Harris has been called 'soft' and 'tough' on crime. What does her record show?

Kamala Harris, then California attorney general, addresses the Domestic Human Trafficking symposium in Los Angeles in 2014.

By Kevin RectorStaff Writer

Oct. 18, 2024 3 AM PT

The Trump campaign calls Harris “soft on murderers, gun criminals, and drug dealers.”
A city attorney watched her in court to learn how to prosecute a case. He recalls “her brilliance, her toughness, her ability to scrap.”
Harris’ approach to justice has shaped a range of issues in California, from same-sex marriage to the death penalty.

At every step of her political career, Kamala Harris has faced the same question: What sort of prosecutor was she?

As a former San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general, the vice president has been called both “soft” and “tough” on crime. She has been labeled a progressive and a moderate. At times, she and her supporters have added to the debate by leaning into one narrative or the other, depending on the office she sought.

Now, as Harris’ record as a prosecutor looms large in the presidential race, many voters say they don’t know what she stands for, and that her opponent, former President Trump — a convicted felon who talks tough on crime — seems more willing to go after criminals.

In a statement to The Times, Trump campaign national press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Harris was “soft on murderers, gun criminals, and drug dealers” and “helped destroy California.”

According to more than a dozen people who knew Harris as a prosecutor — who hired her, worked alongside her, ran against her or worked for her — such claims are meritless.

They say defining her as a prosecutor is complicated because she never fit neatly into any political box, but that a handful of episodes from her earlier career showcase how she balanced a penchant for compassionate reforms with an innate seriousness and an instinct for accountability.

Early days

Harris got her first prosecutor job out of law school as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County, where she worked for eight years.

She then joined the San Francisco district attorney’s office, where she served as chief of the Career Criminal Division, and the San Francisco city attorney’s office, where she ran the Family and Children’s Services Division. She took on and beat progressive San Francisco Dist. Atty. Terence Hallinan in 2003.

Critics have suggested Harris’ rise had more to do with political savvy — or her relationship in the mid-1990s with San Francisco political kingmaker Willie Brown — than talent or smarts. But supporters who knew her then tell a different story.

Though Harris was savvy and Brown certainly helped her, particularly with donors, she was hardworking and dedicated, they said, and rose through the ranks because she was good at her job.

San Francisco City Atty. David Chiu said that when he started as a deputy district attorney, colleagues urged him to watch Harris in court.

“I was told that if I wanted to learn the craft, I should go watch the closing arguments of a great prosecutor — and obviously it was her,” Chiu recalled. “I saw her brilliance, her toughness, her ability to scrap, but combined with a real warmth and compassion.”

Former San Francisco City Atty. Louise Renne said that same combination made Harris the perfect person to oversee child abuse cases in her office. “I was looking for somebody who could both be tough on the law — because you had to be tough — and yet was compassionate and recognized the emotional trauma involved,” she said.

Back on Track

Harris launched Back on Track, an anti-recidivism program for nonviolent, first-time offenders, soon after becoming district attorney.

To join the program, defendants had to plead guilty, which Harris touted as “accountability.” To graduate, they had to earn a GED, get a job, perform community service, pay off any outstanding child support and remain drug free. If they succeeded, the plea would be wiped from their record. If they failed, it would stick.

To run the program, Harris hired Lateefah Simon, a young woman who had overcome adversity to lead the local Center for Young Women’s Development. (Simon is now running for the House seat being vacated by Democratic Rep. Barbara Lee in Oakland.)

Simon said Harris believed deeply in its mission to interrupt cycles of crime by holding young people accountable and surrounding them with support and opportunities.

“It was the hardest program to get through, but it was designed by Black women — she and myself — who really understood why these young people were making these life- or-death decisions on the streets for a few dollars,” Simon said.

The program, which Harris replicated elsewhere in the state as attorney general, ran into criticism for admitting undocumented immigrants with no legal right to work. The problem was revealed after an undocumented program participant committed a violent crime.

Harris said the admission of undocumented defendants was a mistake, and promptly fixed. Simon said it was her “screwup,” as she had designed the program without a screening tool for work eligibility.

Simon said she offered to resign, but Harris tartly ordered her back to work. “There was an expletive in there, and she said, ‘Get back to the office, and update your program,’” Simon said.

Simon said Harris balances a strong instinct for reform with an innate sense of personal responsibility, which Simon said she recognized from her own childhood — where she was surrounded by Black women who knew their communities deserved better, but were ‘’tough as old bologna when it comes to order.”

“Kamala,” she said with a laugh, “is like every auntie that I have.”

Soft on crime?

One of the most frequent criticisms lobbed at Harris by Republicans — including Trump and the Heritage Foundation, the group behind Project 2025 — is that she is “soft on crime.” Heritage even called her “pro-crime.”

Critics have pointed in particular to disputes over homicide cases. San Francisco police sometimes arrested homicide suspects that Harris’ prosecutors declined to charge, drawing allegations that she wasn’t willing to try difficult murder cases — possibly to keep her conviction rates high.

Harris’ supporters say such claims are preposterous — that no prosecutor would decline viable murder cases to improve conviction rates, and that Harris’ line prosecutors would have revolted if she’d tried.

They said the real reason prosecutors declined cases was because the police had done shoddy work or had insufficient evidence.

Others have accused Harris of going soft on criminals by approving lenient plea deals. Her supporters say her office pushed low-level offenders into diversion, yes, but struck sensible plea deals with others and aggressively prosecuted repeat and violent offenders.

“She was one of the first prosecutors that was very intentional about challenging what was ‘hard on crime’ or ‘soft on crime,’ looking at those aggregate consequences to say, ‘How can we do better?’,” said Paul Henderson, a former administrative chief in Harris’ office.

