2024 looks set to be a ‘tough on crime’ campaign | Austin Sarat | Verdict

In many ways, 2024 has already been an unusual presidential campaign. The Biden-Harris swap aside, the policy landscape defies the expected configuration.

One of the places that is most evident is in the area of ​​crime and criminal justice. It seems like we are two months into a contest to see if Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would be tough or tougher on crime.

For more than half a century, the usual pattern of our presidential campaigns has been for one party, the Republicans, to pose as a law-and-order party and accuse the other of being soft on crime. The Democrats have largely eschewed the tough-on-crime strategy.

Not so much this year.

While former President Trump and his MAGA allies continue to focus on the law-and-order themes that have served Republican presidential candidates well since 1968, Democrats, who have nominated a former prosecutor as their standard-bearer, appear determined not to give in to the tough-on-crime agenda.

The dilemma for Vice President Harris and the Democrats is to avoid saying anything on the crime issue during the campaign, which would hamper their ability to be credible spokespeople for criminal justice reform when they take office next January. The criminal justice reform agenda they have coming up is quite substantial.

These include addressing problems with American policing, eliminating mandatory minimum sentences, addressing our continued reliance on prison sentences, and abolishing the death penalty, to name a few.

Sounding tough on crime while leaving room for maneuver will be a tough task for Vice President Harris. She must make it clear, as she once put it, that the best way to be tough on crime is to be “smart on crime.”

As anyone who follows her campaign knows, Harris has made her crime-fighting credentials central to her presidential campaign. Over the past month, as she introduced herself to the American people, she repeatedly used the same slogan. “Before I was elected vice president, I was elected United States senator, I was the elected attorney general… of California. And before that, I was a prosecutor.”

“In those roles,” she continues, “I’ve taken on all kinds of perpetrators: predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, con artists who broke the rules for their own gain. So listen to me when I say: I know the type of Donald Trump.”

In her acceptance speech at last week’s Democratic National Convention, Harris again emphasized her background as a prosecutor. She explained that one of the reasons she became a prosecutor was because of the experience of one of her friends, Wanda, who was sexually abused as a teenager.

“I became a prosecutor,” Harris explained, “to protect people like Wanda. Because I believe that everyone has the right to: Safety. Dignity. And justice.” Harris reminded her audience that “as a prosecutor, when I had a case, I didn’t prosecute it on behalf of the victim. I prosecuted it on behalf of ‘The People.’”

She argued that “In our justice system, an injury to one is an injury to all.” No one, she said, “should fight alone. We are all in this together. Every day in court, I stood proudly before a judge and said five words: ‘Kamala Harris, for the people.’”

Later in her speech, she again demonstrated her tough approach to crime.

She invited her listeners to look at her record, not just her rhetoric. “As a young district attorney in Oakland, I stood up for women and children against predators who abused them. As attorney general of California, I took on the big banks. I delivered $20 billion for middle-class families facing foreclosure. And I helped pass a Homeowner Bill of Rights, one of the first of its kind.”

She cited her work advocating for “Veterans and students who are being ripped off by big, for-profit colleges. For employees who have been ripped off and their wages taken away. For seniors who are experiencing elder abuse.” She touted her record of pursuing “cartels that traffic in guns, drugs and people who threaten the security of our borders and the safety of our communities.”

However, nowhere in her election results speech or during her campaign appearances did Vice President Harris make specific promises about how she would address the criminal justice reform that awaited her.

Harris’ determination not to let the right outshine her on crime marks a marked departure from her approach when she ran for president four years ago. Back then, when the New York Times notes: “She called herself a progressive prosecutor and proposed abolishing the death penalty, mandatory minimum sentences and cash bail.”

What Time calls the “pivot from Harris’ previous efforts to downplay her record as a prosecutor a broader shift within the Democratic Party” and a “changed political landscape” in which Harris’ background in law enforcement “is more palatable to a broader electorate.”

But as she navigates the changing political landscape of crime and criminal justice, Harris will have to avoid taking Donald Trump’s bait on the crime issue. She will have to work hard to prevent the 2024 campaign from turning into a contest to show whose approach to crime is the most extreme.

And there will be plenty of bait that she doesn’t have to take.

For example, on Friday, after the Democratic National Convention, the Trump campaign posted the following: Kamala is DESPERATE!—Violent crime hasn’t ‘decreased,’ it’s up nearly 25% in 66 major U.S. cities, while Kamala was responsible for three of the four most murderous years in the past 25 years.”

“Under Kamala,” it was alleged, “illegal drug users she allowed into the country brutally raped and murdered our citizens. — As District Attorney, Kamala was known for her soft approach to crime, while San Francisco had its highest murder rate in a decade, as Kamala became the ‘model’ for Soros-backed prosecutors across the country. — Drug cartels have not been ‘busted,’ they have ravaged our communities with deadly drugs that have flooded across the border in unprecedented numbers.”

A day later, Trump himself said, “Kamala Harris is the weakest presidential candidate in history on crime.” Echoing these themes, J.D. Vance used an appearance in Wisconsin to remind listeners that Harris officially wants to defund the police. He repeated the tried-and-true Republican line, accusing her of “not supporting the blue crowd” and being soft on crime.

At this point, it is not yet clear how important the crime problem will be when people go to the polls and whether it will influence independent voters in one direction or the other.

A Gallup poll conducted last November found that “sixty-three percent of Americans describe the crime problem in the U.S. as extremely or very serious, up from 54% in the last survey in 2021… far fewer, 17%, say the crime problem in their area is extremely or very serious.”

Furthermore, Gallup notes that only “3% name it as the most important problem facing the country.” That pales in comparison to 1994, “when an average of 42% of Americans… named crime as the most important problem facing the U.S., making it the top problem overall that year…. Crime remained a prominent problem in subsequent years, with as many as 10% naming it between 1995 and mid-2000.”

Other polls show that most Americans now prefer to focus on crime prevention rather than tough punishment. “A prevention-first approach to safety, fully funding what has been proven to create safe communities and improve people’s quality of life, like good schools, a living wage and affordable housing” was more popular than traditional tough-on-crime policies.

Younger voters are “especially likely to support candidates who advocate crime prevention tactics….” And while black and Hispanic voters say crime is a major problem where they live, “majorities of these voters are more likely to favor ‘crime prevention’ strategies than ‘tough on crime’ policies.”

Kamala Harris seems uniquely qualified to understand the crime problem and respond to it in ways that don’t simply rehash old solutions that haven’t worked in the past. She can also use her credibility as a former prosecutor to take the lead in the fight against crime by addressing its root causes.

As the 2024 campaign progresses, Harris has a chance to show she can get tough on crime, but not on Donald Trump and J.D. Vance’s terms.