Vice President Kamala Harris knows how to make communities across the country safer because she has been doing it for decades. Throughout her tenures as San Francisco district attorney, attorney general of California, U.S. senator, and, most recently, vice president, she has sought to protect the right of every individual to be safe by holding accountable those who commit serious crimes and investing in strategies that prevent crime and violence altogether.
In her 2019 memoir, The Truths We Hold: An American Journey, Harris described her approach as a prosecutor as “someone who used the power of the office with a sense of fairness, perspective and experience, someone who was clear about the need to hold serious criminals accountable and who understood that the best way to create safe communities was to prevent crime.”
Kamala Harris’ record on public safety
As a prosecuting attorney (1990–2004)
As a young prosecutor, Harris focused her resources on serious crime while prioritizing the needs of victims and creating strategies to stop cycles of offending, especially for young people. She prosecuted sex traffickers while working with community advocates to provide services to the children they exploited. She opposed measures that unjustly created excessive punishment for children, recognizing that accountability focused on punishment rarely improves safety in the long run. And Harris created programs to protect and empower young people, including founding a mentoring program through the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art that paired students from underserved communities with adult museum members to foster their interest in the arts.
As district attorney of San Francisco (2004–2011)
As district attorney, Harris continued her emphasis on serious crime, with a particular focus on gun violence. During Harris’ tenure, gun crime prosecutions in San Francisco rose to 92 percent. She also continued her efforts to address underlying challenges driving crime, especially drug use. Although few similar programs existed at the time, Harris created “Back on Track,” a diversion program for people charged with drug possession that provided job training, substance abuse treatment, and housing.
District Attorney Harris also recognized the importance of supporting and expanding services for victims as part of preventing crime, especially for those often ignored or traumatized by the criminal legal system. As a result, she changed office policy to treat underage men and women charged with prostitution as victims of sex crimes rather than offenders; co-founded the Coalition to End the Exploitation of Kids; and created San Francisco’s first safe house for young women seeking to leave the sex trade.
As attorney general of California (2011–2017)
As attorney general of California and the state’s top law enforcement officer, Harris oversaw California’s lowest crime rate in history. She expanded on her commitments to focus on serious crime while offering people opportunities to repair, grow, and change their lives. Among other things, Harris implemented a wide range of strategies to protect young people, including by creating a Bureau of Children’s Justice to increase protections for children in the foster system and address childhood trauma; improving juvenile system data collection to inform better policy; supporting the elimination of the incredibly harmful practice of juvenile confinement; and supporting a collaboration between the criminal legal system and community colleges to redirect young people to higher education opportunities.
Harris used the weight of her office to go after those committing serious crime, including powerful corporations that abused their privilege and took advantage of millions of vulnerable people and cartels smuggling large quantities of drugs into the United States. In particular, she secured more than $20 billion in a settlement with some of the country’s largest banks over foreclosure misconduct in an effort to provide homeowners relief after the 2008 financial crisis. And she obtained a $1.1 billion settlement from a network of for-profit colleges for predatory practices that misled and impoverished students.
Harris maintained her focus on reducing repeat offenses by creating the Division of Recidivism Reduction and Re-Entry, a statewide program that partnered with counties and district attorneys to identify and implement best practices and policy initiatives to reduce recidivism and better support people returning from prison.
Attorney General Harris also took several meaningful steps to improve trust in and community collaboration with law enforcement as well as to reduce police violence against civilians—all of which can help improve crime clearance rates. She created a first-of-its-kind open criminal justice data portal that increased transparency around law enforcement practices. In addition, Harris supported a law that required law enforcement to collect data around shooting incidents or other uses of force; created the first statewide law enforcement training on procedural justice and implicit bias; and opened several pattern-or-practice investigations into law enforcement departments.
As a U.S. senator (2017–2021)
As a senator, Harris built on her efforts to create meaningful police reform by introducing the Justice in Policing Act of 2020, on the heels of George Floyd’s murder at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer. In a press release, Harris stated: “As a career prosecutor and former Attorney General of California, I know that real public safety requires community trust and police accountability.”
Sen. Harris also supported strategies to reduce the harm of the war on drugs by decriminalizing marijuana and supporting people whose lives had been harmed by marijuana convictions both through record expungement and investing in their communities. In addition, she recognized the importance of providing formerly incarcerated individuals with support to rebuild their lives, sponsoring legislation to end discrimination in public housing for people with criminal records.
As 49th vice president of the United States (2021–present)
Throughout her entire career, Harris demonstrated her commitment to prioritizing gun violence. Her efforts as vice president built on these earlier efforts, with tremendous results.
The Biden-Harris administration invested heavily in gun violence reduction and prevention efforts and presided over the largest decline in homicide ever recorded in 2023, with 2024 on track to experience an even larger decline. Harris also oversaw the first White House Office of Gun Violence Prevention and launched the Biden-Harris administration’s Safer States Initiative, which supports the creation of local, community-based, and law enforcement violence prevention strategies and state legislation to reduce the harms caused by guns. This past spring, Vice President Harris announced the launch of the first-ever National Extreme Risk Protection Order (ERPO) Resource Center and called on states to leverage Bipartisan Safer Communities Act (BSCA) funding to support efforts to keep guns out of the hands of people in crisis. She has also announced expanded firearm background checks under the BSCA.
These efforts were simply a continuation of Harris’ focus earlier in her career as a prosecuting attorney and attorney general. In both roles, she supported measures to limit access to guns for people who could be dangerous, including domestic abusers, as well as measures to help law enforcement improve gun crime clearance rates. And as senator, Harris co-sponsored bills to enact universal background checks, ban assault weapons, and increase oversight of federally licensed gun dealers.
Conclusion
Most importantly, Vice President Harris’ record demonstrates her commitment to improving safety while being willing to adapt her approaches according to research and best practices. Recently, the Center for American Progress published a framework for improving public safety through better accountability and prevention, rooted in robust evidence on what works to reduce crime, and the public is supportive of this approach.
Effective accountability holds people responsible for their wrongdoings, repairs harm to victims, and empowers people to change their lives while breaking cycles of offending. But lasting safety requires preventing harms caused by guns and investing in the kind of infrastructure, services, and opportunities that build thriving communities. Harris has led with these kinds of strategies throughout her career and implemented them in ways tailored to the needs and challenges of her constituencies.
A biography of Kamala Harris
Kamala Harris served as a prosecutor and in law enforcement for nearly 30 years, first in San Francisco and then later as California’s attorney general. She focused her resources on serious crime, including sex trafficking, drug cartels, and gun violence, all while ensuring that victims received the necessary support to rebuild and that young people were offered opportunities to grow and succeed. As a senator, Harris continued this work, sponsoring legislation that, if passed, would have improved the criminal legal system by removing barriers for people with criminal convictions to thrive upon reentry, creating more effective and accountable policing, and legalizing marijuana. Throughout her career, including in her role as vice president, Harris has led by addressing and preventing gun violence, including by limiting access to guns for people who would cause harm, sponsoring legislation to ban assault weapons, increasing oversight of federally licensed gun dealers, and supporting collaboration between law enforcement and communities to reduce gun violence and solve crimes.
Harris’ commitment to improving safety through better accountability and prevention
Kamala Harris has improved safety for communities throughout her career by holding people who commit serious crimes accountable, all while recognizing that the most important factor in creating safety is preventing crime to begin with. Harris has championed solutions that have proven effective according to research and best practices and has championed strategies that focus on the needs of the people and communities most harmed by crime.
The Biden-Harris administration has overseen a significant decline in crime, including a historic drop in homicide
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