The News
New York City Mayor Eric Adams is cheering Kamala Harris for touting her law enforcement background despite progressives’ past resistance to tough-on-crime messaging.
“The Democratic Party has a tendency to run away from public safety, but it is a very attractive criterion and is a very attractive part of your resume,” Adams, whose own successful 2021 run played deftly on his life as a crime-fighter with deep ties to Black New Yorkers, told Semafor. “I think that she’s really using that as front and center, and that’s really, really impressive.”
Harris built her career in California as a “smart on crime” prosecutor who sometimes positioned herself to the right of other Democrats on issues of law enforcement. But during her 2020 presidential bid, and amid nationwide protests against police brutality, Harris downplayed that reputation and took positions intended to win her friends on the left, praising demonstrations aimed at “defunding” the police, or at least shifting funding toward other services.
“This whole movement is about rightly saying we need to take a look at these budgets and figure out whether it reflects the right priorities,” she said on a New York radio show.
Adams thinks that was a mistake.
“She did run away,“ he said. “I don’t think she should have moved away from it. I think that now you see, she’s leaning into it.”
Harris and Adams are both Black former law enforcement officers: The vice president was district attorney of Alameda County in California and of San Francisco before serving as the state’s attorney general and senator. Adams is a retired police officer with more than two decades of service before his mayoralty.
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Kadia’s view
Despite Adams’ depiction of her top-cop posture as focused on public safety, Harris’ prosecutorial rhetoric is more directed at Donald Trump these days.
“I took on perpetrators of all kinds – predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she told staff soon after taking the reins of what was President Joe Biden’s reelection campaign.
Lately, she’s also homed in on her efforts to target banks during the wave of foreclosures that hit homeowners more than a decade ago. But we have yet to see her talk about public safety in the same terms as Adams, who last year broke so sharply with Biden that he got dropped from the president’s 2024 advisory board, as Axios reported at the time.
So it’s most helpful to view Adams’ plaudits for Harris in the context of the past chasm between him and Biden, which focused on the president’s handling of migration across the southern border that left New York and other cities severely overtaxed.
Room for Disagreement
Harris recently released an ad that cites her prosecutorial experience in plugging her support for Biden’s bipartisan Senate border deal – a proposal that Trump encouraged the GOP to kill. That suggests her law enforcement background might play an even bigger role in her pitch going forward, as Adams suggested.
And while Adams campaigned on vows to curb crime, he’s familiar with the political balance between public safety and equitable policing that Harris tried to strike in 2020. Back in the mid-1990s, as a police officer, he helped found a group called 100 Blacks in Law Enforcement Who Care that focused on addressing tensions between Black New Yorkers and law enforcement over alleged misconduct.
But Harris might not want to take too many political cues from the New York City mayor given his own political struggles. Adams’ approval rating sank to 28 percent in a poll released in December, and in April the Manhattan Institute found just 16 percent of likely voters in the city would support his reelection.
Notable
- Axios has more on Harris’ border ad that cites her past as a prosecutor.
- The Boston Globe dug more deeply into Harris’ role as she and other state attorneys general conducted high-profile settlement talks with banks back in 2011.