Los Angeles Times - 06.08.2019

A12 TUESDAY, AUGUST 6, 2019 WSCE LATIMES.COM

general’s office, drawing
praise from civil rights advo-
cates and scant resistance
from law enforcement.
At the same time, Harris,
the state’s first black attor-
ney general, steered clear of
the legislative brawls over
bills on policing, including
what became a ground-
breaking law to curb racial
profiling. Harris also re-
jected pleas by civil rights
activists to investigate
deadly police shootings of
young black men in Los An-
geles and San Francisco.
“She is maybe a modest
reformer, and that’s fine,”
said Anne Weills, an Oak-
land civil rights attorney.
“But I don’t think that
means she is particularly
progressive. She doesn’t
look at the big picture about
how to make structural
change.”
For months, Harris has
been fending off accusa-
tions, most recently in a de-
bate Wednesday, that she
did too little to fight racial bi-
as in the criminal justice sys-
tem.
Harris told The Times
she was frustrated by the
slow pace of change, but
pointed to progress made
during her tenure.
“You’d be hard-pressed
to find any other attorney
general in America who at
that time was doing the kind
of transformative work that
we did,” Harris said.
Harris had been attorney
general for nearly four years
when a white police officer
shot and killed Michael
Brown, an 18-year-old black
man in Ferguson, Mo. The
shooting on Aug. 9, 2014, re-
shaped the politics of race
and law enforcement in
America.
Video of Brown’s body,
left facedown in the street in
a pool of blood for four hours,
went viral on social media.
Over the next several days,
images of white cops in mili-
tary vehicles firing tear gas
and rubber bullets at mainly
black protesters came to
symbolize police violence
against African Americans.
Police shootings became
major news in the months
that followed as they were

captured in smartphone

videos that spread nation-

wide.

“The death rate from po-

lice use of lethal force has

been stable for a long time,”

said Franklin Zimring, a

criminologist and law pro-

fessor at UC Berkeley. “What

happened with Ferguson ...

was people started to notice

that these things kept hap-

pening.”

Civil rights groups

pressed for new limits on po-

lice power. Law enforce-

ment, feeling besieged,

fought many of the propos-

als.

For Harris, the timing

was difficult. Police unions

had overwhelmingly op-

posed her when she first ran

for the job in 2010, in part be-

cause she had declined to

pursue the death penalty

against the killer of a San

Francisco police officer,

Isaac Espinoza, when she

was the San Francisco dis-

trict attorney. She labored

hard to secure their over-

whelming support in her run

for reelection.

“She had to walk a fine

tightrope,” said Brian Mar-

vel, a San Diego police officer

and president of the Peace

Officers Research Assn. of

California, the state’s top po-

lice advocacy group.

But civil rights advocates

also set high expectations.

“We always hope that be-

cause you look like us, you

talk like us, you walk like us,

you come from where we

come from — that you’re not

just reading about this in the

news. You know there is a

war being waged against

black bodies,” said Cat

Brooks, an Oakland activist

who thought Harris fell

short.

California lawmakers put

police accountability high

on their agenda after Fergu-

son. Among the most con-

tentious bills was one

pushed by civil rights or-

ganizations to collect data

on the race of everyone

stopped by police statewide

to shed light on racial profil-

ing.

Police groups — still a

powerful political force in a

state that has only recently

tempered its strict law-and-

order culture — resisted the

bill, arguing it would be too

burdensome.

Harris declined to take a

position. After Jerry Brown,

then governor, signed the

bill into law, Harris won

credit from civil rights

groups for drafting strong

rules putting it into effect.

Bill Lockyer, a former

state attorney general, said

Harris avoided battles in the

Capitol, just a few blocks

from her Sacramento office,

and concentrated instead

on running her own agency.

“I saw it as a general re-

luctance to have an active

legislative role,” said Lock-

yer, a onetime state Senate

leader who remained closely

engaged in lawmaking as at-

torney general.

Daniel Suvor, Harris’

chief policy advisor at the

time, said her preference

was “to work directly with

law enforcement and the civ-

il rights community to get

things done as opposed to

engaging in superfluous dia-

logue.”

