(Behind The Badge): Kamala Harris has made her views on crime and policing very clear. She was one of the early supporters of the “defund the police” movement. She wants to lower the prison population by going soft on criminals. And she opposes the death penalty—even for cop killers. With crime and public safety among the top concerns of voters, her record warrants closer examination.
Like so many other liberal-leaning politicians, Kamala Harris reacted in knee-jerk fashion in the aftermath of George Floyd’s death. She supported the “defund the police” movement, saying it “rightly” challenged the amount of money spent on police instead of community services. During an interview in June of 2020, she said, “For too long, the status quo thinking has been you get more safety by putting more cops on the street—well that’s wrong.” The facts say that she is wrong.
In 2021, Morgan Williams, an economist at New York University’s Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, took a scholarly approach to the question: Do more police officers prevent crime and save lives? Williams and his colleagues gathered data from the FBI and other sources for 242 cities between the years 1981 and 2018. They crunched all the numbers and concluded that for every 10 to 17 police officers hired, one homicide is prevented. They also found that adding more police reduces other serious crimes, like robbery, rape and aggravated assault. And their study found that, in the average city, a larger police force results in Black lives saved at about twice the rate of White lives saved. And to those who might scoff at these findings and assume racial bias, it should be noted that Williams is Black.
In 2019, the year before the “defund” movement was launched, we had the second safest year in more than three decades. Violent crime in the U.S. nearly quadrupled between 1960 and 1991, the year it peaked. Between 1991 and 2019, our nation’s violent crime rate plummeted by 52 percent. There were 363.9 violent crimes per 100,000 people in 2019, compared to 758.2 in 1991. Only 2014 was slightly lower during that period (363.6).
And the number of full-time state and local sworn officers in our nation in 2019 was one of the highest ever, with 697,195 officers serving. And thanks to increased resources and policy reforms, those officers were doing a better job than at any time in our nation’s history. These numbers clearly and strongly argue against the need to “reimagine,” “defund,” or “abolish” policing.
But George Floyd’s death caused politicians like Kamala Harris to disregard the facts and they embraced the “defund” movement. The results were disastrous. Cities across the country slashed hundreds of millions of dollars from their police budgets, officers left the profession in droves and violent crime rose by 5.6 percent overall in 2020, with homicides soaring by 29 percent; the highest year-over-year increase ever recorded.
During the two-year period between 2019 and 2021, the number of full-time state and local officers dropped by 5.3 percent (697,195 to 660,288 officers) and the violent crime rate rose by 3.8 percent (363.9 violent crimes per 100,000 people to 377.6). And to further buck the fallacy that more police does not make it safer, 2023 saw more police officers serving than the previous year and a corresponding three percent drop in violent crime.
In 2014, while Kamala Harris was State Attorney General, California voters approved a referendum, Proposition 47, that reclassified a list of felonies as misdemeanors, including any theft of less than $950. She was supportive of the measure and its primary goal of decreasing the prison population. Many critics of the law said it added to California’s homelessness crisis and led to a 30 percent increase in the state’s violent crime rate between 2014-2023.
The police officers in San Francisco have another serious beef with their former District Attorney. In 2004, a San Francisco police officer, Isaac Espinoza, was shot and killed during a traffic stop. The 29-year-old husband and father was gunned down in cold blood by a gang member and there was a loud community outcry for the killer to receive the death penalty, even from several leading Democrats, including then-Senator Dianne Feinstein. But three days after the murder, then-District Attorney Harris went on television to announce that she would not be seeking the death penalty—a position she had run on while campaigning for office. Her announcement was ill-timed, coming prior to Officer Espinoza’s funeral, and before she had even spoken to the family about her decision. Officer Espinoza’s family, and many long-time San Francisco citizens and police officers have never forgiven her.
It is concerning to think that there may soon be a person in the Oval Office who has supported defunding the police, wants to reimagine policing, believes that lowering the prison population is good for public safety, and favors soft-on-crime policies—including leniency for cop killers. Voters need to know the facts.
Craig W. Floyd is the founder and CEO of Citizens Behind the Badge, a nonprofit organization dedicated to supporting America’s law enforcement officers and ending the “defund and defame the police” movement. For more information go to: www.BehindBadge.org or email [email protected]
