It is Kamala Harris.
Presumptive Democratic Nominee Joe Biden has picked California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate.
The first woman of color in history to be chosen for such a position.
Biden chose Harris even though as a candidate she attacked him for being a lead architect
of the modern criminal justice system.
She was the one that took it to him. The senator criticized the former vice president's record on race.
I am proud of the work we did performing a criminal justice system and cleaning up the consequences
of the bills that you passed when you were in the United States Senate for decades
The irony of Biden's decision to select Harris particularly in the wake of widespread protests
against police misconduct and racial injustice
is that she has her own troubling record on criminal justice issues which also came up on the debate stage.
She had a police department when she was there that in fact was abusing people's rights.
The bottom line is Senator Harris when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact
in these people's lives, you did not and worse yet, in the case of those who were on death row,
innocent people you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would
have freed them until you were forced to do so there is
no excuse for that i want joe biden to win it is about
everything about criminal justice reform and what we're
trying to do in terms of reforming policing like biden harris deserves
credit for endorsing vital reforms even at this stage in her career but it's
worth setting the record straight about her priorities over the course of her 16
years in public life before criminal justice reform became
front and center for the democratic party
i am proud of that work of being in the position to use the power that i had to
reform a system that is badly in need of reform
harris's record is that of a 1980s style drug warrior
a defender of dirty prosecutors and a political opportunist who has made life
more dangerous for sex workers
harris's political rise has been propelled by a years-long
high-profile campaign against alleged sex traffickers what she's
actually done is throw women in jail for having consensual sex
while trampling on the rule of law to advance her own political ambitions
ignoring the pleas of sex workers and human rights advocates for
over a decade she's fought against campaigns to decriminalize consensual
adult prostitution in california as attorney general she created a statewide
program to get truckers to report suspected sex workers to police
these policies didn't stop traffickers but they did land plenty of sex workers
behind bars one of the greatest defenders is
backpage.com harris fought to destroy backpage.com a classified site that sex
workers used to find and screen their clients
even though she publicly admitted that the site's founders michael lacy and
james larkin were protected from prosecution under
federal free speech laws but tonight a groundbreaking arrest but
a month before election day in her senate race
harris went ahead and had them arrested anyway parading them before the cameras
on pimping charges which were then promptly
dismissed by a judge when harris got to congress she kept up
her crusade becoming a big proponent of the 2018 law known as sestafasta
one cannot cowardly sit behind a computer
committing their crime quite the contrary
the result was that many sex workers had no choice but to return to the streets
where soliciting clients is considerably more dangerous because
you don't know who's going to pick you up
there's more pimps and there's more guys out here meanwhile harris declined to
intervene in a real underage sex trafficking
scandal that involved dozens of police and other local authorities in the bay
area america has a deep and dark history of
people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice i knew
this history well of innocent men framed of prosecutors
hiding information that would exonerate defendants yes and during her time as
california's top cop harris contributed to that history
repeatedly by going to bat on behalf of dirty prosecutors her
office appealed the dismissal of the case in which a prosecutor had
fabricated a confession to secure a conviction and fought an appeal
in a case where a prosecutor had lied to the jury during trial
in 2015 harris tried to stop the removal of the orange county district attorney's
office from a murder trial after it repeatedly failed to turn over
evidence to the defense her office even tried to keep a man in
jail who had been wrongfully incarcerated for 13 years
after a judge ruled that he had proven himself innocent just because the man
hadn't delivered that proof quite fast enough and as san francisco
d.a harris hid known misconduct by a crime lab
technician who admitted to deliberately tainting evidence
did prosecutors working under you know about the concerns
about that lab which is what the judge alleged did not know about it at least
said they did not know about it the debacle has since led to the dismissal
of hundreds of criminal cases something
else it's past time we get done is dismantling the failed war on drugs
starting with legalizing marijuana your opponent ron gold has said that he
is for the legalization of marijuana recreationally
your thoughts on that
i that he's entitled to his opinion harris is a former drug warrior who is
now refashioning herself as pro-legalization that's a positive
shift but not a reason to rewrite the past or
ignore the patterns it reveals in her judgment four years after the cultural
tide had turned in favor of criminal justice reforms
harris continued to support lock-em-up policies that disproportionately hurt
minorities as california attorney general harris
opposed marijuana legalization as late as 2014 promoted civil asset forfeiture
without a conviction as a way to fight drug rings
and sought to more aggressively police prescription drug use
in her 2019 book the truths we hold an american journey harris reveals that her
drug warrior mentality hasn't changed we also need to reinstate the dea's
authority to go after the major pharmaceutical manufacturers and
distributors and we need to invest resources in law enforcement efforts
to cut off the supply of fentanyl from china
let's believe in a more perfect union without mass incarceration of
african-american men we put more people in prison than any
country on earth for no good reason yes we do and once
these people were in prison harris saw to it that they'd have a hell
of a time getting out i absolutely believe there should be
severe and serious consequence for violent crime which is why i prosecuted
those cases and will always seek the highest
sentence as a prosecutor in law enforcement i have a huge stick
so i decided i was going to start prosecuting
parents for truancy before her recent about face
harris chose not to endorse proposed sentencing reforms on the california
ballot in 2012 and 2014 and she defended the
constitutionality of cash bail until 2016. harris's office also fought
an order to reduce california's prison population
after the supreme court determined the conditions amounted to cruel and unusual
punishment although she later claimed to be shocked
by what they had done harris's attorneys argued that
non-violent offenders should stay behind bars because the state needed the cheap
labor they provide we are part of a longer story
and we are responsible for how our chapter gets written
as she tries to convince voters to put her a heartbeat away from the presidency
kamala harris is trying to rewrite her last chapter but her record
is yet another reminder of the terrible choice voters face in the 2020 election
i think you can judge people by when they are under fire and it's not about
some fancy opinion on a stage but when they're in the position to
actually make a decision what do they do