Death penalty

Less than four months into Harris’ time as district attorney, a San Francisco police officer named Isaac Espinoza was killed by a 21-year-old gunman named David Hill. Police, community members and local leaders called for the death penalty.

Harris, who had campaigned on her opposition to capital punishment, refused, announcing before Espinoza’s funeral that she would seek a sentence of life without the possibility of parole. At the funeral, the late Sen. Dianne Feinstein sharply criticized Harris’ decision, and officers began shunning her. Espinoza’s widow and other members of his family also condemned the decision.

Bill Fazio, a former homicide prosecutor who ran against Harris for D.A., said the episode made for a tense few months for Harris — but it was the right decision.

Fazio said he sought the death penalty nine times as a San Francisco homicide prosecutor and secured a death sentence verdict just once — and it was overturned on appeal. San Francisco juries don’t like the death penalty, he said, and even when it is handed down, it’s rarely carried out.

Pursuing such a sentence against Hill, who was “a relatively young defendant who really had no prior record to speak of,” would have made little sense, and the fact Harris understood that goes to her credit, Fazio said.

“This woman was a practicing prosecutor,” he said. “She wasn’t some phony-ass person who was appointed by some politician.”

Later, as attorney general, Harris drew criticism from the left when she defended the state’s death penalty after a judge determined it amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Critics described Harris’ decision to defend the law as hypocritical given her stance in the Espinoza case, but she said it was her duty as attorney general.

Same-sex marriage

In 2008, California voters narrowly passed Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriages. The measure came after the state’s Supreme Court had approved such unions, and an estimated 18,000 same-sex couples had been wed in the state.

Marriage advocates challenged the proposition, and a federal judge ruled the ban was unconstitutional. Harris — a longtime supporter of LGBTQ+ rights who had previously officiated same-sex unions in San Francisco — was running for attorney general at the time, and promised not to challenge the judge’s decision if she won.

Critics of Harris today accuse her of playing politics — of failing to set aside her own beliefs and do her duty as attorney general, as she did with the death penalty. But those close to Harris said she agreed with the judge that Proposition 8 was unconstitutional.

Proponents of Proposition 8 challenged the decision all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which in 2013 found that they lacked standing to bring the case because they weren’t personally harmed by the measure’s overturning.

Harris cheered the decision, and promptly officiated another marriage in San Francisco.

Then-California Atty. Gen. Kamala Harris officiates the wedding of Kris Perry and Sandy Stier in 2013.

Transnational gangs

In an election hyper-focused on immigration and border security, Harris has campaigned on her past efforts to dismantle transnational gangs along the U.S. and Mexico border — which her critics have challenged.

Steve Cooley, a former Los Angeles County district attorney and Harris’ opponent in the attorney general race, called her a progressive prosecutor who “made no effort whatsoever to fight” a decision by then-Gov. Jerry Brown to save money by shuttering a long-standing anti-gang unit in the attorney general’s office. “She just let it go,” Cooley said.

In fact, Harris publicly opposed the budget cuts, saying they would “cripple” the state’s anti-gang and drug trafficking work.

Jeffrey Tsai, a former special assistant attorney general, said Harris deserves a lot of credit for going after transnational gangs, in part by breaking long-standing norms and opening direct lines of communication between California and Mexico law enforcement — which began collaborating much more intensely on anti-trafficking measures.

“Her challenging that traditional notion of the role of a state ... was not quaint. To me it was rather significant, because it symbolized a lot of where I think her head’s at in terms of policy,” Tsai said.

Tori Verber Salazar, a former Republican district attorney of San Joaquin County, said Harris also helped her county confront drug trafficking by strengthening the state’s relationship with U.S. federal law enforcement, which brought more resources to small counties for expensive investigative tools, such as wiretaps.

“She’s a bad ass,” Salazar said. “She gave us the tools and the weapons to do what we needed to do to go after the kingpins.”

Big banks

Shortly after becoming attorney general, Harris joined negotiations between various state attorneys general and large mortgage institutions over improper foreclosure practices during the housing market collapse, which had displaced families across the country.

Not long after, however, Harris pulled out, accusing the banks of offering far too little compensation to Californians.

Her decision was considered ill-advised by some, and she faced a lot of pressure to reverse course.

“It was a lonely place,” said one former senior advisor who asked to remain anonymous in order to speak candidly about private discussions. “She had had conversations with numerous other leaders all across the state, not all of whom were very supportive, some of whom were very skeptical that it was the right decision.”

But Harris, a “quantitative thinker” who had delved into the numbers, was characteristically unmoved, the advisor said.

“When she makes a decision, she moves forward with it. There’s not a lot of hand-wringing or second-guessing. She says, ‘I’ve looked at the data, I’ve made my decision.’”

Ultimately, the gambit paid off. The banks vastly increased their offer, from less than $4 billion to about $20 billion, Harris has said.

The deal wasn’t perfect. While intended to keep Californians in their homes, about half of the debt relief ended up covering short sales, in which banks accepted losses after allowing owners to sell homes for less than what they owed. Nonetheless, the deal became one of Harris’ signature accomplishments — and still wins her praise.

In 2011, Pamela Barrett and her late husband, John, were at risk of losing their home in Shandon, in San Luis Obispo County, after Barrett’s hair salon started losing clients amid the worsening economy. Barrett, now 72, said she tried to work with her lender, Bank of America, to find a path forward, but with no success.

Desperate, she and John — an artist on disability — began writing letters to anyone who might help, including elected officials. The only response came from Harris’ office, Barrett said, which told her to hang on.

Soon after, Barrett said she got a letter from Bank of America offering a loan modification that erased the interest on a large portion of their debt and allowed them to start making much smaller payments. Today, she said, she is retired and still living in her home — and gives Harris much of the credit.