KEEP LOOKING: Searching for the Real Kamala Harris.

As a city prosecutor and later as state attorney general, Harris led a harsh intervention against chronic truancy, justified by the fact that a high proportion of violent criminals were high school dropouts. She pushed for criminal penalties for parents whose children missed too much school. She also pushed for the transfer of undocumented youth charged with felonies to ICE for deportation.

In the sometimes insular world of San Francisco politics, she was a moderate or even conservative voice on public safety and crime issues.

But in the Senate and on the national campaign trail, Harris walked back her previous tough-on-crime record in the shadow of the Trump presidency. Harris championed decarceration efforts and even gestured toward support for the “Abolish ICE” movement. ​​“We need to probably think about starting from scratch,” she told MSNBC. Unlike her first campaign, Harris’s presidential campaign, in line with the rising status of identity politics in progressive circles, stressed her focus to “expose racial disparities in the criminal justice system.”

As I’ve documented in previous investigations of Harris’s record, her rhetoric sometimes failed to match her record. She was among the first to create a district attorney-level environmental justice unit to prosecute polluters in low-income, minority neighborhoods. Yet, her office instead went after small-time defendants, none of whom had spilled a drop of hazardous material in the communities she claimed to protect.

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