In the summer of 2020, following her failed presidential campaign, Kamala Harris called on American lawmakers to "defund the police" in a radio interview—a stance which may complicate the de facto Democratic nominee’s campaign platform centered on her record as a district attorney, CNN reported.
"This whole movement is about rightly saying, we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities," Harris said on the radio show Ebro in the Morning on June 9, 2020. "This is an important conversation and not just a conversation … [it] can’t just be about talk. It has to be about forcing change."
Harris’s support for defunding the police and the Black Lives Matter advocates who rioted in the streets and attacked police in 2020 cast a shadow on her nascent presidential campaign’s emphasis on Harris’s roots as a California prosecutor.
Harris said in the interview that the Black Lives Matter movement "rightly" condemned the amount of money spent on police departments instead of other community services, adding that U.S. cities were "militarizing police" but "defunding public schools."
"I was out there with folks, and well, any movement, any progress we have gained has been because people took to the streets," Harris said.
The radio interview came in the wake of Harris's failed 2020 presidential campaign, which she dropped in late 2019 two months before voting and caucusing began.
The day before the Ebro in the Morning interview, Harris celebrated then-Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti’s decision to slash police funding by $150 million.
"I support investing in communities so that they become more healthy and therefore more safe," Harris said in an ABC interview. "I applaud Mayor Garcetti for doing what he’s done."
Also in June 2020, while serving as a California senator, Harris directly called to "demilitarize police departments" on MSNBC and said it was "backward" to believe that more police officers meant more safety.
"Part of what we have to do here is also look at the militarization of police departments and, and the kind of money that is going to that," Harris said. "At its core, one of the issues that I think we should all agree on is that it is old thinking. It is outdated and is actually wrong and backward to think that more police officers will create more safety."
In yet another interview in June 2020, Harris explicitly suggested that police funding should be used for other social programs.
"In many cities in America, over one-third of their city budget goes to police," she said on The View. "So, we have to have this conversation. What are we doing? What about the money going to social services?"
Even today, Harris is actively raising money for the Minnesota Freedom Fund, a bail fund that busts violent criminals from jail.
Although reports have tried to falsify Harris’s current ties to the fund, it continues to collect cash from Harris’s fundraising efforts well into 2024. The vice president’s fundraising page for the group, which contains a photo of Harris and a crowd of supporters, is active and accepted a contribution Monday morning, the Washington Free Beacon reported earlier this week.