Kamala Harris Laughs in Face of Families Victimized by Police Violence

Kamala Harris was distraught as she stood before an audience one morning in July 2016. In the previous three days, violence involving police had rattled the nation.

Officers had shot and killed one black man in Baton Rouge, La., and another in his auto outside Minneapolis as his horrified girlfriend and her toddler watched. At a protest confronting those shootings, a sniper had killed five Dallas police force officers.

"I take to tell you, my centre is breaking," Harris said at a meeting on racial bias in policing. Her voice wavered.

"As a prosecutor, my eye is breaking. As the top law enforcement officeholder in this country. And as a black woman."

Harris, then California attorney general, paid tribute to officers whose families pray they stay out of danger. She also said she'd never known a black man who wasn't racially profiled or unfairly stopped.

Information technology was an unusually frank acknowledgment of the forces pulling her in contrary directions in the ii years since constabulary killings of blackness men had set up off demonstrations beyond the state and fueled the Black Lives Matter motion.

Seeking to reconcile the competing demands of police and civil rights groups, Harris tried to avoid inflaming either side. That relatively rubber approach has left her open to criticism that she could have done more to atomic number 82 California'south efforts to limit police use of lethal force.

Harris did make tangible advances in police accountability. She focused on programs inside the attorney full general'south office, drawing praise from civil rights advocates and scant resistance from law enforcement.

At the same time, Harris, the state's first blackness attorney general, steered articulate of the legislative brawls over bills on policing, including what became a groundbreaking police to curb racial profiling. Harris likewise rejected pleas past ceremonious rights activists to investigate deadly police shootings of young black men in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

"She is perhaps a modest reformer, and that's fine," said Anne Weills, an Oakland ceremonious rights attorney. "Only I don't think that means she is especially progressive. She doesn't look at the big pic nigh how to make structural change."

On July viii, 2016, the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board met to begin its work under Assembly Bill 953, focusing on eliminating racial and identity profiling in constabulary enforcement.

For months, Harris has been fending off accusations, most recently in a fence Wed, that she did too petty to fight racial bias in the criminal justice arrangement.

Harris told The Times she was frustrated by the dull step of alter, but pointed to progress fabricated during her tenure.

"You lot'd be difficult pressed to discover whatever other attorney general in America who at that time was doing the kind of transformative work that we did," Harris said.

Harris had been attorney general for nearly 4 years when a white law officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old blackness human in Ferguson, Mo. The shooting on Aug. 9, 2014, reshaped the politics of race and law enforcement in America.

Video of Brown'due south torso, left face down in the street in a pool of blood for four hours, went viral on social media. Over the next several days, images of white cops in military vehicles firing tear gas and prophylactic bullets at mainly blackness protesters came to symbolize police violence against African Americans.

Police shootings became major news in the months that followed as they were captured in smartphone videos that spread nationwide.

"The death rate from police utilise of lethal force has been stable for a long fourth dimension," said Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and police force professor at UC Berkeley. "What happened with Ferguson … was people started to notice that these things kept happening."

Civil rights groups pressed for new limits on police power. Constabulary enforcement, feeling besieged, fought many of the proposals.

For Harris, the timing was difficult. Police unions had overwhelmingly opposed her when she first ran for the task in 2010, in part because she declined to pursue the capital punishment against the killer of a San Francisco police officer, Isaac Espinoza, when she was the San Francisco district attorney. She labored hard to secure their overwhelming back up in her run for reelection.

"She had to walk a fine tightrope," said Brian Marvel, a San Diego police force officeholder and president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, the state'due south superlative police advocacy grouping.

Merely ceremonious rights advocates besides set high expectations.

"We always promise that because you lot look like u.s.a., you talk similar us, y'all walk like us, y'all come up from where we come from — that you're not only reading about this in the news. You lot know at that place is a war being waged against black bodies," said Cat Brooks, an Oakland activist who idea Harris roughshod short.

Police advance through tear gas toward demonstrators protesting the killing of xviii-twelvemonth-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

(Scott Olson / Getty Images)

California lawmakers put police accountability high on their agenda after Ferguson. Amongst the most contentious bills was one pushed by ceremonious rights organizations to collect data on the race of everyone stopped by constabulary statewide to shed light on racial profiling.

Police groups — still a powerful political force in a land that has simply recently tempered its strict law-and-guild culture — resisted the nib, arguing it would be too burdensome.

