Kamala’s Flip Flop on Defunding the Police is Shameful
The presidential hopeful casting herself as a tough career prosecutor has bent the knee to her far left allies, and we all pay the price
Chameleon Kamala is busy pretending she doesn’t support all the radical positions she’s taken over the years, and hoping voters won’t notice. The latest phony walk-back: Her full-throated support for defunding our police in 2020, which Harris now says actually means being tough on “predators, fraudsters, and cheaters.” Quite a flip-flop in four years.
Yet Kamala’s anti-cop acrobatics don’t start there—in fact, her support for defunding the police was itself a flip-flop from her stance while serving as San Francisco’s District Attorney 15 years ago. What changed? She decided to run for president in the 2020 election… just like she’s doing now in the 2024 race. And we have it in writing.
In her 2009 book Smart on Crime, then-DA Harris took a much harder stance on fighting crime that today’s Kamala Harris might label far-right, fascist, or even racist.
“In terms of policy specifics, [being] Smart on Crime means more police officers on the street, deployed more effectively,” she wrote. Good idea. So why’d she suddenly switch positions?
“For too long, people have confused achieving public safety with putting more cops on the street,” Harris told a pro-abolish the police radio host in June 2020. Instead, “we have to redirect resources” from police to other areas of government in order “to reimagine public safety in America,” she explained.
“This whole [defund the police] movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these [police] budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” Harris continued.
No Qualms Kamala
What about prosecuting non-violent criminals who steal and vandalize? “Nonviolent offenders . . . must be held strictly accountable for their crimes,” Harris wrote in 2009. Another good idea she didn’t stick with.
As California Attorney General, Harris championed the passage of Proposition 47 in 2014, which lowered some felonies to misdemeanors and blocked prosecutors from punishing criminals who steal, use illegal drugs, or commit fraud… so long as it’s under $950. Harris’ office had the important duty to properly name that crime justification initiative… so naturally she called it “The Safe Neighborhood and Schools Act.” Who could be against that? Not San Francisco liberals, who voted 80–20 percent for the initiative.
The predictable result of Harris’ misnamed and dangerous initiative was a crime wave that swept the Golden State, triggering a grassroots effort to repeal Prop. 47 after a decade of chaos. Now criminals have a license to steal anything under $950—and run very little risk of being prosecuted even if they exceed that threshold.
Vehicle break-ins immediately surged after 7 years of decline. Ditto smash-and-grab burglaries, which fell by 24 percent from 2007–2014—then jumped 15 percent in the year after Prop. 47 passed. The common denominator: The property stolen is consistently under $950, including countless stolen handguns that could be used in yet more robberies.
Burglaries spiked immediately after Prop. 47 went into effect in 2014. Credit: Independent Institute.
As for helping law enforcement, Harris failed to inform voters that Prop. 47 would drastically cut critical DNA samples from low-level criminals used by investigators to catch major criminals and murderers.
Before Prop. 47, Sacramento County nabbed 15,000 DNA samples each month; post-Prop. 47, that fell by two-thirds to 5,000 per month. How many killers did Harris help escape? The world may never know.
(RELATED: What’s Behind Kamala’s 180 on Decriminalizing Prostitution?)
No Prison, No Problem
In Smart on Crime, Harris praised the “positive impact” of “police presence” on minority communities:
A more visible and strategic police presence is a deterrent to crime, and it has a positive impact on a community. Virtually all law-abiding citizens feel safer when they see officers walking a beat. This is as true in economically poor neighborhoods as in wealthy ones.
. . . There is a widely held notion that poor communities, particularly poor African American and Latino communities, consider law enforcement the enemy and that they do not want police officers in their neighborhoods. In fact, the opposite it true.
She also advocated for tough sentencing for violent offenders, writing, “We must recognize that there are some crimes for which the penalty must be permanent exclusion from society.”
That was then, this is now.
In June 2020, Harris endorsed and raised funds for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a radical group that paid $41 million in bail for George Floyd rioters. One of those rioters was a habitual DUI driver who crashed and killed a passenger just one week after Harris helped set him free. Another bail recipient was a serial arsonist who tried to burn down a mosque.
Harris should have known better. In 2022, the Minnesota Freedom Fund paid the bail for Shawn Michael Tillman, who shot and killed a man just 3 weeks after his release. Devin Markus Chase had a hit-and-run conviction while drunk driving when the fund bailed him out on felony drug charges. He failed to appear in court in Oct. 2022—so the fund bailed him out again. A few months later, he stole a car while high and killed a 30-year-old woman. The list goes on.
Kamala Harris never had principles, only ambition. Now that she isn’t bothering to hide her radicalism, will voters fall for it?
(READ MORE: Kamala Harris’s FBI is Gaslighting You About the Crime Wave)