Americans are begging for law and order, and after the revision of FBI crime statistics last week, they know the Biden/Harris administration has failed them badly, with more violent crime in 2022 in nearly every category. Kamala Harris loves to tout her history as a prosecutor when she talks about crime, but something she doesn’t discuss is the time she called on supporters to donate to the Minnesota Freedom Fund, which bails out violent rioters. She made the call during the 2020 George Floyd riots, which many in her party were quick to support and spur on. In The Wall Street Journal, Heather MacDonald discusses the Harris’s sketchy past when it comes to law and order. MacDonald writes:
Kamala Harris has avoided talking about crime and law enforcement on the campaign trail. No surprise there. Since the George Floyd race riots, many American cities have descended into public disorder. Surveillance videos routinely document flash mobs invading businesses, assaulting employees and stealing whatever participants can carry, including cash registers. Customers bear the brunt of stores’ defenses against runaway shoplifting—such as toothpaste locked behind a plexiglass barrier. Drive-by shootings mow down innocent civilians. Urban violent crime has surged 40% between 2019 and 2023.
Instead of discussing her plans for public safety, Ms. Harris has relied on friendly media to trumpet her alleged crime-fighting successes—as one New York Times headline put it, “Her Experience Fighting Cross-Border Crime.” In an interview last week on a black-oriented radio show, “The Breakfast Club,” however, she made clear that she remains committed to her previously stated view that systemic racism “seeps into every part of American life” and “racial injustice” is rampant in policing.
This understanding of law enforcement led Presidents Barack Obama and Joe Biden to routinely characterize police officers as threats to black children. It led their administrations to put police departments under consent decrees—court-enforced plans to decrease alleged bias. If elected, Ms. Harris appears poised to inject this negative view of policing further into local law enforcement.
A caller to the show asked Ms. Harris what she would do “to make sure that there’s a stop to police brutality and murders that have been going on viciously.” The question was based on the false premise that police officers routinely murder blacks. On average, a little over a dozen unarmed black men are killed each year by police officers, according to the Washington Post’s police shootings database. (The Post’s “unarmed” category can include someone trying to grab an officer’s gun.) The 15 or so unarmed black victims of police shootings are a fraction of the 8,000 to 10,000 blacks murdered annually by other black civilians.
Yet Ms. Harris accepted the questioner’s premise that police murders “have been going on viciously.” She replied that as a U.S. senator she had tried to pass the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, a bill that would have restricted the use of certain police tactics and eliminated qualified immunity for law-enforcement officers, thereby opening them to financial liability for contested enforcement actions. Ms. Harris said the Biden administration has “been trying to make these things national so that everyone would have to do it.” In other words, the federal government would set the rules for local policing.
What might those rules entail? During the interview, Ms. Harris claimed that Donald Trump’s plan “for black America” is spelled out in Project 2025, the blueprint for the next administration that Mr. Trump has consistently repudiated. Ms. Harris said—falsely—that the project would require police departments to adopt stop-question-and-frisk policies. Project 2025 is in fact silent about these and any other local law-enforcement tactics.
More troubling than Ms. Harris’s misinformation is the possibility that her administration may—in the name of racial justice—ban local police departments from making police stops. (These are brief detentions of pedestrians or drivers who have raised a reasonable suspicion that they are involved in criminal activity.) No tactic has proven more effective in getting illegal guns off the street than police stops in crime hot spots.
Ms. Harris said that she stands for the “freedom” to be “free” from police brutality. Police brutality is a sickening abuse of government power. But the police training and accountability revolution in recent decades has made such abuse rare. Democrats’ near-exclusive focus on police transgressions ignores the real source of violence against blacks—crimes committed by other blacks—and makes such violence harder to combat.
Action Line: Every solution from Harris is more central government in your home. Americans are tired of the crime encouraged by the radical progressives who think it’s ok to steal as long as it’s from someone wealthier. To them, it’s just a redistribution of wealth. When you want to talk about your wealth, I’m here. In the meantime, click here to subscribe to my free monthly Survive & Thrive letter.