Harris’ authority over po-

lice practices was limited. In

a state with nearly 80,000 po-

lice officers, the attorney

general employed only

about 300 — special agents

who investigate healthcare

fraud, gun violations and

drug crimes. By November

2015, all agents in the field

were equipped, on Harris’

order, with body-worn cam-

eras.

Some advocates were

seeking mandatory body

cameras for nearly every offi-

cer in California. They tried

unsuccessfully to pass a bill

to create a statewide stand-

ard for their use. Harris

spurned the proposal, say-

ing she opposed a “one-size-

fits-all approach.”

Another Harris project

was anti-bias training for

law enforcement agencies

statewide, which proved

popular. More than two doz-

en agencies participated in

the first course. It remains

part of the state’s formal offi-

cer training.

Harris’ signature

achievement from this pe-

riod was Open Justice, an

online portal that, for the

first time, made a wide array

of criminal justice data avail-

able to the public, including

tallies of deaths and injuries

in police custody.

“She saw there was so

much emotion and anecdote

around the criminal justice

reform conversation, and

she wanted to inject data,

facts and evidence into the

conversation,” Suvor said.

It was the rare initiative

embraced by both police

and reform advocates.

“That was really, really

helpful to the movement, be-

cause there was no place

that we could look at in-cus-

tody deaths at the hands of

law enforcement prior to

that,” said Melina Abdullah,

a Black Lives Matter organ-

izer who chairs Cal State

L.A.’s Pan-African studies

department.

Harris was less success-

ful in dodging political

fallout when it came to calls

for state investigations of

high-profile shootings. Civil

rights advocates viewed lo-

cal prosecutors as inher-

ently compromised in cases

against police they worked

closely with every day.

State intervention in lo-

cal cases was a fraught issue

for Harris. In 2004, Lockyer,

then attorney general, had

second-guessed her refusal

to seek the death penalty for

the killer of Espinoza, open-

ing his own investigation

into her decision. He ulti-

mately sided with Harris.

“There’s no question that

has influenced and did influ-

ence my perspective on

this,” Harris said, adding she

believed local officials are

best held accountable by

voters.

Community activists

urged Harris to investigate

two high-profile police

shootings in California —

Ezell Ford’s death in Los An-

geles in 2014 and the 2015

killing of Mario Woods in San

Francisco — but she de-

murred, saying she lacked

legal grounds to overrule lo-

cal prosecutors.

“I wouldn’t even say dis-

appointed is a strong

enough word for how we felt

about how she did as attor-

ney general,” said Kim Mc-

Gill, an organizer with the

Youth Justice Coalition.

Critics suspected a politi-

cal motive behind Harris’

stand against state probes of

the L.A. and San Francisco

police shootings.

“When she was running

for attorney general, she was

already running for presi-

dent,” Weills said. “It’s a very

calculated process. For her

to start to alienate the whole

law enforcement establish-

ment by taking on these in-

vestigations ... it might have

destroyed her career.”

A 2015 bill, which failed to

pass, would have required

the attorney general to ap-

point a special prosecutor to

take on cases involving po-

lice use of deadly force. Har-

ris declined to support it.

Yet Harris did not always

take a hard line against state

probes of local police mis-

conduct. She privately

asked the governor for mon-

ey to create teams of prose-

cutors to conduct such in-

vestigations in jurisdictions

that consented to them.

Brown refused, she told The

Times.

After she won election to

the U.S. Senate, and in her fi-

nal days as attorney general,

Harris opened civil rights in-

vestigations into the Kern

County Sheriff ’s Office and

the Bakersfield Police De-

partment, which remain on-

going under her successor,

Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra.

Now, as she runs for pres-

ident, Harris has more force-

fully backed independent in-

vestigations of police wrong-

doing. She has promised the

U.S. Justice Department

would pursue more robust

oversight of racial bias in po-

lice departments nation-

wide. She has also vowed to

push legislation to end racial

profiling.

Harris dealt cautiously with bias

POLICEin Ferguson, Mo., after the killing of Michael Brown in 2014. Kamala Harris, a black prosecutor, identified with both sides.

Scott Olson Getty Images

[Harris,from A1]

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