Kamala Harris Dropped A Lot of Prosecutions As San Francisco District Attorney

As Kamala Harris begins her campaign for president, she has touted her prior work as a prosecutor that went after “fraudsters” and “predators” during her time as district attorney for San Francisco from 2004 to 2011 and then as California’s attorney general from 2011 to 2017. Informally, she is sometimes referred to as ‘Kamala the Cop’ for her focus on prosecuting petty marijuana possession crimes.

But Harris’s time as S.F. district attorney also involved a large number of cases left unprosecuted. In 2005 and 2006, the D.A.’s office suddenly did not prosecute 5,164 cases according to San Francisco police incident data.

There is some discretion to which cases the district attorney prosecutes because of the quality of evidence, availability of witnesses, or other various details of the case. And the incident data shows that around 645 cases were not prosecuted the year before Harris took office. Separately, around 700 to 800 cases a year are additionally refused—actively not prosecuted—by the prosecutor’s office.

But the thousands of cases left unprosecuted by Harris’s office stands out significantly from those trends. Since 2003 when the data starts, there’s never been cases dropped at that scale. And unprosecuted or refused cases have steadily declined since then, with only 21 cases unprosecuted and only one case refused in 2017.

While the cases unprosecuted in 2005 and 2006 come from a wide range of crimes, the vast majority—86 percent—were for fraud, theft, and counterfeiting.

Harris is also known for not prosecuting the bank OneWest—Steven Mnuchin’s California bank that was oft described as being run as a '“foreclosure machine”— during her tenure as California Attorney General through leaked documents provided to The Intercept.

Odd Homicide Trends During Her Tenure

Besides the dropped prosecutions, San Francisco saw a wave of homicide while Harris was at the helm.

In general, San Francisco was similar to many other major cities in that it saw a steady decline of crime since 1994, including that of murder according to data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Crime Data Explorer stats.

But beginning in 2001, before Harris took office, homicides in San Francisco started to increase dissimilar to other major cities, only to suddenly stop in 2009.

That year saw maybe one of the largest single year drops in homicide, suddenly going from 98 to 45. A story from the San Francisco Gate described the drop and historic low as “inexplicable.” The police chief at the time, George Gascón, attributed it to successful gang enforcement, while a local resident disputed that detail.

Targeted police enforcement, she believes, “has absolutely nada” to do with the decline. Officers are no more visible now in the Bayview than they ever were, she insists.

A report from the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice would show a similar trend for almost all categories of arrests. Violent, property, and drug crimes would all see a surge through 2009 only to suddenly drop in 2010 with a caveat that there was a “glitch” in the SFPD data system that accounted for arrests being underreported in 2010.

The Suspect Benefits of Community Policing

A 2011 annual report from the San Francisco police department (SFPD) ascribes the decline to successes in crime-fighting strategies and community interaction.

A combination of unique crime-reducing strategies has been implemented in the past three years which contributed to this low trend. The Police Department continues to focus on building positive relationships with community and business members, which in turn, encourages cooperation from residents who now take ownership of their neighborhoods.

While the effect of police-community relationships are hard to quantify, the numbers don’t show the SFPD being particularly effective in solving murders. The year prior to that drop—2008—saw one of the lowest clearance rates for homicide. What had been around 40 to 50 percent of cases cleared for prosecution per year fell below 20 percent.

The idea that community policing drove the change is also suspect as the SFPD published a report in December of 2008 touting the potential benefits of community policing. It would seem unlikely that the police department implemented community policing programs and then immediately saw one of the largest drops in homicide all in the span of one year.