From the earliest days of her candidacy, one topic has loomed over Vice President Kamala Harris’s presidential bid: her track record with criminal justice reform in the United States.
On Tuesday, Harris — the Democratic nominee for the presidency — had a chance to address some of the criticisms, in a town hall-style interview with radio host Charlamagne tha God.
It was also an opportunity for Harris, the former attorney general of California, to bolster support among the Black community.
While the vast majority of Black voters identify with the Democratic Party, recent polls show their backing for Harris is not as strong as in 2020, when fellow Democrat Joe Biden was running for president.
Harris took the offensive on Tuesday, very quickly steering the conversation towards correcting the record about her candidacy.
“Folks say you come off as very scripted,” Charlamagne began, in the first minute of their conversation. “They say you like to stick to your talking points —”
The vice president immediately jumped in. “That would be called discipline,” she quipped.
It was an apparent effort to draw a distinction between herself and her Republican rival Donald Trump, whose public appearances are often described as rambling.
Harris continued to give sharp rebuttals to criticisms of her public appearance as buttoned-up.
“What do you say to people who say you stay on the talking points?” Charlamagne asked.
“I would say, ‘You’re welcome,'” she replied.
Prosecutor past under spotlight
A former prosecutor who became district attorney of San Francisco and then attorney general of California, Harris has long faced scrutiny for her approach to criminal justice.
On the campaign trail this election cycle, Harris’s allies have sought to leverage her background to the Democrat’s advantage, framing the race as a battle between “the prosecutor” and “the felon”.
Trump, after all, has 34 felony convictions to his name, after he was found guilty in May of falsifying business records in relation to a hush-money payment to an adult film actor.
Harris herself has leaned into that framing. On July 23, shortly after she launched her presidential campaign, Harris struck a contrast between herself and Trump, who faces a total of four criminal indictments.
“Before I was elected vice president, before I was elected United States senator, I was elected attorney general of the state of California, and I was a courtroom prosecutor before then,” Harris told a rally in Wisconsin.
“And in those roles, 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.”
But critics have blasted Harris for that same history as a prosecutor, with members of both the right and left slamming her policies.
Progressives, on one hand, have criticised her hard-handed approach to issues like student truancy: Harris famously championed a state law that would make parents eligible for a misdemeanour if their child were chronically absent from school without an excuse.
In 2014, Harris also opposed calls to implement an independent system to review the fatal use of force by police.
Critics at the time argued that local prosecutors work closely with police and are therefore unable to be objective when deciding whether to bring charges. Harris, however, said, “I don’t think it would be good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys.”
Her opponents on the right, meanwhile, have accused Harris of being lax on crime and failing to adequately support law enforcement.
Decriminalising marijuana
In her interview with Charlamagne, Harris sought to tamp down on the criticism against her by branding it the product of right-wing misinformation.
“One of the biggest challenges that I face is mis- and dis-information,” Harris told the radio host. “And it’s purposeful. Because it is meant to convince people that they somehow should not believe that the work I have done has occurred and has meaning.”
Charlamagne, for his part, called on Harris to answer several rumours swirling around her campaign.
“One of the biggest allegations against you is that you targeted and locked up thousands of Black men in San Francisco for weed. Some said you did it to boost your career. Some said you did it out of pure hate for Black men,” he said, asking: “What are the facts of that situation?”
Harris refuted the allegations, replying, “It’s just simply not true.”
She then pivoted to her work on lowering penalties for marijuana possession, an issue that disproportionately affects Black men.
A 2020 analysis from the American Civil Liberties Union, for instance, found that Black people are 3.64 times more likely to be arrested for possessing the drug, compared to white people. The report, however, found no significant difference in marijuana use between the two populations.
That difference in arrest rates contributes to higher incarceration rates overall for Black men in the US. The Pew Research Center found that, in 2020, Black adults faced five times the rate of imprisonment as their white counterparts.
Referencing this discrepancy, Harris told Charlamagne that she would decriminalise marijuana on the federal level if elected president.
“My pledge is, as president, I will work on decriminalising it, because I know exactly how those laws have been used to disproportionately impact certain populations and specifically Black men,” she said on Tuesday.
Approximately 24 states have already taken steps to legalise small quantities of marijuana for recreational use. But on the federal level, the drug remains illegal, though the Biden administration has taken steps to lower penalties.
In May, for instance, Biden’s Justice Department initiated a new rule reclassifying marijuana as a “schedule III drug”, down from the highest rank under the Controlled Substances Act’s five-tier system.
That reclassification made the drug acceptable for medical use. It also indicated a shift in the government’s position, to acknowledge that marijuana is not as dangerous as the other drugs in its previous category, like heroin.
“As vice president, [I] have been a champion for bringing marijuana down on the schedule,” Harris told Charlamagne. “So instead of it being ranked up there with heroin, we bring it down.”
Attacking Trump on ‘stop and frisk’
Harris not only defended her criminal justice work as “progressive”, but she also actively attacked her Republican rival Trump for policies she warned would be detrimental to the Black community.
Throughout his campaign, Trump has championed a crackdown on crime in the US, proposing policies that critics warn could increase the use of excessive force among law enforcement officers — and cause the violation of civil liberties.
Last month, for instance, Trump floated the idea of having “one real rough, nasty day” for law enforcement to address property crime without restraint.
He has also pledged to strengthen police immunity from prosecution and push for increased use of “stop and frisk” policies.
“You have to do a policy of stop and frisk,” Trump told the TV show Fox and Friends in August, envisioning a situation where a police officer recognises a suspect on the street. “Stop and frisk and take their gun away.”
While the US Constitution protects people from “unreasonable search and seizure”, advocates say “stop and frisk” policies allow the police to search suspects in an un-intrusive manner if they have a “reasonable suspicion” they may be armed or dangerous.
But critics warn that “stop and frisk” has been used to racially profile people and harass them without warrant or cause. Some “stop and frisk” policies have therefore been struck down as unconstitutional.
Harris zeroed in on Trump’s support for “stop and frisk” in Tuesday’s interview.
“My opponent”, she said, would have “a formalised stop and frisk policy, for which he has said, if a police department does not do it, they should be defunded”.
“There is so much at stake” this election, she added, pointing to the potential risks for the Black community, which has been disproportionately targeted by such policies.
Pressure on Harris
Harris’s appearance on the radio town hall with Charlamagne came one day after the Democratic candidate made another major overture to Black voters, releasing an “Opportunity Agenda for Black Men“.
That agenda outlined plans for decriminalising marijuana, promoting cryptocurrency and providing one million “forgivable” loans for Black entrepreneurs.
If elected, Harris would be the first woman — and the first person of mixed Black and South Asian descent — to win the White House.
But while she carries a majority of support among Black Americans, some pollsters see concern in how her numbers compare to the 2020 election. In that race, President Joe Biden carried 90 percent of Black votes, according to a survey from The New York Times and Siena College.
By contrast, only 76 percent of the Black electorate plan to vote for Harris, Biden’s vice president, in this year’s election. That’s a significant drop — and the poll showed even lower numbers among Black men.
Only 69 percent backed Harris, compared to 81 percent of Black women.
Trump has tried to make gains in that demographic — and he has even publicly questioned Harris’s identity as a Black woman.
During her town hall on Tuesday, Harris faced questions about her commitment to the Black community. One caller asked her about her “lack of engagement” with the Black church.
Harris refuted that claim too. She replied that she had grown up in the Black church.
“So first of all, that allegation is of course coming from the Trump team, because they are full of mis- and dis-information,” she said. “They are trying to disconnect me from the people I have worked with and that I am from, so they can try to have some advantage in this election.”
