Kamala Harris said police shootings and cases of alleged brutality by law enforcement officials should be handed off to independent investigators, breaking with her long-held resistance to taking prosecutorial discretion away from locally elected district attorneys.
Harris, a former career prosecutor and California attorney general, had long advocated in favor of preserving prosecutorial discretion, taking heat from civil rights activists and African American leaders in her state. While running for Senate in 2016, she was criticized for withholding her support for state legislation requiring the Attorney General’s office to independently probe fatal police shootings. Now, campaigning for president, Harris was asked about her stance amid calls for more scrutiny over the investigative process.
“I believe the best approach is to have independent investigations,” Harris said in a Monday interview on MSNBC.
When Harris addressed the question head-on in 2014, she took the opposite approach. Harris said she didn’t think it good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys. “I don’t think there’s an inherent conflict. … Where there are abuses, we have designed the system to address them,” she told the San Francisco Chronicle.
Harris never took over an officer-involved fatality investigation while serving as attorney general. But late in the 2016 Senate run, a spokeswoman for Harris told the Chronicle that the then-attorney general did advocate to the governor and Democratic legislative leaders for money in the state budget to create three new teams within her office to conduct criminal investigations of officer-involved shootings. The goal, which was never fulfilled because the budget request was denied, was to deploy state attorneys in deaths resulting from these cases, a Harris aide told POLITICO.
Harris’ remarks on the subject Monday appear to be the first time she’s advocated for a blanket approach to independent probes. Pressed on her evolution on the subject, Harris pointed to a seminal case from early in her elected career. As district attorney of San Francisco, she recalled how she refused to seek the death penalty against a gang member who fatally shot a city police officer in 2004, sparking criticism from both sides. Harris noted there were calls at the time for the marquee case to be taken away from her.
“I had a very real, personal experience where I had to fight to keep my case — and my argument was, ‘I was elected to exercise my discretion, and no one’s going to take my case from me,’” Harris said in the MSNBC interview. “It was that personal experience that informed my principle, which is that these cases shouldn’t be taken from the person who was elected to exercise their discretion.”
But Harris said it’s now clear to her that there needs to be an independent entity brought in to probe the recurring shootings and brutality by police officers from the beginning. Such probes are needed, Harris said, “from the first moments of the incident so that we can be certain and sure that there has been a thorough investigation that is not informed by bias, and so that there will be justice for all of the people concerned.”
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