Opinion
All of her protestations to the contrary, Vice President and Democrat presidential candidate Kamala Harris has shown, time and again, that she does not believe in the Second Amendment and will do what she can to restrict the gun rights of law-abiding citizens. Quite apart from her extremist anti-gun agenda, Harris has embraced a variety of other policies that will make Americans less safe.
Campaigning against Joe Biden in 2020, Harris promised, as president, to “fundamentally transform how we approach public safety” by “drastically limiting the number of people we expose to our criminal justice system.” At the time, she called herself a progressive prosecutor and her criminal justice platform included eliminating federal mandatory minimum sentences for criminal defendants and incentivizing the states to do the same, scrapping cash bail, and decriminalizing illegal border crossings by “undocumented” aliens. Harris’s “defund the police” position included an explicit call for “demilitarizing” police departments, reducing budgets, and “forcing change.” “It is outdated and is actually wrong and backward,” she said, “to think that more police officers will create more safety.”
As CNN later pointed out, once Harris was selected as Biden’s running mate she did a complete about-face, with the Biden campaign asserting that Harris opposed defunding the police and had always supported increasing police funding. “‘Joe Biden and Kamala Harris do not support defunding the police, and it is a lie to suggest otherwise,’ Sabrina Singh, Harris’ then-press secretary said in October 2020. ‘Throughout her career, Sen. Harris has supported increasing funding to police departments …’”
Now that Harris is in the running again, she has likewise strategically repositioned herself as something of law and order candidate, with no reference to her 15-page plan of 2020 to “Transform the Criminal Justice System and Re-Envision Public Safety in America.”
Apart from more gun control, the details of Harris’s current policies on public safety are much less clear, although she still supports ending cash bail.
Recent information out of Chicago indicates that such reforms are associated with an increased likelihood of felony recidivism for persons on pretrial release after a recent arrest.
Illinois made news last year when it enacted legislation that made it the first state in the nation to abolish cash bail. As part of dismantling and rebuilding the legal framework on the pretrial release of criminal defendants, the law eliminated cash bail, established a default presumption that all defendants were eligible for pretrial release, and limited the crimes for which a court could order a defendant detained pending trial.
A year after the law went into effect, one researcher says “[w]e can’t say whether it’s had an impact on crime.” While crime did not appear to increase in 2024 as compared to 2023, he cautioned that the findings were too preliminary, given that many of the most serious criminal cases filed in 2023 were still pending a court resolution.
CWB Chicago, a local crime reporting site, has done its own “deep dive” into Cook County records to evaluate how the new law affects crimes by Chicago’s pretrial detainees. It looked at the percentage of new felony crimes attributable, allegedly, to persons on pretrial release, and discovered that almost a fifth of felony charges involved such individuals.
After reviewing court files on felonies (excluding domestic cases) committed in Chicago, CWB Chicago found that 18.1% of new felony cases were filed against people who were already on misdemeanor or felony pretrial release (and two-thirds of the new charges involved persons on pretrial release for a felony). During the same period in the 2023 “cash bail” era, court documents “showed that only 8.5% of defendants facing new felony charges were noted as being in violation of bail bond.” The new number – nearly 20% of people arrested and charged with felonies in Chicago being on pretrial release for another pending criminal case – “appears to be substantially higher than during a comparable period …when Illinois still operated on a cash bail system.”
The folks at CWB Chicago have another metric regarding bail reform, pretrial release and crime. In 2019, after “Cook County Chief Judge Timothy Evans publicly stated, ‘We haven’t had any horrible incidents occur’” under that court’s affordable bail reform initiative, CWB Chicago began documenting instances of individuals, while out on felony pretrial release, being accused of killing, shooting, or trying to kill or shoot others. So far this year there have been at least 25 such cases, with the latest concerning an individual charged with first degree murder for allegedly shooting a man.
The 25 horrible cases this year represent 40 victims, eight of whom died. (Since 2020, the total number of alleged crime victims of people awaiting trial for a felony in Chicago is at least 388, of whom 130 died.) Significantly, as the website explains, these figures are a considerable underrepresentation. “The actual number of murders and shootings committed by people awaiting trial for felony allegations is undoubtedly much higher than the numbers seen here. Since 2017, CPD has brought charges in less than 5% of non-fatal shootings and 33% of murders, according to the city’s data.”
It is likely too soon to assess the effect of the new Illinois law across the state, but there is reason to believe, as Donald Trump’s campaign states, that the elimination of cash bail is part of the “turnstile justice” approach that drives up crime rates, representing “a catastrophe for public safety [that] puts more violent criminals back on the streets to cause further mayhem.”
Kamala Harris’s breakdown of campaign issues and policies this time around avoids anything like her explicit soft-on-crime plan of 2020. What is apparent is that her 2024 version of “re-envisioning” of public safety in America is just a different reformulation of prioritizing criminals (“justice impacted individuals”) over victims, by proposing the most radical anti-gun administration in American history.
About NRA-ILA:
Established in 1975, the Institute for Legislative Action (ILA) is the “lobbying” arm of the National Rifle Association of America. ILA is responsible for preserving the right of all law-abiding individuals in the legislative, political, and legal arenas, to purchase, possess, and use firearms for legitimate purposes as guaranteed by the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Visit: www.nra.org
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