Vice President Harris’ history of supporting a bail fund for Black Lives Matter protesters who have been convicted is a key issue for law enforcement as she tries to present herself as a candidate who upholds law and order.
“Let’s be clear about something: If Kamala Harris becomes the next president of the United States, she will be an unmitigated disaster for public safety in this country,” Joe Gamaldi, the national vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police and an active Houston Police Department lieutenant, told Fox News in an interview.
“She has loudly and proudly supported bail reform and has even donated and encouraged other people to donate to a fund that helped get murderers, rapists, people who were shooting people in the streets, out on bail,” he told the outlet. “We’re not talking about helping bail out the mom who stole a candy bar from the store to help feed her kids; we’re talking about violent criminals.”
The Houston cop went on to say that left-wing ‘bail reform’ hasn’t been successful in “any urban community” where it’s been introduced.
“It is what has led to 16 American cities experiencing the highest murder rate in recorded history back in 2020-2021,” he said. “And we’re still living with the fallout of that.
“Over the last three years in the United States, we’ve averaged over 20,000 homicides a year, and we haven’t seen those numbers since the mid-1990s,” Gamaldi told Fox News. “And now we’re going to have Vice President Harris, who is the presumptive nominee at this point, is going to run on a platform of supporting bail reform after seeing the horrific consequences we’ve seen in our urban communities.”
Charles “Cully” Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former prosecutor, told the outlet that the VP employs the “exact same language” as Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib, and Sen. Bernie Sanders when they called for the defunding of police following George Floyd’s death during his arrest by Minneapolis police in 2020.
“I know the language of the right and the left,” he said. “And this is exhibit A in a dog whistle to the left.
“So, the reason that the media is now fawning all over her and trying to protect her and calling her the cop candidate is because they’re engaged in projection,” he said. “She’s anti-cop.”
Stimson added when politicians and prosecutors advocate for “reimagining” the criminal justice system, they are essentially “pro-criminal.
“‘Reimagine’ means pro-criminal; that’s all it means,” he said. “The George Gascons, the Larry Krasner, the Alvin Bragg, the Kim Foxxs have enacted their policies [as district attorneys]. They refuse to prosecute all misdemeanors. They watered down felonies to misdemeanors. They don’t send violent juveniles to adult court. And the list goes on and on and on.”
Stimson went on to note Harris’ support for the $150 million defunding of the Los Angeles police department in 2020 under the leadership of then-Mayor Eric Garcetti.
Joseph Imperatrice, an NYPD detective and founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC, told the outlet that the country needs a president who will “put the bad guys behind bars.”
“America needs a leader that’s going to keep bad guys behind bars, and unfortunately, Kamala Harris hasn’t done that,” he said. “It was proven during the riots by intentionally bailing out the bad guys.”
“This isn’t a Democrat or Republican issue, this is a humanitarian issue,” Imperatrice added. “This is an accountability issue.”
After she served more than a dozen years as San Francisco’s district attorney and subsequently as California’s attorney general, Imperatrice suggested that Harris’ record was characterized by a blend of lenient crime policies and progressive discrimination.
“But unfortunately, we’ve seen over the last couple of years pandering to the left, pandering to activists,” he said.
“She has turned the corner,” he told Fox. “She’s not the prosecutor that we once knew, and now she’s allowing bad guys to not only stay out of jail, but she’s helping them to get out of jail, which is causing a big problem.”
