Tag: hit&run

President Donald Trump and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi are locked in a battle of wills over the border wall. After declaring a “barrier…absolutely critical to border security” during his Oval Office address, Trump walked out of a meeting with Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer when they refused to budge on the wall money. This may well be a prelude to Trump acting on his threat to declare a national emergency and using unobligated Pentagon funds to get the military to build a wall.

That would be a terrible abuse of his power, because there is no wall-worthy national security threat at the border.

Contrary to Trump’s claims, a wall won’t do much to stanch the flow of drugs to this country. Why? As best as can be determined, most of the heroin and cocaine intercepted on its way to the U.S. comes through legal ports of entry. And even if the wall did substantially block smugglers, the same sorts of drugs—or close substitutes—would be instead generated domestically, as long as there is a demand for them.

As for the human beings coming across the southern border, they are increasingly asylum seekers, and their cases deserve to be heard and processed quickly—which means investing in more immigration judges, not misdirecting resources on a misguided wall.

No matter how many times it is pointed out to Trump, he simply won’t admit that the flow of illegal immigration is rapidly trending downwards. In 2000, the authorities apprehended 1,643,679 unauthorized migrants. In 2017? 303,916. There was a slight uptick in 2018, but nothing approaching a “crisis”—a word that Trump used six times in his seven-minute national address earlier this week. So going by the sheer numbers, if there was ever a time for a wall, it has already passed.

If the quantity of immigrants doesn’t justify a wall, their “quality” doesn’t either.

The administration has already taken a walloping for its whopper that 4,000 terrorists were apprehended at the southern border in 2017, a figure that was off by 4,000. Yes, about 3,000 “special interest” people were flagged entering from that side, but that merely means that they hail from countries that are a potential source of terrorism, not that they are terrorists themselves. No one who has come in from the southern border has ever conducted a terrorist attack. Even the ultra-restrictionist Center for Immigration Studies acknowledges that the administration is vastly exaggerating the terrorist threat.

What about other kinds of criminals? Trump has never backed away from his statement that Mexico sends us “rapists” and “criminals” rather than its “best” people. In truth, Mexico no longer sends us very many people at all—unlike back in 2000, when Mexicans made up 98 percent of the total migrants and Central Americans about two percent. As Stephanie Leutert, director of the Mexico Security Initiative at the University of Texas at Austin, points out, the split is now close to 50-50.

And among those coming in, criminals are the rarest of rare exception.

Leutert notes:

Since the Trump administration took office, the Border Patrol has detected fewer gang members crossing irregularly than during the Obama administration. In FY2017, these detections amounted to 0.075 percent of the total number of migrants (228 MS-13 members out of 303,916 total migrants). When combined with MS-13’s rival, the Barrio 18 gang, the number rises only slightly to 0.095 percent. This is far from the “infestation” of violent gang members described by the president.

Furthermore, unlike the immigrants coming from Mexico, 98 percent of who were working-age men looking for better economic opportunities, half of the apprehended immigrants from Central America are families, many of them not-so-threatening women and children without men, predominantly from three countries: Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador.

Leutert notes that although the migrants from Guatemala tend to come from rural areas to escape extreme poverty (often mortgaging their farms to make the journey), those from Honduras and El Salvador are predominantly urban dwellers trying to get away from gangs. (Those gangs, in turn, formed after America started deporting criminal aliens back in droves.)

The previous unaccompanied minor “crisis” occurred not because Central American parents were acting irresponsibly, as many restrictionists claim. It was because they were trying to extricate their kids from the clutches of gangs trying to recruit them. “Boys of eleven years old (or younger) may be recruited as lookouts and teenage girls may be eyed for becoming members’ ‘girlfriends,'” Leutert says.

Families are now coming together to seek asylum. One would think that would gain them some brownie points from immigration hardliners who were slamming them for sending kids alone. But no! Now they are being accused of using kids as “pawns” to gain entry into the United States (because, per the Flores ruling, kids can’t be kept in detention for longer than a few days so families who come with them are more likely to be “caught and released”). But that’s not the case. Families are all fleeing together because gangs have started charging exorbitant extortions that are beyond the means of small mom-and-pop businesses to pay. And the price for failing to pay up, Leutert points out, is often death.

