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

For many voters whose support Harris needs, a prosecutor is always a cop, and a cop is not the good guy

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 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.

Judith Levine is a Brooklyn journalist and essayist, a contributing writer to the Intercept and the author of five books