 It is Kamala Harris presumptive Democratic nominee Joe Biden has picked California Senator Kamala Harris as his running mate. The first woman of color in history to be chosen for such a position. Biden chose Harris even though as a candidate she attacked him for being a lead architect of the modern criminal justice system. She was the one that took it to him. The senator criticized the former vice president's record on race. I am proud of the work we did performing a criminal justice system and cleaning up the consequences of the bills that you passed when you were in the United States Senate for decades. The irony of Biden's decision to select Harris particularly in the wake of widespread protests against police misconduct and racial injustice is that she has her own troubling record on criminal justice issues which also came up on the debate stage. She had a police department when she was there that in fact was abusing people's rights. The bottom line is Senator Harris when you were in a position to make a difference and an impact in these people's lives you did not and worse yet in the case of those who were on death row innocent people you actually blocked evidence from being revealed that would have freed them until you were forced to do so. There is no excuse for that. I want Joe Biden to win. It is about everything about criminal justice reform and what we're trying to do in terms of reforming policing. Like Biden Harris deserves credit for endorsing vital reforms even at this stage in her career but it's worth setting the record straight about her priorities over the course of her 16 years in public life before criminal justice reform became front and center for the Democratic Party. I am proud of that work of being in the position to use the power that I had to reform a system that is badly in need of reform. Harris' record is that of a 1980s style drug warrior a defender of dirty prosecutors and a political opportunist who has made life more dangerous for sex workers. Harris' political rise has been propelled by a years long high profile campaign against alleged sex traffickers. What she's actually done is throw women in jail for having consensual sex while trampling on the rule of law to advance her own political ambitions. Ignoring the pleas of sex workers and human rights advocates for over a decade she's fought against campaigns to decriminalize consensual adult prostitution in California. As attorney general she created a statewide program to get truckers to report suspected sex workers to police. These policies didn't stop traffickers but they did land plenty of sex workers behind bars. One of the greatest defenders is Backpage.com. Harris fought to destroy Backpage.com a classified site that sex workers used to find and screen their clients even though she publicly admitted that the site's founders Michael Lacey and James Larkin were protected from prosecution under federal free speech laws. But tonight a groundbreaking arrest. But a month before election day in her senate race Harris went ahead and had them arrested anyway parading them before the cameras on pimping charges which were then promptly dismissed by a judge. When Harris got to Congress she kept up her crusade becoming a big proponent of the 2018 law known as Cesta Fasta. One cannot cowardly sit behind a computer committing their crime quite the contrary. The result was that many sex workers had no choice but to return to the streets where soliciting clients is considerably more dangerous. Because you don't know who's going to pick you up. I mean there's more pimps and there's more guys out here. Meanwhile Harris declined to intervene in a real underage sex trafficking scandal that involved dozens of police and other local authorities in the Bay Area. America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice. I knew this history well. Of innocent men framed. Of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants. Yes and during her time as California's top cop Harris contributed to that history repeatedly by going to bat on behalf of dirty prosecutors. Her office appealed the dismissal of the case in which a prosecutor had fabricated a confession to secure a conviction and fought an appeal in a case where a prosecutor had lied to the jury during trial. In 2015 Harris tried to stop the removal of the Orange County District Attorney's Office from a murder trial after it repeatedly failed to turn over evidence to the defense. Her office even tried to keep a man in jail who had been wrongfully incarcerated for 13 years after a judge ruled that he had proven himself innocent just because the man hadn't delivered that proof quite fast enough. And as San Francisco DA Harris hid known misconduct by a crime lab technician who admitted to deliberately tainting evidence. Did prosecutors working under you know about the concerns about that lab? The prosecutors in my office did not know about it and at least said they did not know about it. The debacle has since led to the dismissal of hundreds of criminal cases. Something else it's past time we get done is dismantling the failed war on drugs starting with legalizing marijuana. Your opponent Ron Gold said that he is for the legalization of marijuana recreationally. Your thoughts on that? Um I that he's entitled to his opinion. Harris is a former drug warrior who is now refashioning herself as pro-legalization. That's a positive shift but not a reason to rewrite the past or ignore the patterns it reveals in her judgment. For years after the cultural tide had turned in favor of criminal justice reforms Harris continued to support lock them up policies that disproportionately hurt minorities. As California Attorney General Harris opposed marijuana legalization as late as 2014 promoted civil asset forfeiture without a conviction as a way to fight drug rings and sought to more aggressively police prescription drug use. In her 2019 book The Truths We Hold An American Journey Harris reveals that her drug warrior mentality hasn't changed. We also need to reinstate the DEA's authority to go after the major pharmaceutical manufacturers and distributors and we need to invest resources in law enforcement efforts to cut off the supply of fentanyl from China. Let's believe in a more perfect union without mass incarceration of African American men. We put more people in prison than any country on earth for no good reason. Yes we do and once these people were in prison Harris saw to it that they'd have a hell of a time getting out. I absolutely believe there should be severe and serious consequence for violent crime which is why I've prosecuted those cases and will always seek the highest sentence. As a prosecutor in law enforcement I have a huge stick so I decided I was going to start prosecuting parents for truancy. Before her recent about face Harris chose not to endorse proposed sentencing reforms on the California ballot in 2012 and 2014 and she defended the constitutionality of cash bail until 2016. Harris's office also fought an order to reduce California's prison population after the Supreme Court determined the conditions amounted to cruel and unusual punishment. Although she later claimed to be shocked by what they had done Harris's attorneys argued that nonviolent offenders should stay behind bars because the state needed the cheap labor they provide. We are part of a longer story and we are responsible for how our chapter gets written. As she tries to convince voters to put her a heartbeat away from the presidency Kamala Harris is trying to rewrite her last chapter but her record is yet another reminder of the terrible choice voters face in the 2020 election. I think you can judge people by when they are under fire and it's not about some fancy opinion on a stage but when they're in the position to actually make a decision what do they do.