If there were lots of criminals and terrorists trying to sneak across the border undetected, a wall might help. But asylum seekers are actually trying to get caught because they want to live and work legally in the country. Indeed, as Vox‘s Dara Lind points out, they turn themselves in to the first border agent they encounter—at a port of entry if they can, but if those are too backed up, or if they’re forced to languish for days and weeks because the Trump administration will only let a few in at a time (an illegal practice called metering), then between ports.

All a wall would do in that case is seal off access points between ports, creating bigger backups at ports of entry. Far from alleviating the brewing humanitarian situation at the border, as Trump claimed in his address, a wall would exacerbate it.

Restrictionists also claim that asylum-seeking families that are “caught and released” typically just disappear, never to be heard from again. But that’s a highly dubious claim, to say the least. In one Obama-era program where asylum seekers were paired with case managers before being let go, the asylum seekers had a 100 percent attendance record at court hearings. They also had a 99 percent rate of check-ins and appointments with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to a Department of Homeland Security report.

More generally, the immigration advocacy group American Immigration Council published a report four years ago that looked at studies from over the previous two decades examining how well asylum seekers fulfilled their legal obligations. It found “very high rates of compliance” among those “who were placed into alternatives to detention.”

The report cited a 2000 U.S. government-commissioned study that found an “83 percent rate of compliance with court proceedings among asylum seekers who were found to have a credible fear in the expedited removal process.” It also showed an 84 percent compliance rate among asylees under minimal supervision, and 78 percent among those who were unsupervised.

This makes sense: The penalty for living in the country without authorization—both legal (given that unauthorized people have a very hard time obtaining visas) and in lost wages—is so high that asylum seekers have a built-in incentive to do things by the book. That’s why, far from wasting money on the wall, it would be better to invest in more judges and legal hearings for a speedy dispensation of asylum cases.

The real crisis will be if Trump declares a national emergency to deal with his fake threat.

Has California Democratic Sen. Kamala Harris settled on a presidential run and picked a date to announce her candidacy? A variety of media outlets have reported as much, citing San Francisco talk radio station KCBS as the source. On Wednesday, KCBS reported that Harris would announce her candidacy on or around Martin Luther King Day (January 21), “probably at a campaign rally in Oakland.” Their intel allegedly came from anonymous sources close to Harris.

But today, Politico‘s Christopher Cadelago reports that “a formal announcement date is not settled,” per “a person close to her.”

Take all that for what you will. The bottom line is likely the same: Brace yourself for the Harris 2020 campaign to officially launch sometime soon.

If you need a refresher on Harris’ horrible history, here’s C.J. Ciaramella reviewing her newly released book.

In The Truths We Hold, Harris touts her record as a “progressive prosecutor,” but the book glosses over numerous instances where her office defended prosecutorial misconduct.

Harris recounts her career as a line prosecutor in San Francisco, up through her tenure as California Attorney General and her election to the U.S. Senate. The book is a rather clear attempt by Harris to preemptively defend her record on criminal justice, which has emerged as an important issue, especially on the left flank of the Democratic Party….

What her book doesn’t address, however, is the many times her own office contributed to that dark history.

And a bit more of Reason‘s Harris coverage:

• Democrats Created a Birth-Control Banning Bogeyman Out of Brett Kavanaugh. Called Out, Kamala Harris Doubled Down
• New Kamala Harris Bill Asks Federal Taxpayers to Subsidize California’s High Housing Costs
• Kamala Harris: No Friend to Criminal Justice Reform
• The Phony Feminism of Kamala Harris
• Kamala Harris Went to Bat for Dirty Prosecutors as California Attorney General

FREE MARKETS

Malcolm Gladwell is full of crap about marijuana and the dangers of its decriminalization. Yesterday, Reason‘s Jacob Sullum tackled a fearmongering anti-pot piece from The New York Times. But there are a lot of bad takes like it these days, including a recent New Yorker story by Malcolmn Gladwell. For some fun, see this Twitter thread from journalist Dave Levitan, which takes on the bad stats and misrepresentations point by point. A sample:

Gladwell: studies of twins suggest a gateway effect!

