Indifference And Ambition Behind Kamala Harris Policies That Increase Violence And Trap Children On Street
Author discovers two-year-old migrant child in Los Angeles living amidst crime and psychosis caused by bad migration and homeless policies
Vice President Kamala Harris is the tough prosecutor and compassionate candidate America needs right now, she and her supporters say. “As a prosecutor, I specialized in cases involving sexual abuse," Harris said. “Well, Trump was found liable for committing sexual abuse." The Vice President launched her formal campaign for the presidency by pointing to her work as California’s Attorney General and San Francisco’s District Attorney. “In those roles, 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," she said. "So hear me when I say I know Donald Trump's type.”
But Harris is poised to win the Democratic Party’s nomination through undemocratic means, was President Joe Biden’s border czar when border crossings rose five-fold, and was unable to prevent crime and homelessness from skyrocketing in San Francisco and California. From 2014 to 2023, violent crime in California rose more than 26%, according to the Public Policy Institute of California, a liberal think tank. Today, the state’s violent crime rate is 31% higher than in the rest of the United States. One out of four San Franciscans say they were a victim of crime last year, 42% of them victimized more than once, and only half bothered to report it. California, with 12% of America’s population, has one-third of America’s homeless. That number rose 50% over the last ten years, from 113,000 in 2014 to 181,399 in 2023.
It’s true that crime and homelessness are complex problems requiring difficult trade-offs and caused by drivers that are not entirely under the control of Vice President Harris or any other political leader. California has expensive housing, weather that allows the homeless to sleep outside year-round, and a culture that welcomes outsiders. California spends significantly more to help the homeless than other states. And San Francisco has a liberal culture that has long tolerated open-air drug use.
All of those factors and trends were in place before Harris became California’s Attorney General in 2011, United States Senator in 2017, and Vice President in 2021. And, by nature of his position, California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, deserves a significant amount of the blame for the state’s crime and homelessness crisis.
But Harris is closely allied with Newsom and may be the second most powerful politician in America. She has had significant and growing political power since when she became District Attorney of San Francisco in 2004 to her selection by President Joe Biden as Vice President last week. And Harris wasn’t just any politician, she was the top law enforcement officer in San Francisco and California, respectively, from 2004 to 2017, the exact period when crime and homelessness sharply worsened in California.
And, now, there are migrant children living in dangerous conditions on Skid Row, Los Angeles, near downtown, as a direct result of Harris’ policies on migration, crime, and homelessness. I discovered the children and interviewed their parents last Friday, July 19, 2024. They are from Venezuela and live on a sidewalk. The mother described women fighting with knives outside their tent and being in a store when a man pulled a gun on the store owner and demanded a cigarette. All around the tent under which they live, there are people in various states of psychosis, some violent.
One of the children is two years old. The mother said he is autistic and had heart surgery; the scar is visible on the boy’s chest. The father told me he came here for work, after which the mother corrected him and said he came for refuge. A source told us the man had abused the mother of the boy in a local shelter, and he was asked to transfer to a different shelter. Instead, he camped on the street. A few days later, the mother joined the man with her child. The mother offered a similar account but said he was threatened with violence in the shelter and that the child had cried and asked to be near his father.
