Yes, Kamala Harris Is Responsible For California’s 31% More Violent Crime And 3x More Homeless

Yes, Kamala Harris Is Responsible For California’s 31% More Violent Crime And 3x More Homeless Yes, Kamala Harris Is Responsible For California’s 31% More Violent Crime And 3x More Homeless Jul 26, 2024 ∙ Paid Nearly a full week has passed since President Biden dropped out of the presidential race and threw his support behind Vice President Kamala Harris. In that time, Harris has made clear that she will run on her record as a tough and effective prosecutor. But anyone who comes to California knows that we are in a crisis. Our violent crime rate today is 31% higher than in the rest of the United States. One out of four San Franciscans say they were a victim of crime last year. Now, you might think, “Well, you can’t blame Kamala Harris for that. That’s Gavin Newsom’s fault. After all, he’s the governor whereas she’s the Vice President and was a US Senator before that.” But Harris was the District Attorney of San Francisco from 2004 to 2011 and was the Attorney General — California’s top law enforcement officer — from 2011 to 2017. And it was during those years that crime in California started rising. According to a liberal think tank, the Public Policy Institute of California, violent crime here rose 26%. And it’s not like Kamala Harris was helpless to do anything about crime while she was a US Senator from 2017 to 2021 or as Vice President since then. It’s true that, 20 years ago, Harris ran as a tough-on-crime District Attorney in San Francisco. In 2020, Tulsi Gabbard criticized Harris for incarcerating people for marijuana. But the number of people in prison for drugs was never very large. Even in 1997, the height of the war on drugs, just one percent of all prisoners in the US were in for a first or second nonviolent drug offense. And California legalized marijuana for medical use in 1996 and for all use in 2016, so it was really a non-issue. And then, between 2010 and 2014, Harris changed. By 2019, she described herself as a “progressive prosecutor.” In 2020, Harris denied that police prevent crime. “For too long, the status quo thinking has been. You get more safety by putting more cops on the street. Well, that's wrong.” But that’s not a mainstream view among criminologists. In fact, an overwhelming amount of evidence, including studies commissioned by the Obama administration, shows that more police do reduce crime, from shoplifting to murder. In the same interview, Harris claimed that there is less crime in wealthier neighborhoods because they put money into schools, not police. “By the way, if you want to look at upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods, they don't have that patrol car. They don't have those police walking those streets. But what they do have — they have well funded schools.” This is also wrong. The reason police don’t walk the streets of those neighborhoods is because there is less crime. And when there is a crime, you’d better believe that those upper-middle-class suburban neighborhoods want the police showing up immediately. It’s inconceivable that Harris didn’t know this. She was San Francisco DA. She knows perfectly well that there are more police in poor inner-city neighborhoods because there is more crime there. Not only was Harris lying, she was doing so in service of making the argument that we should defund the police. And defunding the police had consequences. Most crime experts agree that the calls to defund the police resulted in police pulling back, thereby emboldening criminals and causing murder and other crimes to rise. Somewhere around 3,000 black lives were lost to homicide thanks to the defund the police movement. During the 2020 primary debate, Harris talked of her support for “Initiatives around re-entering former offenders and getting them jobs and counseling.” But according to NBC News, at least 7,000 former prisoners became homeless in Los Angeles alone in 2019, 2020, and 2021. Now you might think, Harris isn’t responsible for that. But she mostly was. After all, it was Harris who, as Attorney General, wrote highly biased summaries for two ballot initiatives, propositions 47 and 57, which caused the increase in crime and homelessness. In 2014, Proposition 47 decriminalized open-air drug dealing, drug use, and shoplifting. And in 2016, Proposition 57 released many prisoners, including violent ones, despite the lack of the rehabilitation and societal re-entry system that Harris claimed to have created. Together the two propositions, along with incentives for homelessness in the form of cash and free housing, caused homelessness in California to rise 50% over the last ten years, from 113,000 in 2014 to 181,399 in 2023. California today has 12% of America’s population and one-third of America’s homeless. And I’m not the only reporter to come to this conclusion. Even NBC News, which is pro-Harris, last year said that “California’s reforms created a prison-to-homelessness pipeline, as counties were overwhelmed with an influx of returning inmates.” The situation Harris created in California means that she cannot claim to be a strong defender of vulnerable people. Of the 25% of San Franciscans who say they were victims of crime last year, 42% of them were victimized more than once, and only half bothered to report it. And Harris is responsible in another way for the crisis and that’s through her role as a top immigration official in the Biden administration. It’s true that “Border Czar” was never her formal title, but Biden clearly put Harris in charge of dealing with the root causes of immigration, and she didn’t do that. And now the increase in border crossings from 400,000 in 2020 to over two million, due to the Biden-Harris administration’s more liberal immigration policies, is overwhelming homelessness services in California. I was on Skid Row in Los Angeles last week and discovered migrant women and children living in dangerous conditions. One migrant mother with a two-year-old child told me that other homeless women had fought with knives outside of her tent. Experts agree that the increase in the US homeless population last year was a direct result of the influx of migrants from around the world. Harris should have massively expanded homeless shelters to deal with the influx of former prisoners and migrants to the street, but she didn’t. In May, Harris announced $5.5 billion in new funding, supposedly to address homelessness. But she dedicated just $290 million to homeless shelters and services and just $30 million for addiction rehab and recovery. Why is that? Why did Harris go from a tough-on-crime prosecutor to someone who called for defunding the police and has starved cities of the money they need for homeless shelters? It’s clear from looking at Harris’ changing position on crime that she has let her personal ambition and political expediency take precedence over protecting the vulnerable. In 2020, she should never have suggested that more police don’t reduce crime in order to encourage the defunding of the police. In the 2010s Harris should have created the rehabilitation and reentry system she claimed to have created and didn’t. And in 2014 she never should have misled the public about the impact of Proposition 47, which decriminalized drugs and shoplifting. Kamala Harris’ mixture of indifference and ambition is similar to that displayed by California Governor Gavin Newsom. Neither Harris nor Newsom are as ideological as some are in the Democratic Party. Rather, they blow with the winds of public opinion, from tougher to softer on crime. Both Harris and Newsom may have things in which they truly believe. Both seem particularly passionate about abortion, for example. But they don’t seem to care much about the things that directly impact the most vulnerable members of society, from migrant children to mentally ill homeless addicts to the victims of crime and violence. Harris’ awkwardness, her tendency to speak in clichés, and her changing positions on crime suggest someone who is constantly seeking to gauge public opinion and appeal to particular audiences, and not someone who has a deep commitments to protecting the public in general and the vulnerable in particular. When it comes to migration, crime, and homelessness, she has sought policies that would deal neither with the root causes nor the symptoms. Now that the media is fragmenting and its power declining, it will be harder for Harris to maintain the story that she is someone who the American people can trust to be a tough prosecutor and act with compassion toward the vulnerable. None of that means she can’t defeat Trump, who has struggled over the last few days to define her. But it does mean that she is highly unlikely to be able to lead the country to deal with its most difficult problems.