Me, in an actual book with citations and shit: you didn’t look at the OTHER twin study that found something else, dick. pic.twitter.com/oi8h3btEGC

— Dave Levitan (@davelevitan) January 8, 2019

FREE MINDS

Good news for Google and free speech. From Fast Company:

For years, Google has been fighting an order from a French regulator, which tried to force the company to follow the law beyond European borders. The legal framework demands that internet companies purge search results about people’s personal information. France argued that allowing results to remain in other locations made the law ineffective. Google and other technology advocates rebutted that allowing the law’s scope to expand globally would allow repressive regimes to essentially erase all dissenting online content about them around the world.

Now, Google has a legal adviser to the European Union’s top court on its side. More here.

QUICK HITS

Story to watch: Texas landowners with land near wall necessary for Trump wall “are digging in, vowing to reject buyout offers and preparing to fight the administration in court.”
https://t.co/041cIVdzOW

— Tim Mak (@timkmak) January 10, 2019

• Former Sens. Claire McCaskill (D–Mo.) and Jeff Flake (R–Ariz.) were the least popular members of Congress last year, according to Morning Consult.

• It’s a public domain bonanza!

• Hoaxes upon hoaxes:

“A study that claimed to explain why falsehoods go viral has turned out to itself be false.” And yes, it went viral. https://t.co/DtQg1CXdgb

— Jesse Walker (@notjessewalker) January 10, 2019

• Glory days…

This tweet is correct about Chomsky’s long-held, absolutist free speech views. But it’s not just Chomsky. From Berkeley to ACLU, free speech absolutism has long been a central, defining belief of the left, which never used to trust institutions of authority with censorship power: https://t.co/BD7kxm95sl

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) January 10, 2019

It’s been reported that the Department of Justice is drafting an opinion to reverse a 2011 finding from the Office of Legal Counsel that paved the way for states to regulate online gambling as they see fit. Such a move, writes Veronique de Rugy, would not just be a blow to states like Nevada, New Jersey, Delaware, and Pennsylvania that have already legalized online gambling, as well as the many others considering such action; it would also go against basic federalist principles.

View this article.

The University of Virginia has suspended the Señoritas Latinas Unidas sorority for hazing. Officials agreed with a girl who pledged the sorority that a requirement that members study 25 hours a week violated the school’s anti-hazing policy. The sorority has sued the college in federal court, complaining that they are being discriminated against, noting other programs at the college with similar study requirements.

NowThis, a news website that primarily caters to left-of-center millennials and Gen Z-ers, tweeted this on Wednesday: “The CIA’s highest level positions are now all held by women—another stride towards progress.” The tweet even included a flexed bicep emoji, a symbol of progress that invokes Rosie the Riveteer. Here it is:

The CIA’s highest level positions are now all held by women — another stride towards progress pic.twitter.com/Sz4rDw4U7m

— NowThis (@nowthisnews) January 9, 2019

Most of the responses to the tweet involve people dunking on it, and for good reason. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) being run entirely by women is not another stride toward progress. A stride toward progress would be the CIA shutting down, or at the very least renouncing its past misdeeds: torturing prisoners, spying on American citizens, overthrowing foreign governments, etc., etc.

Yes, current CIA Director Gina Haspel is a woman. She also ran a CIA black site in Thailand and was personally involved in the waterboarding of at least one detainee. When asked about these activities during her confirmation hearings, she was unrepentant. She said, essentially, that she was just following orders.

I’m highlighting this tweet because it speaks to intersectionality’s corruption of the modern progressive movement. Intersectionality, of course, is the academic tradition from the late 1980s that stressed group-based oppression: particularly racism and sexism. Over the years, proponents of intersectionality have added other areas of concern: everything from transphobia and homophobia to size-ism and able-ism. It’s not that the intersectional thinkers are necessarily wrong—transphobia exists, and it’s bad—but rather that a monomaniacal focus on group-based oppression can be naïve. Haspel taking over the CIA, for instance, might be a blow to sexism in some very narrow sense, but it does nothing to remedy the CIA’s appalling record on civil liberties, something progressives purport to care about.

