Was Kamala Harris a tough prosecutor or a ‘soft on crime’ liberal?

Kamala Harris received some of the biggest cheers during her campaign when she compared her background as a government attorney prosecuting “predators,” “con artists” and “fraudsters” to her opponent’s felony conviction.

“I know Donald Trump’s type,” Harris told the crowd at the Democratic National Convention last month. “I’ve dealt with people like him my whole career.”

But Trump has exploited the record of the Democratic nominee, who served as a prosecutor, district attorney and attorney general in California before being elected to the Senate, to portray her as soft on crime.

He is likely to press her hard on the issue during next week’s first presidential debate, after his campaign called her a “weak district attorney” in a statement Friday.

What does her track record actually look like?

What is Harris’ position on the death penalty?

When Harris was first elected as San Francisco’s district attorney in 2004, she declined to seek the death penalty for David Hill, who was charged with the murder of police officer Isaac Espinoza. The move was consistent with her campaign stance at the time.

“She kept her word,” said Stanford Law School professor John Donohue. “If that was all that had happened, I would say, ‘Well, she stuck to her principles.’ … What may have led some people to think there was some ambiguity was her later position as attorney general of the state of California.”

In 2014, Harris, now the state’s top judicial officer, appealed a federal judge’s ruling that declared the death penalty unconstitutional, arguing it was flawed. Death penalty advocates saw the decision as a turning point.

The relatively liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals sided with Harris on procedural grounds, holding that the district court lacked jurisdiction to consider novel constitutional theories in such a case.

“I don’t think it would necessarily have ended the death penalty in California, certainly not in a clean way, if she had simply stayed the death penalty, but it would have sent a message and it would have supported the abolition of the death penalty if she had taken that step,” Donohue said.

How has Harris dealt with issues surrounding child sexual abuse?

One of the pillars of Harris’ legal work is her quest to change the way cases involving child victims of sexual abuse are handled, in order to prevent further harm.

“She has really shown that she is sensitive to these issues and has made solid progress on them,” said Diane Rosenfeld, a professor at Harvard Law School.

Harris’ push to treat sexually abused children as victims rather than accusing them of prostitution was a “huge breakthrough,” Rosenfeld added.

After focusing on prosecuting child sexual abuse cases in Alameda County, California, Harris founded a division as a district attorney in San Francisco. He later worked with the U.S. Department of Justice on a national program aimed at preventing child abuse.

The San Francisco unit was “quite prescient,” Rosenfeld said. Trauma experienced by sexual abuse victims, particularly children, means they “may not be able to recall details in the same linear fashion that an investigator wants to hear evidence of sexual abuse.” A unit where prosecutors are trained to receive this information “is to be commended.”

What is Harris’ position on immigration?

Immigration will be a hot topic during the debate, as the number of people apprehended at the US southwest border last year reached a record high of nearly 2.5 million.

Trump has blamed the administration of US President Joe Biden for illegal border crossings and called Harris a “failed border czar”. The vice president has emphasized her role as attorney general of a border state and pledged to tighten border security.

“I’ve gone after transnational gangs, drug cartels, human traffickers who came into our country illegally,” Harris told the crowd earlier this year. “I’ve prosecuted them in case after case, and I’ve won.”

Her record in California is mixed. As San Francisco’s district attorney, she brought cases suing employers for exploiting immigrant workers, in one case targeting a contractor who failed to pay workers.

But she also supported a policy in San Francisco, along with then-Mayor Gavin Newsom, that required local police to report arrested young illegal immigrants to Immigration and Customs Enforcement, a federal agency that later played a central role in former President Trump’s controversial immigration campaign.

Is Harris pro-police?

During a speech at the Michigan sheriff’s office last month, Trump attempted to paint Harris as anti-police, claiming without evidence that the country was being swept by a “Kamala crime wave.” Violent crime has dropped since Trump was in the White House.

But Harris has repeatedly pitted her record against Trump’s to suggest that as a former prosecutor she would be a more effective law enforcement officer.

That policy has been criticized from both sides of the political spectrum, with conservatives accusing her of being too liberal, while progressives point to California’s mass incarceration of African Americans, a result of decades of tough state policies on crime.

Her relationship with the police has been rocky. Her relationships with local law enforcement were strained by her decision as San Francisco district attorney not to seek the death penalty against a man accused of killing a city police officer.

In 2020, she voiced her support for the “defund the police” movement as protests erupted across the country following the killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd by police officers.

But Biden and Harris’ campaign team later stressed that the duo did not support police cuts.

Earlier in her legal career, Harris was criticized by civil rights activists for not more actively investigating police killings of black people in California.

What is Harris’ relationship to Wall Street?

During a speech in July, Harris told the audience that “during the mortgage crisis, I took on the big banks on Wall Street and won $20 billion for California families, holding those banks accountable for fraud.”

“Donald Trump was just found guilty of 34 counts of fraud,” she added, referring to his conviction in a case involving hush-money payments to a porn actress ahead of the 2016 presidential election.

Harris has repeatedly referred to the multibillion-dollar settlement reached in 2012 with the five largest U.S. mortgage lenders, including JPMorgan and Wells Fargo, over alleged wrongful foreclosures and other mortgage-related abuses.

The deal came after Harris withdrew from settlement negotiations in 2011, arguing that the proposed agreement was “inadequate” and would “leave too few California homeowners in their homes” — a bold move that ultimately increased the final settlement by more than four times.

The deal has since been criticized for not generating enough money for homeowners.

But Nancy Wallace, a professor at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, praised Harris’ efforts. “Kamala was the first AG to stand up to these institutions, which were only willing to cover a small portion of the costs.”