Opinion: Harris was once tough on crime. What happened?

Which Kamala Harris is running for president? And which Democratic Party is she representing?
Democrats want you to think Vice President Harris was once a tough, no-nonsense prosecutor. Republicans want you to believe she was a “pro-crime” progressive who voiced support for defunding the police.
The problem is they’re both right. Harris used to be a crime fighter who valued enforcing the law. Then Harris rebranded herself as a progressive prosecutor to appeal to the left wing of her party. Now she is staying silent to avoid controversy. But the real problem isn’t that Harris changed – it’s that the Democratic Party did.
The uncontroversial truths Harris told as San Francisco’s district attorney can’t be repeated in today’s Democratic Party because they have become too contested. The Democratic Party, like Harris, doesn’t seem to know where it stands on crime. Democrats should read Harris’ 2009 book to find their way back to common sense. 
The conservative claim that Harris was always a progressive radical on crime simply isn’t true. When she was elected San Francisco’s district attorney in 2003, her views were quite moderate, pairing a strong desire to prosecute criminals with support for social interventions to prevent crime.
Harris shared her views on criminal justice in a 2009 book, “Smart on Crime.” The Kamala Harris of 2009 called for “more police officers on the street, deployed more effectively” as one of her top priorities. She also castigated what she called “the partisan liberal argument … that police are an unwelcome occupation force in poor neighborhoods.”
She pointed out, correctly, that police are wanted desperately by the law-abiding residents of poor and minority neighborhoods. The prospect of cities pursuing de-policing or creating police-free zones would have appalled 2009 Harris.
As Harris wrote: “Not to send in police because one assumes they’re not wanted or because it’s somehow not ‘fair’ to the community to respond to its offenders flies in the face of fundamental principles of democracy. … All communities want and are entitled to law enforcement. Law enforcement agencies need to investigate and prosecute all crimes and make all the streets safe.”
While she always opposed the death penalty, her record as San Francisco DA was far from progressive. She cracked down on drug courts she saw as letting drug dealers off the hook. She wrote of the need to punish thieves no matter their motivations. And she fought for higher bail amounts to keep dangerous criminals behind bars and reduce gun violence.
2009 Harris possessed, in her words, “the desire to prosecute criminals to the fullest extent of the law.”
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But then the Democratic Party changed. And so did Harris.
After the Black Lives Matter movement rose to national prominence in 2014, progressives increasingly turned against law enforcement. Suddenly, police were racist. Prison was racist. Enforcing the law was racist. The left wing of the Democratic Party forgot the truths Harris wrote in her book: That police aren’t occupation forces, and that while of course there is always room for police reform, high-crime communities need more police, not less.
Apparently, Harris forgot her book, too.
When she first ran for president in 2019, she played to progressives to win votes. She adopted the “progressive prosecutor” label and attacked Joe Biden for being too tough on crime. She repeated the claim that Michael Brown was murdered (despite the Justice Department investigation to the contrary), attacked shadowy “systemic racism” in the justice system and advocated for a range of policies designed to get criminals back on the street.
Ironically, despite her repositioning, her record was simply too conservative for progressives. Then-Rep. Tulsi Gabbard famously flamed Harris on the Democratic debate stage for being too tough on crime by prosecuting drug offenders and fighting to keep criminals in jail.
In the wake of the riots that erupted after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020, progressives urged de-policing. Democratic Party leaders stood back and stood by.
Harris helped raise bail funds for protesters and rioters spreading chaos in Minneapolis and praised the mayor of Los Angeles, Eric Garcetti, for cutting $150 million from the police budget. More than 20 cities slashed their police budgets. Crime surged.
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After the disastrous consequences became clear, Democratic leaders scrambled to squash the “Defund the Police” slogan, but their messaging on crime remained confused and uncertain. The Democratic Party was caught between commonsense moderates urging law enforcement and radical progressives demanding more police cuts and prison closures. Today, Democrats continue to skirt the issue to avoid an intraparty civil war. Harris is no exception.
Which Harris is running for president? Is it the 2009 Harris who wrote that “serious and violent criminals need to be locked up” or the 2019 Harris who made it a priority to release serious criminals? Is it the 2009 Harris who called for more police on the streets or the 2020 Harris who praised de-policing? We don’t know because she won’t explicitly say. And she won’t say because the Democratic Party is split between those who want to lock up the criminals and those who want to lock up the cops.
For the good of their country, and their party, Democrats need to rediscover common sense on crime. As Harris wrote in her 2009 book, “Achieving justice for victims and preventing future victimization ultimately is our mission.”
That shouldn’t be controversial, but it is in today’s Democratic Party. And it will remain controversial until Democrats loudly speak the explicit truths Harris did in 2009 but won’t in 2024.
Jeffrey Seaman is a Levy Scholar and Paul Robinson is the Colin S. Diver Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. They are the co-authors most recently of “Confronting Failures of Justice: Getting Away with Murder and Rape.”