Harris declined to take a position. After Jerry Brown, then governor, signed the beak into police force, Harris won credit from civil rights groups for drafting strong rules putting information technology into effect.

Nib Lockyer, a quondam country attorney general, said Harris avoided battles in the Capitol, merely a few blocks from her Sacramento part, and concentrated instead on running her own agency.

"I saw it as a general reluctance to have an active legislative part," said Lockyer, a onetime land Senate leader who remained closely engaged in lawmaking as attorney general.

Daniel Suvor, Harris' chief policy counselor at the time, said her preference was "to work direct with law enforcement and the civil rights customs to become things done as opposed to engaging in superfluous dialogue."

"She had to walk a fine tightrope."

Brian Marvel, president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, on Kamala Harris

Harris' say-so over constabulary practices was express. In a state with almost 80,000 police officers, the chaser full general employed but about 300 — special agents who investigate healthcare fraud, gun violations and drug crimes. By November 2015, all agents in the field were equipped, on Harris' gild, with body-worn cameras.

Some advocates were seeking mandatory trunk cameras for most every officeholder in California. They tried unsuccessfully to pass a bill to create a statewide standard for their employ. Harris spurned the proposal, saying she opposed a "one-size-fits-all approach."

Another Harris project was anti-bias training for constabulary enforcement agencies statewide, which proved popular. More than than two dozen agencies participated in the first form. Information technology remains part of the state'due south formal officeholder training.

Harris' signature achievement from this period was Open Justice, an online portal that, for the first fourth dimension, fabricated a wide array of criminal justice data bachelor to the public, including tallies of deaths and injuries in police custody.

"She saw there was and then much emotion and anecdote effectually the criminal justice reform conversation, and she wanted to inject data, facts and evidence into the conversation," Suvor said.

It was the rare initiative embraced by both police force and reform advocates.

"That was really, really helpful to the movement, because at that place was no place that nosotros could look at in-custody deaths at the hands of law enforcement prior to that," said Melina Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter organizer who chairs Cal Land L.A.'south Pan-African studies department.

Harris was less successful in dodging political fallout when it came to calls for state investigations of loftier-contour shootings. Civil rights advocates viewed local prosecutors as inherently compromised in cases against constabulary they worked closely with every day.

State intervention in local cases was a fraught upshot for Harris. In 2004, Lockyer, then attorney general, had second-guessed her refusal to seek the death punishment for the killer of Espinoza, opening his ain investigation into her decision. (He ultimately sided with Harris.)

"In that location's no question that has influenced and did influence my perspective on this," Harris said, adding she believed local officials are best held accountable by voters.

Community activists urged Harris to investigate two loftier-contour police force shootings in California — Ezell Ford'south death in Los Angeles in 2014 and the 2015 killing of Mario Woods in San Francisco — but she demurred, saying she lacked legal grounds to overrule local prosecutors.

"I wouldn't even say disappointed is a potent enough word for how nosotros felt about how she did every bit attorney general," said Kim McGill, an organizer with the Youth Justice Coalition.

Tritobia Ford, at left, female parent of Ezell Ford, speaks in January 2017; protesters demonstrate against the shooting of Mario Woods in December 2015

(Los Angeles Times / Associated Press)

Critics suspected a political motive behind Harris' stand up against state probes of the L.A. and San Francisco police shootings.

"When she was running for attorney general, she was already running for president," Weills said. "It's a very calculated procedure. For her to offset to alienate the whole police force enforcement institution by taking on these investigations … it might have destroyed her career."

A 2015 bill, which failed to laissez passer, would have required the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to take on cases involving police force employ of deadly force. Harris decline to back up it.

Yet Harris did not e'er take a hard line against state probes of local police misconduct. She privately asked the governor for money to create teams of prosecutors to deport such investigations in jurisdictions that consented to them. Chocolate-brown refused, she told The Times.

After she won election to the U.S. Senate, and in her concluding days every bit attorney general, Harris opened civil rights investigations into the Kern County Sheriff'south Office and the Bakersfield Law Department, which remain ongoing under her successor, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra.

Now, as she runs for president, Harris has more than forcefully backed contained investigations of police wrongdoing. She has promised the U.S. Justice Department would pursue more robust oversight of racial bias in law departments nationwide. She has also vowed to push legislation to end racial profiling.

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Source: https://www.latimes.com/politics/story/2019-08-05/kamala-harris-police-shootings-black-lives-matter

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