Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris — who openly identifies as a prosecutor challenging “felon” Donald Trump — compared law enforcement in America to lynching and Jim Crow restrictions during the peak of racial unrest in mid-2020.
“When we say that America has a history of systemic racism, we mean that from slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and policing, our institutions have done violence to black Americans,” Harris, then a senator from California, said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Police Use of Force and Community Relations” in June of that year, weeks after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin. “And it has caused black Americans to be treated as less than human across time, place, and institution,” Harris added before calling for the elimination of “systemic racism.”
WATCH:
Kamala Harris once compared policing to lynching and Jim Crow — but now she’s touting her law enforcement background. pic.twitter.com/QnBw9p0JCQ
— USA Features Media (@UsaFeatures) August 27, 2024
Four years later, Harris is embracing her law enforcement background, positioning the 2024 election as a contest between a prosecutor and a convicted criminal, the New York Post reports. “Before I became vice president and before I was elected as U.S. [sic] senator, I was the attorney general of California. Before that, I was a prosecutor who took on predators, fraudsters, and cheaters. So I know Donald Trump’s type,” she posted on X in July.
In her 2020 remarks, Harris referenced the deaths of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery—whom she described as being “lynched while going for a run”—and Breonna Taylor, who was killed in March 2020 during a no-knock raid at her home in Louisville, Ky., after her boyfriend fired on police, wounding one officer (a federal judge recently overturned the officers’ convictions in her wrongful death case). “There is a movement being led by people who might appear from the outside to have little in common, who are marching together to demand an end to the black blood that is staining the sidewalks of our country,” she said. “It gives me hope.”
Harris then argued that the country “must reimagine what public safety looks like” while stating that more policing wasn’t the answer. “The status quo thinking that more police creates more safety is wrong. It’s wrong. And it has motivated too much of municipal budgets and the thinking of policymakers,” she claimed. “[It] has distracted them from what would truly be the smartest use of resources to achieve safety in communities, which is to invest in the health of those communities. And healthy communities without any doubt are safe communities.”
Harris did not explicitly endorse calls to “defund the police,” but she nevertheless echoed much of the same rhetoric about local budgeting for the men and women in blue. She criticized “our mayors and local leaders” for dedicating “so much money” to “militarize the police” as “two-thirds of public school teachers in America today are coming out of their own back pockets to help pay for school supplies.” The future VP also claimed that racial disparities are “deeply rooted in our education system, and our housing system, in our workforces, and health care delivery system, and more.”
Harris proposed several measures to address the crisis, including a national use-of-force standard, independent investigations into alleged police misconduct, requirements for municipalities to report police use-of-force incidents to the federal government, and expanded pattern and practice investigations into police departments. And she went on to criticize Republicans for falling into “simplistic traps” regarding police reform in America.
“I was disheartened to hear our colleagues suggest that when we discuss the fact of systemic racism, we are accusing people within the system and all people within the system of being racist,” she said. “That kills the conversation.”
Two days later, Harris repeated her remarks about the nation’s history of systemic racism on social media, striking her earlier reference to “policing.” She wrote on X: “When we say that America has a history of systemic racism, we mean that from slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the criminal justice system, our institutions have done violence to Black Americans. And it has caused Black Americans to be treated as less than human.”
When we say that America has a history of systemic racism, we mean that from slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the criminal justice system, our institutions have done violence to Black Americans.
And it has caused Black Americans to be treated as less than human.
— Vice President Kamala Harris (@VP) June 18, 2020
Disclaimer: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author’s opinion.