Chronicle, defending her choice. Long-time civil rights attorney John Burris, who supported Harris’s decision at the time, remarked that he believed it was “politically was not wise for her, but it was a philosophical position she took.” “She was pretty bold in her position and she did take a lot of heat for it,” he told the BBC. “That was a pretty progressive stand.” The incident could have terminated her political aspirations, but Harris, who had been raised by a single mother in the working-class city of Oakland, persevered. “Is she a political animal? Absolutely not. Is she naturally skilled? Yes,” stated Brian Brokaw, who managed Harris’s two successful campaigns for California attorney general 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 internalize some lessons from her initial significant decision as San Francisco district attorney. Four years later, she again declined to seek the death penalty following a dramatic homicide, but this time, she better comprehended the potential repercussions of her decision. Tony Bologna was driving in San Francisco with his three sons when their vehicle was subjected to a barrage of gunfire. Bologna and two of his sons were killed; his third son sustained critical injuries. Shortly after the killings, police apprehended Edwin Ramon Umaña, an undocumented member of the MS-13 gang who had apparently mistaken the 49-year-old Bologna for a sworn adversary. This time, Harris chose to personally deliver the difficult news about her prosecutorial decision to Bologna’s widow, Danielle, as recalled by Matt Davis, who was representing Danielle Bologna in a civil lawsuit against the city at the time. “It was no surprise that Danielle had a very strong, negative reaction to the news,” Mr Davis told the BBC in a recent interview. “She made it clear that she was upset, and Kamala listened to her and expressed her sympathies but stayed pretty firm.” The meeting left a lasting impression on Davis. He had befriended Harris in law school in San Francisco, and when she first disclosed her intentions to run for D.A., he remembered thinking she had no chance. But he asserts that painful conversation made him realize he had underestimated her. “That was not an easy thing to do,” Mr Davis said. Throughout her career in law enforcement, Harris’s supporters endeavored to portray her as a “progressive prosecutor” dedicated to criminal justice reform while also being tough on crime. This was a delicate balance to strike in a liberal city within the country’s largest left-leaning state, and one that critics from both political spectrums contend she did not consistently maintain. As district attorney, she adopted a “smart-on-crime” philosophy, which encompassed initiatives to divert non-violent offenders from prison by guiding them into job training programs and ensuring young offenders remained in school. Niki Solis, an attorney in the San Francisco public defender’s office who opposed Harris in the early 2000s, noted that Harris had been receptive to her concerns about how young victims of sex trafficking were being charged with prostitution, rather than being treated 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,” Ms Solis stated. Trump and his conservative allies have sought to emphasize this period in her career, characterizing her as part of a “San Francisco liberal elite.” Conversely, on the political left, she has been accused of not being sufficiently reform-minded, leading some on social media to dub her “Kamala the cop.” However, by the time Harris was elected as California’s attorney general in 2010, her progressive inclinations appeared to have yielded 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,” observed Gil Duran, who worked for Harris in the attorney general’s office for a few months. “The attorney general – usually a sleepy backwater of an office – was now home to a rising star.” On the national stage, Harris began to establish her presence. In 2012, in the aftermath of the global financial crisis, Harris threatened to withdraw from negotiations concerning a financial settlement between state attorneys general and five US banks. California was slated to receive approximately $4 billion in the initial agreement, and Harris ultimately secured $18 billion for the state. The Harris campaign has highlighted this case during the campaign as further evidence of her willingness to confront powerful interests. However, more recent reports indicate that only $4.5 billion of the settlement ultimately reached California homeowners who had been defrauded by lenders. In actions that displeased some liberals, she implemented a statewide school truancy program, which some county prosecutors utilized to arrest parents. Additionally, she defied a Supreme Court order to alleviate overcrowding in the state’s prisons. She also reversed her previous stance on the death penalty in 2014 when, as attorney general, she appealed a lower court’s ruling that declared it unconstitutional. Thus, the prosecutor who once refused to sentence violent murderers to death on the basis that “there is no exception to principle” was now defending the state’s authority to do precisely that. Hadar Aviram, a criminal justice and civil rights professor who petitioned Harris to uphold the decision, was among many critics of her position. “You are not under any obligation to defend things that are morally unjust,” she told CNN in 2019 regarding the incident. “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 collaborated with Harris when she first left Oakland, contended that the barrage of criticism she encountered over her support for the death penalty was unjust. “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.” Yet, Harris was selective about which laws she enforced. In 2004, when Gavin Newsom, then San Francisco’s mayor, decided to permit same-sex weddings, in contravention of state law, Harris assisted in officiating several of the ceremonies, describing it as “one of the most joyful” moments of her career. Her extensive record as a prosecutor would prove challenging when, after being elected to the US Senate in 2016, Harris decided to seek the Democratic presidential nomination. She chose to launch her 2020 presidential campaign just blocks from the Alameda County Courthouse, the very location where she first uttered the words, “for the people” – which would become part of her campaign slogan. However, her past defense of the death penalty and resistance to prison reform drew criticism from her party’s left-wing. She withdrew from the presidential race before the primary contests to select a Democratic contender had even commenced. Now, as Harris campaigns for president against Donald Trump, she is once again highlighting her prosecutorial credentials, but recontextualized within a new political environment. While many cities, including San Francisco, experimented with progressive police reform following Floyd’s murder, a surge in crime and homelessness during the pandemic has provoked public opposition to so-called “soft on crime” policies. Republicans have also heavily emphasized political messaging centered on crime and public safety in recent years. Harris’s past as a prosecutor is no longer as significant a liability, and in a contest against the first former president to be convicted of felony crimes, the narrative aligns with the current political climate. Notably, at the Democratic National Convention this summer, abolishing the death penalty was removed from the party platform. And while in 2020, Harris aimed to win over left-leaning Democrats, she is now explicitly appealing to moderate Republicans who may be disillusioned with Trump. To achieve this, she has adjusted several of her positions – from border security to single-payer health care – towards the center. This has led to accusations from her opponents that she is inconsistent. 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.” However, Mr Duran, Harris’s former colleague in the attorney general’s office, views it less as an issue of political integrity and more simply as an indicator of her political pragmatism. “I think she does have conviction but it’s really hard to run a campaign on your convictions alone, for the most part,” he stated. “The Kamala Harris we’re seeing now is very much poll and focus-group driven.” What Harris truly represents has been a persistent question throughout her career – and continues to follow her in her pursuit of the Oval Office. But to Mr Brokaw, her former campaign manager, she has consistently operated on her own terms. “She has carved her own path and left a whole bunch of people behind who counted her out and underestimated her,” he concluded. Correction 19 November: This article was amended after a previous version incorrectly stated that Harris dropped out of the 2020 presidential primary after George Floyd was murdered. In fact she had already dropped out before his death. Copyright 2024 BBC. All rights reserved. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Read about our approach to external linking.