Crime

Kamala Harris Chuckling About Bullying Poor People Should Be Disqualifying -- That It's Not Says Something Deeply Disturbing

There are a lot of Democrats out there who don't see harassing minorities or the poor as a big deal.

By  
on

“Fearless” may not apply if you’re poor with kids (Photo by Mason Trinca/Getty Images)

In what promises to be a crowded field of Democratic candidates for 2020, Senator Kamala Harris has definitely staked out a lane. Everything about the early days of her campaign revolves around her prosecutorial career right down to her slogan “Kamala Harris For The People,” a nod to how she would introduce herself in court as a career prosecutor.

“Vote for me, I’m a cop” isn’t the lane most people would expect out of a Democrat in this day and age, but the liberal fascination for draconian criminal justice measures is more engrained than you might think. Indeed, it’s more engrained than many of those liberals are willing to admit.

Harris’s prosecutorial record had already raised red flags among the Democratic Party’s progressive wing who have long expressed unease with the Senator’s aggressive prosecutorial background. But it was her pet project to use the powers of her office to bully and terrify poor people for having truant kids that has generated the loudest protests from those corners.

The idea of punishing the parents for the missteps of their children is routinely trotted out for spicy hot take value. Most people never take the time to consider that the frame of this “slightly above barstool-level” take is a racist and classist “two for one deal” on the part of people who want to normalize the idea that the system shouldn’t punish one black kid for a minor infraction when it could be punishing more black people instead. Somewhere along the line, Harris — who would never consciously consider her policy this way — decided to carry water for these retrograde ideas.

But wherever one falls on the question of the wisdom of the policy on paper, the casual cruelty of this clip of Harris laughing about the idea of arresting people struggling to raise their kids is simply gut-churning.

Sponsored

Bullying poor people is a real knee-slapper!

To dispense with one of the most problematic defenses of Harris this video’s given life to — no, it’s not OK that the woman in this particular story didn’t end up going to jail. Putting aside the question of how many others her office didn’t treat as kindly, it should never be shrugged off as “no harm, no foul” to be harassed by law enforcement and threatened with imprisonment. This is even more true when the community on the other end of the harassment is one that fairly sees every interaction with law enforcement as a potential death sentence.

As the old saying goes, to the hammer, everything looks like a nail. Does truancy reflect a deep parental criminality? Nope. As the Harris clip above suggests when it tries to shift to its “feel good” conclusion, truancy is more properly a symptom of a society that forces the working poor to have three jobs while still trying to keep tabs on kids without the benefit of live-in nannies. That’s probably not an ill that “MOAR JAILS” can solve, but Harris apparently decided it was because she held the jailhouse keys.

You’d think that the publicity surrounding these clips would finally convince even the most forgiving Democrats to abandon the Harris candidacy, but they almost certainly won’t. Despite all the talk, do not discount the capacity of large swaths of the Democratic Party — particularly its suburban, largely white constituencies — to relish their role as apologists for harsh conceptions of criminal justice so long as it happens to the people they don’t interact with at the Whole Foods.

Briahna Gray, who penned one of the most incisive accounts of the problems with Harris’s record, included an interlude that was particularly damning of the state of liberal politics in 2019 and the excuses white people are willing to make to provide “context” to put a better shine on Harris’s career:

Sponsored

Journalist Jill Filipovic argued on Twitter recently that she judges Harris’s history less harshly because black women “shoulder additional burdens” compared to white men, and women have to prove that they are “tough.” Filipovic acknowledges that Harris’s race and gender don’t “excuse” her record, but, she insists, “context matters.”

It’s difficult to understand, though, how the context matters here except to provide some kind of excuse. I’m not without sympathy for the additional pressures exerted on Harris because she is a black woman — after all, unlike Filipovic, I am one too. But those sympathies do not eclipse the concern I have for the black women who bore the consequences of Harris’s prosecutorial misjudgment. Importantly, if Harris had to be tougher on crime because she is black, it wasn’t for the sake of some higher ideal. It was because her personal ambitions demanded it.

The problem may run deeper. The pressure to be “tough” isn’t limited to minority women in this field. When we spoke with Mark Godsey of the Ohio Innocence Project, he explained that Democratic prosecutors are more likely to dig in on wrongful convictions because they feel they lack the credibility on crime that Republicans have staked out for themselves. But over time, these candidates fronting as Judge Dredd to swipe a few moderate votes in a general election have shifted the whole mentality of a broad segment of liberal voters. They don’t really see this as campaign puffery, but as a core part of their liberal identity. They like knowing there’s a Cy Vance out there filling Riker’s with low-level offenders who languish there, sometimes for years, before ever going to trial. As long as everyone offers the right platitudes about the promise of poor and minority communities, there’s nothing wrong with — and indeed a perceived virtue in — using real or threatened state violence to coerce specific communities at an alarmingly disproportionate rate.

These videos aren’t hurting Kamala Harris in this election because, deep down, there are a lot of Democrats who don’t see laughing at the prospect of terrorizing people as a real problem. We’ll see if there are enough who do when we start getting to the primaries.

Earlier: This Law School Professor Knows Not Everyone Has The Same Rights In This Country

HeadshotJoe Patrice is a senior editor at Above the Law and co-host of Thinking Like A Lawyer. Feel free to email any tips, questions, or comments. Follow him on Twitter if you’re interested in law, politics, and a healthy dose of college sports news. Joe also serves as a Managing Director at RPN Executive Search.

Topics

, , , ,