This is not the first time generic yaaassss slay kween feminism has been used to obscure Haspel’s appalling awfulness: My colleague Scott Shackford made a note of The Advocate’s coverage, which commended the CIA director for making “herstory” in a tweet that practically demands a barf emoji response.

Recall that some on the left complained Trump had threatened to drop “the mother of all bombs” on Afghanistan—not because killing yet more people in the war-torn country would be wrong, but because the phrase itself is sexist. This approach should frustrate true progressives. It certainly frustrates libertarians who would occasionally like to ally with them.

Emboldened by successfully restricting access to plastic straws, California’s busybody legislators are now mulling a crackdown on another ubiquitous feature of our consumer society: the paper receipt.

On Monday, Assemblyman Phil Ting (D–San Francisco) introduced a bill that would require businesses to provide their customers with an electronic receipt unless they specifically requested a paper one, in an effort to both cut down on waste and protect human health from the deadly chemicals found on paper receipts.

“It’s common sense legislation. We think it’s minimal cost, and we think it’s really putting the power back in the consumers,” said Ting at a press conference, standing next to an expressionless aide wearing a giant paper receipt costume on which were written fun facts about the bill.

Ting’s bill is modelled explicitly on the state’s recently passed straw-on-request bill, down to the penalties.

Any default provision of a physical receipt would expose the paper proof-of-purchase providing proprietor to daily fines of $25, capped at $300 per year—a carbon copy of the fines restaurateurs face for handing out unsolicited plastic straws.

The similarities between the two policies do not end there.

Straw bans got their start with a number of well-marketed advocacy campaigns from environmental nonprofits with catchy, alliterative names like ‘Strawless in Seattle’ or ‘Skip the Straw.’

Ting’s bill likewise draws both its inspiration and most of its facts and figures from nonprofit Green America’s Skip the Slip campaign—which does its best to hype the environmental impact and health risks of paper receipts.

According to a May 2018 report from Green America, America’s yearly receipt usage costs us 10 million trees and another 21 billion gallons of water. The group also warns that some 93 percent of receipts come coated in Bisphenol-S (BPS) or Bisphenol-A (BPA), everyone’s favorite chemicals to hate.

On closer inspection, neither of these data points seem like much to worry about.

The average American uses about 80 to 100 gallons of water a day, which works out to be about 10 to 12 trillion gallons a year for the whole country. About 15 billion trees are estimated to be felled each year globally. Paper receipts are a rounding error.

Reason‘s Ron Bailey has likewise cataloged how health concerns over BPA—often found in products like water bottles and plastic utensils—are largely unfounded. Green America’s report gives few reasons for why BPA on receipts—a product that is not touching the food you eat or the water you drink—would be a concern.

It was the same story with plastic straws, which—despite all the fuss—make up miniscule percentages of beach litter and marine plastic debris.

Passing some sort of receipt-on-request law will not do much to improve the health of California’s environment or its residents. If anything, it will ensure that more of them are coaxed into giving over their data for an electronic receipt, which will almost certainly increase digital litter in their inboxes.

It is true that receipts, unlike straws, are becoming less relevant as more and more purchases are digitized. Nevertheless, it should be up to businesses and consumers to figure out how they want to record their purchases.

New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio today proposed a plan requiring private employers to provide their workers with 10 days per year of paid vacation.

The proposal would benefit hundreds of thousands of full- and part-time employees who don’t have access to paid time off (PTO), de Blasio’s office claims. If the plan is approved by the New York City Council, all private businesses with five or more workers would need to offer their workers two weeks of vacation time.

“New Yorkers need a break,” de Blasio said today from City Hall. “If you work hard and you don’t get a break, that’s not fair.”

The proposal is the first of its kind in the United States, according to The New York Times. De Blasio’s office specifically highlighted the 470,000 combined employees in the city’s professional services, retail, hotel, and food industries who don’t get paid vacation.

“It’s bad for your physical health. It’s bad for your mental health,” the mayor said. “It’s no way to live.”

Under the plan, workers would be able to take time off for any reason once they’ve been employed for 120 days. Companies would be allowed to require that employees give two weeks’ notice before taking time off, or deny PTO requests if too many workers are taking off at the same time.

