California lawmakers and former top cops say Kamala Harris ’ new campaign ads presenting her as ‘tough’ on drug trafficking don’t match with her record as a prosecutor – when she advocated not charging dealers until their third arrest. Harris proposed a policy in 2005 when she was San Francisco District Attorney to only prosecute drug dealers the third time they were caught selling narcotics, DailyMail.com has learned.
The plan sparked a scandal and was only halted when the city’s police chief Heather Fong pushed back to prevent it. So when the Harris presidential campaign released an ad on August 7 trumpeting her record as a ‘tough’ prosecutor who ‘took on drug cartels’ and ‘spent decades fighting violent crime ’, California lawmakers and senior police officers who served during Harris’ tenure decided to speak up and challenge the candidate. ‘The campaign is trying to completely reinvent reality,’ said GOP congressman Kevin Kiley. ‘Those of us who have actually lived in California – in particular in San Francisco where she was DA but Los Angeles as well – know all too well what the reality was.
‘She was a champion of San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy, she wanted drug dealers to go without being prosecuted until the third attempt, and she herself said in her own book that she was a progressive prosecutor. ‘The more the American people learn about what her actual record was, they’re going to see this campaign rhetoric for the facade that it is.’
Kevin Cashman, who was Deputy Chief of San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) at the time, said he and his colleagues were ‘shocked’ by DA Harris’ 2005 proposal. ‘We immediately saw that it wouldn’t be effective for our mission of keeping San Francisco safe,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘The District Attorney called the strategy she recommended Operation Safe Streets. We in the police department called it Catch and Release, because we would have to catch them, identify them, and then release them back in the community without any action taken.
‘We saw that if we implemented that, we’d be overrun by commuter criminals, if word got out that you can come to San Francisco and deal drugs without consequence.’ Cashman said he felt the policy would mean more officers putting themselves in harm’s way for nothing. ‘Making narcotics arrests in San Francisco is one of the most dangerous things an officer can do,’ he said. ‘We’ve had officers killed in the line of duty attempting to make drug arrests. ‘The DA wanted us to release those drug dealers after making narcotics arrests.’
Cashman said that Harris’ new campaign ad casting her as ‘tough’ on crime is ‘not consistent with the facts’. ‘Kamala Harris was the most liberal and progressive district attorney I worked with in over 30 years in the SFPD,’ he said. An October 2005 letter to Harris from Cashman’s then-boss, SFPD Chief Fong, laid out the ‘adverse effects’ she believed the proposed policy would cause. ‘News of such a program would travel quickly within the drug community,’ the top cop wrote. ‘If out of town dealers learn that they can sell drugs without consequences in San Francisco, we will probably see an influx of sales and the associated crimes that come with that.
‘Narcotics dealers who sell drugs near a school would be released after only a brief detention. Undoubtedly, this would send the wrong message to observant children who unfortunately witness drug-dealing activity on a regular basis. ‘Officers routinely go into harm’s way to make these arrests and believe that sufficient probable cause and evidence exists for the complaint. In short, such a program could be bad for morale and counter to what every officer is taught.’ Cashman said that despite the Chief’s letter, staffers in Harris’ DA office still tried one more time to persuade police leaders to agree to the policy – but were shot down and abandoned the effort.
John McGinness, who was the Sacramento County Sheriff during Harris’ 2004-2010 DA role and served as president of the California Peace Officers Association in 2008, said that Harris’ new campaign advert ‘does not comport with the truth in any way shape or form.’ ‘I dealt with California law enforcement agencies up and down the state,’ he told DailyMail.com. ‘She was an outlier insofar as she seemed to embrace a hands off approach with regards to enforcing the law.’ Harris has attracted criticism for other allegedly soft-on-crime policies as San Francisco DA.
She announced plans in February 2007 to get tough on assaults against police officers and said ‘violent people should be held accountable,’ according to local news site SFGate . But Harris ended up creating a policy that allowed offenders charged with misdemeanor assault on an officer. to qualify for pretrial diversion rather than prosecution. The policy meant that if someone punched or spat on a cop, they would get counseling and other services, rather than jail time. ‘The bottom line is that if a suspect assaults a police officer, he should go to jail, not to class,’ said Cashman. In 2007 the San Francisco Police Officers Association wrote to Harris protesting the policy.
