Kamala Harris "desastre sin paliativos" para la seguridad pública: Joe Gamaldi
Vice President of the Fraternal Order of Police Joe Gamaldi discussed with Fox News Digital Kamala Harris' record with law enforcement.
Vice President Harris' record of backing a bail fund for Black Lives Matter convicted protesters is at the forefront of law enforcement minds as she attempts to paint herself as a law-and-order candidate.
"Let's be clear about something: If Kamala Harris becomes the next president of the United States, she will be an unmitigated disaster for public safety in this country," Joe Gamaldi, the national vice president of the Fraternal Order of Police and an active Houston Police Department lieutenant, told Fox News Digital.
"She has loudly and proudly supported bail reform and has even donated and encouraged other people to donate to a fund that helped get murderers, rapists, people who were shooting people in the streets, out on bail," he said. "We're not talking about helping bail out the mom who stole a candy bar from the store to help feed her kids; we're talking about violent criminals."
Vice President Harris (Reuters/Evelyn Hockstein)
Gamaldi said bail reform has not worked in "any urban community."
"It is what has led to 16 American cities experiencing the highest murder rate in recorded history back in 2020-2021," he said. "And we're still living with the fallout of that.
"Over the last three years in the United States, we've averaged over 20,000 homicides a year, and we haven't seen those numbers since the mid 1990s," he said. "And now we're going to have Vice President Harris, who is the presumptive nominee at this point, is going to run on a platform of supporting bail reform after seeing the horrific consequences we've seen in our urban communities."
Joseph Imperatrice, an NYPD detective and founder of Blue Lives Matter NYC, told Fox News Digital that America needs a president who will "put the bad guys behind bars."
"America needs a leader that's going to keep bad guys behind bars, and unfortunately, Kamala Harris hasn't done that," he said. "It was proven during the riots by intentionally bailing out the bad guys."
"This isn't a Democrat or Republican issue, this is a humanitarian issue," Imperatrice said. "This is an accountability issue."
Vice President Harris disembarks Air Force Two as she arrives to campaign in Milwaukee on July 23, 2024. (Reuters/Kevin Mohatt/Pool)
After more than a dozen years as San Francisco's district attorney and then as California's attorney general, Imperatrice indicated that Harris' track record included a mix of soft-on-crime policies and progressive discrimination.
"But unfortunately, we've seen over the last couple of years pandering to the left, pandering to activists," he said.
"She has turned the corner," he said. "She's not the prosecutor that we once knew, and now she's allowing bad guys to not only stay out of jail, but she's helping them to get out of jail, which is causing a big problem."
Charles "Cully" Stimson, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation and a former prosecutor, told Fox News Digital that Harris uses the "exact same language" as Rep. Ilhan Omar, Rep. Rashida Tlaib and Sen. Bernie Sanders when they previously called for the defunding of police in the wake of George Floyd's death while being detained by Minneapolis police in 2020.
"I know the language of the right and the left," he said. "And this is exhibit A in a dog whistle to the left.
"So, the reason that the media is now fawning all over her and trying to protect her and calling her the cop candidate is because they're engaged in projection," he said. "She's anti-cop."
Stimson said that when politicians and prosecutors say that they want to "reimagine" the criminal justice system, they are "pro-criminal."
"'Reimagine' means pro criminal, that's all it means," he said. "The George Gascons, the Larry Krasner, the Alvin Bragg, the Kim Foxxs have enacted their policies [as district attorneys]. They refuse to prosecute all misdemeanors. They watered down felonies to misdemeanors. They don't send violent juveniles to adult court. And the list goes on and on and on."
Vice President Harris' record as a prosecutor is being questioned by members of law enforcement. (AP Photo/Morry Gash)
Stimson pointed to Harris' applause of Los Angeles' defunding of the police department by $150 million in 2020 under the leadership of then-Mayor Eric Garcetti.
"When she applauds – those are her words, not mine – Garcetti and other police departments, taking $150 million from the LAPD, a huge chunk of money and sprinkling it, that is defending," he said. "So, we have to apply common sense and logic to this. Taking $150 million away from it, and you're defunding it."
A bail fund promoted by Kamala Harris in 2020 that freed violent criminals is back in the spotlight after President Biden dropped out of the 2024 race. (Fox News)
Harris, a prominent opponent of the cash bail system during her previous presidential campaign, promoted the Minnesota Freedom Fund in June 2020 to help bail Black Lives Matter rioters out of jail, but only a fraction of the more than $41 million actually went to freeing rioters.
Minneapolis station FOX 9 reported that the fund spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to free an alleged knife murderer and a convicted rapist who was facing charges of sexual assault and kidnapping, among others.
Another criminal, George Howard, 48, also reaped the benefits of the fund. He was allegedly involved in a road rage altercation on an Interstate 94 entrance ramp before he shot another driver, according to Minneapolis police, weeks after bailing out on domestic assault charges.
Vice President Harris boards Air Force Two as she leaves Joint Base Andrews, Md., on July 23, 2024. (Reuters/Kevin Mohatt/Pool)
El Fondo para la Libertad de Minnesota admitió su papel en la vuelta de Howard a la calle.
"Estamos al corriente de los informes sobre el trágico y mortal tiroteo en Minneapolis a principios de esta semana, en el que supuestamente estaba implicado George Howard, una persona a la que el Fondo para la Libertad de Minnesota había prestado anteriormente ayuda para la libertad bajo fianza", escribió entonces el grupo en las redes sociales. "El MFF cree que toda persona detenida por las fuerzas de seguridad es inocente hasta que se demuestre su culpabilidad, y si un juez considera que reúne los requisitos para la libertad bajo fianza, no debería tener que esperar en la cárcel simplemente porque no tiene los mismos ingresos o el mismo acceso a los recursos que los demás."
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Harris, who is now the presumptive Democrat presidential nominee, is working on picking a vice president, with her most likely selection being a handful of Democrat governors from the Midwest.
Fox News Digital se ha puesto en contacto con la campaña de Harris para obtener comentarios.
