California’s tough-on-crime past giving Kamala Harris trouble
LOS ANGELES » The Zodiac killer struck first. Then came the Manson family. Later, the Hillside Stranglers, the Night Stalker and the Golden State Killer terrorized California.
Starting in the late 1960s, one lurid murder after another fed public perceptions that crime in California was spiraling out of control. Gang shootings turned neighborhoods into combat zones. The crack epidemic ravaged communities.
Fear and outrage spawned a raft of harsh sentencing laws. California enacted one of its most punitive, “three strikes and you’re out,” after one parolee killed 18-year-old Kimber Reynolds of Fresno in 1992 and another kidnapped and killed 12-yearold Polly Klaas of Sonoma County a year later.
“We’re going to start turning career criminals into career inmates,” Republican Gov. Pete Wilson declared in 1994.
The laws strengthening criminal penalties drove a surge in the state’s prison population over 30 years, beginning in the 1970s. Under both Republicans and Democrats — including Kamala Harris, who became a prosecutor in 1990 — a tough-on-crime political culture flourished in California, and African Americans were hit hardest: Their incarceration rate remains more than five times their share of California’s population.
The crackdown on crime swept most of the country, but California stood out as one of the most aggressive states. Only recently has it begun shedding its lock’em-up mind-set.
In the 2020 presidential race, the disproportionate imprisonment of African American men has become a major issue, and it’s posing an especially big challenge for Harris, California’s first black U.S. senator. She is counting on strong support from African Americans. But many black voters are wary of her 27 years as a prosecutor enforcing laws that sent African Americans to prison.
Often left unsaid is that Harris, a former state attorney general and San Francisco district attorney, did not play a role in passing those laws.
Still, her home state’s high rate of incarcerating people of color goes a long way in explaining the trouble she has had selling her candidacy to black voters nationwide. In California and many other states, racial disparities in imprisonment have intensified resentments of what many see as deeply ingrained discrimination in America’s criminal justice system.
“Communities of color, they have a hard time trusting you when you are connected with law enforcement,” said Yvette McDowell, a black attorney and former Pasadena prosecutor who is undecided in the Democratic presidential race.
Citing generations of racial bias in the justice system, banks and other institutions, she said, “History has taught us a lot about distrusting people who don’t have our best interests at heart.”
Tensions between law enforcement and California’s black communities run deep. The 1965 Watts riots stemmed largely from anger over police brutality. The Black Panther Party, formed the following year, set up patrols to monitor police harassment in Oakland. The L.A. riots of 1992 were touched off by the acquittal of four white police officers in the beating of Rodney King, an African American.
The friction with law enforcement has had a broad cultural impact. In the 1980s and 1990s, black outrage at police misconduct was a frequent theme in the music of Tupac Shakur, N.W.A. and other West Coast rap performers. Ice Cube, the former N.W.A member who wrote the lyrics to “F--- the Police,” told the Los Angeles Times in 1989 that cops “see you in a car” and “assume you are a dope dealer.”
The United States now has the world’s highest incarceration rate, with 2.3 million people in jail or prison.
“You have this multi-generational impact of the absence of 2 million people, and the people who come home — not rehabilitated, just punished — can’t get housing and jobs,” said Karim Webb, an L.A. restaurant owner active in promoting young entrepreneurs affected by racial bias in the justice system.
“It has led to a miserable set of circumstances for people to have to try to overcome with very, very limited tools or resources.”
Many of the crimes that set in motion California’s prison boom were ghastly. The theatrically named serial killers left scores of victims and a trail of mayhem that both captivated and terrified the state.