It doesn’t sound like employees could automatically take 10 days of PTO after 120 days of employment. According to The Washington Post, workers would accrue their PTO gradually over the course of their employment.

The proposal probably has a decent chance of passing. The city council is dominated by Democrats, and judging from some of their reactions in de Blasio’s press statement, a good number already appear to support the proposal.

But support is far from universal. “Everyone wants employees to have a fair amount of vacation time, but one-size-fits-all government mandates tend to make it harder to hire, grow businesses and create jobs,” Michael Steel, a Republican strategist who used to work for former House Speaker John Boehner (R–Ohio), told the Post. “This sounds like that’s what this would do.”

Kathryn Wylde, president and CEO of the Partnership for New York City, a local business group, agrees. She called the plan “another example of municipal overreach into the city’s private sector economy.”

“Most New York City employers are doing whatever they can to attract and keep good workers and do not need the government dictating their benefit policies,” Wylde said in a statement. Many of the businesses that would be affected, she said, “are struggling retailers, who are facing rising rents and online competition.”

Steel and Wylde bring up fair points. If private employers believe offering their workers paid vacation time will increase productivity, morale, or profits, then they will. Most businesses already do this, with the Bureau of Labor Statistics reporting that 76 percent of private industry workers had access to PTO as of March 2017.

The problem is that PTO doesn’t make sense for every business.

“When policymakers like de Blasio mandate benefits, it results in a reduction in salary/wages, or other employee benefits for employees,” says Vanessa Brown Calder, a policy analyst at the Cato Institute who specializes in social welfare, housing, and urban policy. “That is because employers are interested in limiting total costs (compensation) for a given productivity level,” Calder told Reason in an email.

If private employers are forced by the government to offer those benefits, then they may decide to cut wages as a result. But let’s say workers at any particular company make $15 an hour (which is the minimum wage for business in NYC with 11 or more employees): Their wages can’t legally be cut any more. In order to make ends meet, the business may end up cutting hours or even laying off some employees.

Mandatory benefit proposals essentially tell workers and companies what kind of compensation packages are acceptable. In reality, some workers would gladly trade higher pay for more time off. “However, not all employees would,” notes Calder. “When policymakers like De Blasio mandate benefits, it (counterintuitively) reduces employees choices.”

There are other reasons why de Blasio’s plan isn’t a good idea. “Mandates that make employees more expensive offer less incentive for businesses to hire more and more highly skilled employees (that’s bad news for lower-wage workers),” wrote Independent Women’s Forum Carrie Lucas in a July 2017 piece for Reason. “A government one-size-fits-all paid leave program would also discourage voluntary alternative work arrangements like job-sharing and telecommuting that benefit employers and employees.”

Lucas was specifically referring to proposals that provide new parents with paid leave. But it’s the same idea. Paid family leave and paid vacation time are both great policies when employers decide to implement them. But forcing such policies on businesses and their workers can, often does, and likely will have unintended consequences.

“We are fighting for free speech every single day,” says Students for Liberty’s CEO Wolf von Laer, who also contends that college campuses around the world are “breeding grounds for socialism.”

I spoke with Laer, who has a Ph.D. in political economy from King’s College (London), and David Clement, director of external relations, about SFL’s upcoming LibertyCon, which takes place in Washington, D.C., January 17-20, and pulls together 2,000 students, activists, and libertarians from all over the world.

Reason is a sponsor of LibertyCon and folks such as Katherine Mangu-Ward, Matt Welch, Peter Suderman, Robby Soave, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown will join Libertarian Party Vice Presidential nominee Bill Weld, FCC head Ajit Pai, legal giants Randy Barnett and Alan Dershowitz, and others for the conference. During lunch on Saturday, Reason will present a “live” version of the magazine, featuring some of your favorite journalists, the musical styling of Remy, and the comedy of Andrew Heaton and Austin Bragg.

Go here for a list of speakers and use the code REASON to get a 40 percent discount on registration.

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Alex Berenson, the former New York Times reporter who has just published an anti-pot polemic that he aptly named after a notoriously hysterical 1936 anti-pot movie, says marijuana legalization “appears to lead to an increase in violent crime.” Like his claim that marijuana causes schizophrenia and other “serious mental illnesses,” his claim that it causes violence is based on a highly selective reading of the evidence.

