Kamala Harris

There was an Intercept story about Kamala Harris the other day. It talked about how she’s going to deal with the baggage of being a prosecutor.

The problem isn’t that Harris was an especially bad prosecutor. She made positive contributions as well — encouraging education and reentry programs for ex-offenders, for instance. The problem, more precisely, is that she was ever a prosecutor at all.

This is a good point. And the article goes on further to talk about Larry Krasner who is my city’s DA and someone who is literally changing the oppressive system from the inside. Did Harris? Did she head in that direction? We will need to dig deep into that. Can we trust someone who was a part of this system?

Today there was another piece I read on Buzzfeed about her book in 2009 about crime and her thoughts. But that book was in 2009. Has she evolved her beliefs? That’s something I will need to dig into further. For what its worth, the article does get some comment from Shaun King (who I think is on top of this stuff):

King, for his part, has been won over by Harris’s time in the Senate, and what he calls her “evolution” on criminal justice. “I was a little slow to trust her as a reformer on criminal justice, but I think she’s proven herself to me,” King said.

King said he disapproved of much of Harris’s “moderate” work as California’s attorney general. But as a senator, he said, empowered by her intimate knowledge of the justice system, “I think she’s become one of the better spokespersons for really serious criminal justice reform in the Democratic Party.”

I like Kamala Harris. I think she’s smart and tough and she appears to care about issues that I care about. She announced her candidacy today and she is on my radar so we shall dig into this further.