Vice President Kamala Harris' prosecutorial record is facing fresh scrutiny now that she's running for the White House.
Harris is pointing to her time as a district attorney and California Attorney General as a point of contrast against former President Trump, a convicted felon.
It's a risky strategy as Harris has faced criticism from progressives who accused her of being too tough on crime and helped derail her 2020 presidential campaign, reports Axios.
This time, she is betting it will help her against Trump. "I took on perpetrators of all kinds: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain," she said at a campaign rally in Wisconsin last week. "So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type."
The Trump campaign has simultaneously accused Harris of being weak on crime and a San Francisco "liberal" — a classic GOP attack against a Democrat.
The violent crime rate per 100,000 residents in California dropped by 10% during Harris's first four years in office as the state's attorney general.
During that period, the California Department of Justice improved DNA testing capabilities and cleared the state's DNA backlog for the first time. Harris' office also signed an agreement with Mexico's AG to combat transnational gangs.
Violent crime surged in 2016 during her last year in office to a six-year high.
As District Attorney of San Francisco, the number of cases from violent crimes in the city her office cleared skyrocketed by 24% during her time as DA. Those cleared cases came as the number of violent crimes rose steadily in the city during her first five years in office then fell 15% in her last two years.
Harris was part of the fledging restorative justice movement of the early 2000s while balancing a moderate approach to fighting crime.
In her 2009 book, "Smart on Crime: A Career Prosecutor's Plan to Make Us Safer," Harris urged Americans to see crime as "a non-partisan issue" while pushing programs to intervene on potential repeat nonviolent offenders.
The left, she wrote, needed to get "past biases against law enforcement and (recognize) that even low-incoming communities...want and deserve great public-safety resources."
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