Kamala Harris' Personal Attacks Can't Mask Her Record

by: sfbrentb

Tue Apr 13, 2010 at 11:07:51 AM PDT

More than six weeks after the Department of Justice released disturbing statistics about the increase in San Francisco's crime rates during SF DA Kamala Harris' tenure as District Attorney, Harris continues to run scared from her record. With Friday's release of a video comprised of TV news footage showing local outrage at Harris' revolving door system of justice, her failure to pursue the death penalty against a hardened cop-killer, and her dropping of prosecutions related to the San Francisco crime lab scandal, Harris still has provided no answers to the people of San Francisco or to California voters.

In the video, one police officer expresses his anger and disappointment about Kamala Harris' refusal to seek the death penalty against a convicted cop killer:

"The people of San Francisco should be outraged by this. These...criminals know in San Francisco if you want to commit a crime, you come here, you do it, you plead it down. The next thing you know you do three months when you should be doing 12 years in state prison for it."

Those aren't the Kelly campaign's words. They are the words of a San Francisco police officer on the evening news.

Instead of responding to these damaging news reports, Harris' campaign has again resorted to personally attacking Attorney General candidate Chris Kelly and manipulating statistics to hide her abysmal record on crime.

Harris fails to acknowledge that the video itself is a compilation of actual news reports from Bay Area television stations, including responses from law enforcement and regular citizens about the rising crime rates in San Francisco. And their effect is devastating.

Watch this short web video of recent news media reports about Kamala Harris' job performance as District Attorney.

Harris can't dispute and in fact hasn't disputed the numbers from the DOJ, which show that violent crime and homicides have indisputably and tragically increased in San Francisco during her tenure, while crime fell statewide.

Instead she relies on faulty data comparisons to try and paint her record as something other than what it is. In March, when they were first confronted with these statistics, the Harris campaign tried to obfuscate the truth by quoting statistics from a six month period in 2009 and compared them to statistics from 6 months in 2008. The problem is that Kamala Harris hasn't been D.A. for 6 months. She's been D.A. for 6 years.

This time the campaign is choosing to compare San Francisco's crime rates to individual cities, ignoring the methodology of the California Department of Justice, the very department she says she wants to lead as Attorney General, in order to make her numbers look better. This is a distortion of the facts, plain and simple.

Here is what the DOJ statistics show. In the period of time that Kamala Harris has been District Attorney in San Francisco:

• The homicide rate in San Francisco County in 2003 was 8.8 per 100,000 population. The homicide rate in San Francisco County in 2008 was 11.6 per 100,000. That's a 32% increase.
• The violent crime rate in San Francisco County in 2003 was 732.5 per 100,000 population. The violent crime rate in San Francisco County in 2008 was 808.0 per 100,000. That's a 10% increase.
• The robbery rate in San Francisco County in 2003 was 392.3 per 100,000 population. The robbery rate in San Francisco County in 2008 was 493.7 per 100,000. That's a 26% increase.

Watch the video. Look at the DOJ stats. Those are the facts.

Another fact. Kamala Harris' track record proves that she is simply not up to the job.

-- Brent Blackaby
Kelly for Attorney General