Is the ‘Copmala Curse’ back?

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Vice President Kamala Harris never donned a police uniform, was issued a gun or badge, or had an assignment to walk the beat. Yet her reputation as “Copmala”—stemming from serving as California’s attorney general and San Francisco’s district attorney—persists, an ideology the newly minted presidential candidate is likely to confront in the months leading to the November election. 

Harris is undoubtedly former law enforcement as an ex-prosecutor, and her roles required working in tandem with police at every level. Online progressives attacked her record first, before fellow candidate Tulsi Gabbard followed suit on national television during a Democratic primary debate during the summer of 2019. They pointed to supporting prison time from marijuana convictions while holding post as California’s AG and accused her of sandbagging wrongful conviction challenges. 

After entering the race as a legitimate contender, she dropped out of the Democratic primary by the winter and ended up selected as running mate to the eventual presidential election winner Joe Biden. Harris now has a second chance at becoming commander-in-chief now that Biden has terminated his 2024 reelection campaign and endorsed Harris as the party candidate on July 21. 

Internet culture continues to factor into Harris’s presidential ambitions today. A repeatedly shared snippet from a White House swearing-in ceremony, in which she relays her mom’s words of wisdom that “you think you just fell out of a coconut tree,” might break the internet. The ditzy and anxious portrayal of her in numerous TikTok edits of the speech seems reductive of the first Black vice president to some scrollers, but others see a narrative that could humanize and endear Harris to younger voters. 

An unexplainable link between the vice president’s potential campaign and “Brat,” the recently released album by British pop act Charli XCX, seems inescapable: Simple black text on a lime-green background—fashioned after the album’s cover art ubiquitous among a certain sect of terminally online millennials and Gen Z’ers—spells out “Kamala HQ,” her official rapid response page on X (formerly known as Twitter). Even Mayor Eric Adams was reduced to fielding questions about Harris’s “Brat summer” during a routine media appearance this week. 

As Harris’s campaign trails become more serious, so do conversations about the vice president’s prosecutorial track record. Underneath the hilarious Photoshop images of Harris arresting Republican nominee Donald Trump, Copmala is a serious allegation linking the potential first Black woman president to the mass incarceration that is devastating Black and Brown Americans both historically and currently. 

“What’s interesting about this debate in 2019, and is interesting in these conversations today, is how much of a role does the president actually have when it comes to criminal justice politics in this country,” said Benjamin Levin, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis. “[It’s] one of the places where conversations may become more about symbolism than they become about actual policy and politics…but the reality is that the vast majority of people who are accused of crimes, who are currently in jail or prison, are there due to state and local decisions.”

Harris’s track record is a departure from the ideals of “progressive” prosecutors like Philadelphia’s Larry Krasner or Chicago’s Kim Foxx, according to Levin, but she wasn’t uniquely aggressive or tough on crime as a district attorney, either. Even with some bold reformist positions in the early 2000s, particularly on opposing the death penalty as San Francisco district attorney, Harris largely approached her prosecutorial offices conventionally. 

“We need to be really careful [about] the phrase [“progressive prosecutor” because] anybody who wants to get outside of the mold of mass incarceration is often labeled a progressive prosecutor,” said Laurie Levenson, a law professor at Loyola Marymount University. “I would say that for her time, she was progressive. Whether that would be progressive in comparison to other prosecutors is a big question. To her credit, she was more successful than most who have embraced the label progressive prosecutor.”

Levenson added that “some people…would say you’re never going to be progressive if you’re the head of a prosecutorial agency and you work with the police. They want to defund the police, so they wouldn’t see anything short of that as progressive. I think [Harris is] probably more middle of the road.”

Levenson, herself a former prosecutor, called the Copmala narrative overly simplistic and a disservice in reporting. After all, delegating accountability and credit in elected prosecutorial offices is tricky. District attorneys and state attorney generals are public-facing officials selected on a ballot, but under them are appointed prosecutors and investigators who show up in court, don’t answer to voters, and boast their own intents and agendas. 

Proponents point to convictions against white collar criminals and gender-based violence offenders while deflecting Copmala criticism toward line-level prosecutors below her. For example, the 1,500-plus prison sentences over marijuana charges for which she was criticized by Gabbard would not have been prosecuted directly by Harris as California attorney general. 

Critics, on the other hand, argue that she served in a managerial role over aggressive criminalization against Black and Brown Californians even if she didn’t directly prosecute those cases, so when her office allegedly knowingly failed to produce damaging information about a police drug lab technician, accountability trickled upward. 

Yet those perspectives are two sides of the same coin. Beyond sweeping reformist victories and miscarriages of justice is the constant cycle of people in and out of the criminal legal justice system that every prosecutor’s office encounters each day. 

Robert Saleem Holbrook, executive director of Pittsburgh’s Abolitionist Law Center, believes Harris’s track record warrants the Copmala nickname. He said that simply serving as a prosecutor means she participated as an arm of the carceral state.

Holbrook is a prison abolitionist, as his organization’s name suggests, and faced mass incarceration first-hand. However, he maintains a “purity test” is unproductive and said Harris’s prospective presidential campaign offers her a reset. 

“I can’t say that there’s anything in her electoral history that really gives me promise or hope [as an abolitionist],” Holbrook said. “I look for someone like her to recognize an opportunity. When she sees one and sees momentum, she has to come [to the campaign] with something different this election cycle…you can’t just offer us ‘Trump is a bad guy, fascism is coming, [and] he’s a racist.’ We’ve seen that. We’ve heard that before. That is, unfortunately, the story of America.”

Holbrook urged Harris to “Give us something different—that is what we’re looking for. That’s what we’re looking for [in] Kamala: a transformative candidate. If she’s going to be a status quo candidate…it’s not going to resolve any of the fundamental issues or flaws with American society.”

Woods Ervin, national co-director of the Angela Davis-founded abolitionist movement Critical Resistance, said their concerns about Harris remain similar to the ones they had about her predecessor.

“I think for an organization like Critical Resistance, our primary concern with Harris is the same that we had with Biden: that her commitment to policing and incarceration will increase funding and infrastructure for imprisonment at the state and local level, and especially at the southern border,” Ervin said over email. “I think the particular risk she poses (that is different from Trump) is the impact she could have on progressive voters and constituents to become less open to policies and campaigns that shrink the carceral apparatus.”

In her first campaign speech, Harris championed affordable healthcare and fair wages, but she also somewhat embraced the Copmala identity herself, boasting about her former offices’ work in convicting fraudsters whom likened to former president Donal Trump, who is guilty of 34 felony counts related to his hush money scheme. Now, “cop vs. felon” and “prosecutor vs. felon” memes already populate the internet space and similar narratives have reached election coverage at major publications. In the process, though, they also stigmatize everyday people living with a conviction record.

“It suggests that the worst thing about former President Trump and to oppose him isn’t necessarily a range of objectionable or odious policies,” Levin said. “The fact that he’s in a country, where according to many estimates, one in three adults has a criminal record…[and] those records are disproportionately felt in Black communities and in low-income communities, there’s something perhaps worrying about the message that says let’s make this about the prosecutor versus the felon.”
Tandy Lau is a Report for America corps member who writes about public safety for the Amsterdam News. Your donation to match our RFA grant helps keep him writing stories like this one; please consider making a tax-deductible gift of any amount today by visiting https://bit.ly/amnews1.