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Shortly after U.S. Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden named Sen. (and former California Attorney General) Kamala Harris as his running mate in August 2020, social media users began circulating a meme purportedly showing two contradictory statements Harris had made about the value of having more police on the streets, along with commentary painting Harris as a lying hypocrite: In a strictly literal sense, the meme correctly attributes to Harris two contrasting statements she made 11 years apart, as The New York Times noted in an August 2020 article about Harris' viewpoint on police misconduct: Whether those contrasting statements document Harris to be a liar or a hypocrite is a thornier question, however. Altering one's viewpoint about an issue over the course of many years is not necessarily hypocritical, especially if such evolution is based on additional knowledge and experience and/or shifting conditions -- it's only hypocritical if a given viewpoint is an insincere one, expressed for purposes of political expediency rather than genuine belief. In 2009, Harris was district attorney of San Francisco, but by 2020, she had served a six-year tenure as California's attorney general and was well into her fourth year as a U.S. senator. Certainly occurrences that took place, and the experience she accumulated, during that 11-year span might have prompted a change in her thinking. As well, it's important to note the context in which Harris made those statements. The first was taken from her 2009 book Smart on Crime, in a chapter that was specifically about the evolution of methods for fighting crime. The chapter was titled Myth: The tools of crime fighting never change and opened with the statement that the secret of successfully reducing crime is that there is no one secret to successfully reducing crime, so Harris was arguing against a status quo approach and emphasizing the need for measuring how effectively police were actually making communities safer (rather than merely creating the appearance of safety): Her second statement came in the midst of nationwide protests spurred by the police custody death of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May 2020, when long-simmering issues of police violence and the treatment of Blacks by police came to a boil -- all while the U.S. was grappling with a nationwide shutdown due to the COVID-19 coronavirus disease pandemic. At that point, many Americans decidedly did not hold to the notion that the increased presence of police made them safer (or made them feel safer) and gave rise to defund the police movements. It was in that context that Harris responded to a question about police by asserting that status quo thinking was wrong and that we have to reimagine what public safety looks like: In the period between those statements, The New York Times observed, Harris has struggled to reconcile her calls for reform with her record as a prosecutor -- enduring criticism for not intervening in cases of controversial police shootings and for yielding to the status quo rather than pursuing bold reform, while her approach was subtly shifting nonetheless: So yes, across an 11-year span, Harris did offer the contrasting statements about police displayed above. Whether they're evidence of hypocrisy on her part or of an authentic shift in her thinking and viewpoint is a subjective issue.
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