From the moment Kamala Harris joined 57 counterparts at the 2004 California District Attorneys Association annual conference, it was an open question how the first Black, Asian American and female D.A. in the state’s history would fit in. Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican American, did not blend in back home in liberal San Francisco County’s law enforcement circles. When Harris won in December 2003, she became one of only three elected Black district attorneys in the U.S. “They looked at her like she had four heads,” said Debbie Mesloh, Harris’s communications director at the time, about her appearance at the district attorneys’ conference in Santa Barbara, a conclave of conservative, throw-the-book-at-them prosecutors, reports the New York Times. “It was an organization of mostly older Caucasian Republican men,” said Gilbert Otero, the former district attorney of Imperial County. Harris, he said, had “these beliefs that didn’t normally jibe with our crowd. She and I had a little spat at one roundtable over the death penalty and the three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy — me for both and her against.”
Harris’s rise from strong-willed law enforcement official to standard-bearer in liberal Democratic politics is unusual. Navigating both paths has left her open to criticism as the Democratic presidential nominee that she either betrayed liberal ideas or prioritized those ideals over law and order. A close examination of her 12 years as an elected prosecutor shows a coherent record that is mostly consistent. Harris seemed particularly focused on protecting the most vulnerable victims by cracking down on violent offenders while seeking alternatives to incarceration for less serious criminals. Her priorities as a prosecutor became clear once she was given the authority by voters to establish them. Those efforts were not always successful or politically advantageous. Harris’s defenders argue that her professional history makes perfect sense to anyone who grew up as she did, in a working-class Black neighborhood in Berkeley governed by mostly white leaders. Harris’s best-known innovation as district attorney was the Back on Track initiative, a pilot program she began in 2005 to address high recidivism rates among nonviolent drug offenders between the ages of 18 and 30. The program was both progressive in outlook and “very, very difficult for those who entered it,” said Lateefah Simon, who ran the program and is now a Democratic candidate for the House.
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