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As a public defender, I saw firsthand that to be a prosecutor means covering up the misconduct of blue lives while criminalizing and caging black ones.
Too often, prosecutors shield police from accountability and ask black and brown folks to pay the price. This is what Harris did for decades.
Her office hid information that misconduct in a police crime lab tainted hundreds of drug convictions.
She obstructed defense attorneys’ efforts to obtain disciplinary and conviction records of police officers with histories of misconduct.
She oversaw a sham investigation that held no one accountable for Orange County’s illegal use of jailhouse snitches.
She resisted calls to appoint special prosecutors when police were accused of crimes, despite the fact that local district attorneys effectively cannot and do not prosecute cops they work with (and they work with all local cops).
What’s worse is she did all of that in progressive California in the 2000s — a time and place where she was often to the right of what even Republicans championed. Her platform for DA called her competitor “soft on crime”. She ran on “tough on crime” & “law & order”
And rather than atone for her regressive prosecutorial past, Harris has chosen to whitewash it. She doesn’t get to do that. Not with her record.
She doesn’t get to jail black and brown parents when poverty affects their children’s school attendance, then trade in the political currency of being bused to an integrated school as a child.
She doesn’t get to defend capital punishment in California that condemns black people to death row at six times the rate of white people, then tout her moral opposition to the death penalty.
She doesn’t get to slow-walk the release of prisoners from jails so overcrowded that the U.S. Supreme Court called them inhumane, then brag about her leadership fighting against mass incarceration.
America needs a leader who has shown us her entire career that black lives matter, not just recently.
Prosecutors do not necessarily pull the trigger, but they frequently function as the getaway driver when police officers abuse or kill. And as defendants are told in criminal courtrooms around the country, the getaway driver is often considered just as guilty as the killer.
Please @JoeBiden no cops. not now.
From fellow public defender’s plea: https://www.nydailynews.com/opinion/ny-oped-prosecuting-kamala-harris-20200703-dutcgewwtbd5fls5e54rjzhxvq-story.html
