A campaign ad for Vice President Kamala Harris paints her as a tough-on-crime candidate by touting her record as a prosecutor — a claim easily torn apart by simply looking at the data.
“Trump just talks tough. Kamala Harris is tough,” says the ad’s voiceover as claims of violent crime decreasing and drug cartels being “shut down” under Harris’s watch flash across the screen:
NEW: The Kamala Harris campaign is up on TV with this response spot on crime/border security —
Male voiceover:
“Trump just talks tough. Kamala Harris is tough” pic.twitter.com/9k3HBNyIuF
— Medium Buying (@MediumBuying) August 23, 2024
Former President Donald Trump’s War Room X account quickly debunked the ad by pointing out several of Harris’s law and order failures:
Kamala is DESPERATE!
— Violent crime isn’t “down,” it’s up almost 25% across 66 major U.S. cities while Kamala has presided over three of the four most murderous years in the last 25 years.
— Under Kamala, illegals she let into the country are brutally raping and murdering our… https://t.co/2ML9S5Paw2
— Trump War Room (@TrumpWarRoom) August 23, 2024
Despite President Joe Biden’s claim that “Americans are safer today than when Vice President Harris and I took office” — citing preliminary data from the Major Cities Chiefs Association (MCCA) — a different independent analysis finds that violent crime is actually up in 66 major U.S. cities.
According to the Coalition for Law, Order, and Safety (CLOS), there has been a 9.6 percent increase in total violent crime from January-June 2019 to January-June 2024.
Aggravated assault is up nearly 25 percent, and murder is up 6.4 percent, the coalition reveals.
Executive Director Sean Kennedy says his organization’s data are more accurate due to inaccurate statistics that law enforcement agencies submit to the MCCA.
“The problem is in this game of telephone, the agencies don’t always submit correct data or possibly the MCCA creates a typo, or gets the data mangled,” Kennedy told Fox News. “So, that becomes a problem where you see data not matching what the law enforcement agency publicly reports.”
As for Harris’s January 2004-January 2011 tenure as San Francisco, California’s district attorney, the murder rate skyrocketed.
A Macrotrends chart created with FBI crime data shows that the rate leaped from 8.94 murders per 100,000 people to 12.81 after Harris’s first year in office.
The murder rate peaked in the city under her watch, at a stunning 13.36 murders per 100,000 people in 2007.
Throughout Harris’s entire time as district attorney, the homicide data show that San Francisco remained above the statewide and nationwide average.
Some of her notable prosecutorial controversies include her refusal to pursue the death penalty against “admitted gang member” David Hill, who was convicted of murdering San Francisco police officer Isaac Espinoza, Axios reported.
No police union endorsed Harris for a decade after that, the outlet noted.
Harris also declined to pursue the death penalty for Edwin Ramos, an El Salvador-born illegal immigrant and member of MS-13 who shot and killed a father and his two sons.
While she was California’s attorney general, her office admitted that violent crimes also sharply increased by ten percent between 2014 and 2015.
“As DA, Kamala was known for being soft on crime, while San Francisco had the highest murder rate in a decade as Kamala became the ‘model’ for Soros-backed prosecutors across the country,” the Trump War Room stated.
Harris also did not “shut down” cartels, it said.
Instead, it said that Latin American gangs have “ravaged our communities with deadly drugs flowing across the border in unprecedented numbers” in her three-and-a-half years as vice president.
“The Sinaloa cartel has made record profit under Kamala,” the Trump team added.
While it is impossible to know exactly how much the Mexico-based drug trafficking and money laundering organization profits off of its criminal deeds, prosecutors in the Southern District of New York said in April 2023 that 28 Sinaloa-affiliated defendants “reaped hundreds of millions of dollars in profits by flooding the United States with fentanyl.”
In June 2024, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) announced more charges against Los Angeles-based associates of the Sinaloa cartel for laundering more than $50 million in drug proceeds with the help of Chinese organized crime groups.
The fentanyl that Sinaloa and other gangs have trafficked into the U.S. has devastated communities across the country, with a Florida sheriff’s office recently seizing enough of the deadly drug from a trafficking ring to kill three million people.
The Trump War Room also blasted the so-called “bipartisan” border bill as a “fake” piece of legislation that “would’ve put millions of illegals on the fast-track to citizenship.”
Critics of H.R. 815 pointed out that the resolution actually codified loopholes for illegal migrants:
.@SenatorLankford @SenMikeRounds So much for liars, internet rumors, and Russian propaganda. Everything we reported would be in the bill three weeks ago, is in the bill.
We’ll be awaiting your apologies.. pic.twitter.com/7d6n3twFAE
— Immigration Accountability Project (@I_A_Project) February 5, 2024