California lawmakers and former police officers who served during Kamala Harris’s tenure as a Golden State prosecutor called out the vice president for presenting herself as a "tough on drugs" prosecutor, saying her record tells a different story.
"The campaign is trying to completely reinvent reality," Rep. Kevin Kiley (R., Calif.) told the Daily Mail. "Those of us who have actually lived in California … know all too well what the reality was. She was a champion of San Francisco’s sanctuary city policy, … and she herself said in her own book that she was a progressive prosecutor."
Kiley pointed to a 2005 policy Harris recommended when she was San Francisco’s district attorney which stipulated that drug dealers could only be prosecuted the third time they were caught selling narcotics.
"The more the American people learn about what her actual record was, they’re going to see this campaign rhetoric for the facade that it is," Kiley said.
"We immediately saw that it wouldn’t be effective for our mission of keeping San Francisco safe," Kevin Cashman, who was deputy chief of the San Francisco Police Department in 2005, said of Harris’s proposal. "The district attorney called the strategy she recommended Operation Safe Streets. We in the police department called it Catch and Release because we would have to catch them, identify them, and then release them back in the community without any action taken."
The officials’ criticism comes as the Harris campaign has leaned into the vice president’s years as a "tough" prosecutor, particularly in her rally speeches and television ads, as the race for the White House begins its final sprint.
John McGinness, who was the Sacramento County sheriff during Harris’s prosecuting years, said that the Democratic candidate’s "tough on crime" messaging "does not comport with the truth in any way, shape, or form."
"I dealt with California law enforcement agencies up and down the state," McGinness said. "She was an outlier insofar as she seemed to embrace a hands-off approach with regards to enforcing the law."
Harris’s California criticizers also ripped the presidential nominee for an August television advertisement that paints her as a "tough on crime border state prosecutor" and features former president Donald Trump’s southern border wall—which she previously condemned multiple times.