For decades Kamala Harris was know for her tough on crime stances, but she's also billed herself as a progressive prosecutor in 2019. Now criminal legal reform experts like Insha Rahman say Vice President Harris appears to have found her way to the middle.
"For a lot of voters, it just landed as 'unclear who you are,'" Rahman said. "You could see her struggle to find her footing of what kind of a prosecutor was she?"
San Francisco City Attorney and longtime Harris friend, David Chiu, calls it a "radical middle."
"She's someone who has always seen the nuances of of the difficult situations that happen in and around the criminal justice system," he explained.
Harris has said repeatedly her only client has ever been "the people," but she's had a range of different policies representing them as District Attorney, as Attorney General and as senator.
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Harris' time as DA got off to a rocky start 20 years ago, when a police officer was killed in the line of duty. She declined to seek the death penalty, which was an issue she ran on. Elected leaders, including then Senator Dianne Feinstein, came after her.
"That is a moment of you see politics going, you know, right up against policy and values, and that had a chilling effect on then DA Harris," said Rahman. "You can see that in her subsequent sort of public stance."
As California Attorney General she eventually defended the death penalty. In the same position, she refused to defend the state's same sex marriage ban, and officiated weddings herself.
Progressives have been skeptical of her policies, though she created the Back on Track program to help reduce recidivism rates among low-level drug trafficking defendants.
She also won some serious checks for Californians, billions in a case against a for-profit college and $20 billion for homeowners against the big banks.
These are the kinds of issues she's touting.
"I will tell you, these fights were not easy, and neither were the elections that put me in those offices," Harris said at the Democratic National Convention.
But Harris ran into issues the last time she ran for president, at a time when criminal justice reform was top of mind and being a prosecutor was not popular among the progressive base.
During her time as a top cop, she clashed with civil rights and police accountability activists at points, opposed a statewide mandate for body cameras, opposed a ballot measure that would reduce certain felonies to misdemeanors, and rebuffed an effort to have the Attorney General's office investigate officer involved shootings instead of having the local DA investigate local police.
"Just like everyday people have evolved. We all change over time. Our own views on issues grow and evolve. I think we can actually safely say Kamala Harris has as well," Rahman said.
Since then, Harris has cosponsored criminal justice reform, worked to get rid of cash bail and find money for mental health treatment, crisis response and community violence intervention.
"She's someone who is very fact based, very data driven, not necessarily going to bring an extreme ideology one way to the conversation, but doing what's common sense," Chiu explained.
As Senator sitting on the Judiciary Committee for a short time, she was known to hold officials' feet to the fire.
Once a liability for her, this evolution may eventually become an asset to the wing of independent voters she's courting.
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