Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris likened law enforcement in America to lynching and Jim Crow restrictions during the height of racial unrest in mid-2020.
“When we say that America has a history of systemic racism, we mean that from slavery, Jim Crow laws, lynchings, and policing, our institutions have done violence to black Americans,” Harris, then a senator from California, said during a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on “Police Use of Force and Community Relations” in June of that year, weeks after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin.
“And it has caused black Americans to be treated as less than human across time, place, and institution,” Harris, now 59, added before calling for the elimination of “systemic racism.”
In her 2020 remarks, Harris invoked the deaths of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery — whom she described as being “lynched while going for a run” — and Breonna Taylor, who was killed in March 2020 during a so-called no-knock warrant in her Louisville, Ky. home.
“There is a movement being led by people who might appear from the outside to have little in common, who are marching together to demand an end to the black blood that is staining the sidewalks of our country,” she said. “It gives me hope.”
Harris then added that America “must reimagine what public safety looks like” while arguing that more policing wasn’t the answer.
“The status quo thinking that more police creates more safety is wrong. It’s wrong. And it has motivated too much of municipal budgets and the thinking of policymakers,” she argued.
“[It] has distracted them from what would truly be the smartest use of resources to achieve safety in communities, which is to invest in the health of those communities. And healthy communities without any doubt are safe communities.”
She dinged “our mayors and local leaders” for dedicating “so much money” to “militarize the police” as “two-thirds of public school teachers in America today are coming out of their own back pockets to help pay for school supplies.”
The future vice president also complained that racial disparities are “deeply rooted in our education system, and our housing system, in our workforces, and health care delivery system, and more.”
Harris pitched several proposals to remedy the crisis, including a national use-of-force standard, independent investigations into alleged police misconduct, municipalities reporting police use-of-force incidents to the federal government, and expanding pattern and practice investigations into police departments
Two days after the hearing, Harris reiterated her comments about the nation’s history of systemic racism on social media, striking her earlier reference to “policing.”
“When we say that America has a history of systemic racism, we mean that from slavery, Jim Crow, lynchings, and the criminal justice system, our institutions have done violence to Black Americans. And it has caused Black Americans to be treated as less than human,” she wrote on X.
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Article URL : https://nypost.com/2024/08/27/us-news/kamala-harris-once-equated-law-enforcement-with-lynching-jim-crow-laws/