“The first four states to legalize—Alaska, Colorado, Oregon and Washington—have seen sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults since 2014, according to reports from the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” Berenson writes in the Times. “Police reports and news articles show a clear link to cannabis in many cases.”

As Jesse Singal notes, selecting 2014 as the starting year seems suspect, since two of those states (Colorado and Washington) approved legalization in 2012. But 2014 does coincide with the lowest national violent crime rate since the late 1960s. The national rate rose by 3.5 percent in 2015 and by 3.4 percent 2016, then fell by about 1 percent in 2017, for a total increase of about 6 percent between 2014 and 2017. It’s true that the increase in violent crime was sharper in the four states that Berenson mentions. Can the difference be attributed to marijuana legalization?

Probably not. University of Oregon economist Benjamin Hansen finds that “the homicide rates in Colorado and Washington were actually below what the data predicted they would have been given the trends in homicides from 2000-2012.” He says “we can’t conclude that marijuana legalization increases violence, and perhaps even there could be small negative effects.”

Nor is the effect that Berenson perceives apparent in national data. The share of Americans reporting past-month marijuana use in the National Survey on Drug Use and Health rose by 55 percent from 2002 to 2017, a period when the national violent crime rate fell by 23 percent.

How plausible is it that legalizing marijuana would immediately cause “sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults”? Here is how a bunch of experts at the RAND Drug Policy Research Center summarized the evidence in a 2013 report commissioned by the Office of National Drug Control Policy: “Even though marijuana is commonly used by individuals arrested for crimes, there is little support for a contemporaneous, causal relationship between its use and either violent or property crime. There is evidence supporting a possible intertemporal relationship, but it is not clear to what extent this is unique to marijuana.” The authors flatly state that “marijuana use does not induce violent crime,” while “the links between marijuana use and property crime are thin.”

In line with that research, several studies have found that relaxing legal restrictions on marijuana is not associated with an increase in violent crime. A 2016 analysis of data from 11 Western states, published in the Journal of Drug Issues, found “no evidence of negative spillover effects from medical marijuana laws (MMLs) on violent or property crime.” To the contrary, the researchers found “significant drops in rates of violent crime associated with state MMLs.”

A 2017 study published in Contemporary Drug Problems compared FBI crime data in states with different legal regimes and found that “property and violent crime rates appear to be lower in both decriminalized and medically legalized states, but the difference is not statistically significant.” A 2018 study published by Germany’s Institute of Labor Economics compared California counties with different policies regarding medical marijuana dispensaries and found “no relationship between county laws that legally permit dispensaries and reported violent crime.” Another 2018 study, published in the Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, found “no causal effects of medical marijuana laws on violent or property crime at the national level” and “no strong effects within individual states, except for in California, where the medical marijuana law reduced both violent and property crime by 20%.”

If letting people use marijuana for recreational purposes leads to “sharp increases in murders and aggravated assaults,” you would expect to see something similar in jurisdictions that allow medical use, especially when the rules are loose, as they were in California for two decades before full legalization. Yet these studies find nothing of the sort. And if more marijuana use means more “paranoia and psychosis,” resulting in “an increase in violent crime,” as Berenson claims, you would expect that the national increase in marijuana use would have been accompanied by a national increase in violent crime. Yet exactly the opposite happened.

Berenson’s book has received respectful reviews in The New Yorker and Mother Jones, along with considerable pushback from people who study these issues. You can expect to see more of the latter.

Likely 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.) released a new memoir this week. In The Truths We Hold, Harris touts her record as a “progressive prosecutor,” but the book glosses over numerous instances where her office defended prosecutorial misconduct.

Harris recounts her career as a line prosecutor in San Francisco, up through her tenure as California Attorney General and her election to the U.S. Senate. The book is a rather clear attempt by Harris to preemptively defend her record on criminal justice, which has emerged as an important issue, especially on the left flank of the Democratic Party.

“The job of a progressive prosecutor is to look out for the overlooked, to speak up for those whose voices aren’t being heard, to see and address the causes of crime, not just their consequences, and to shine a light on the inequality and unfairness that lead to injustice,” Harris writes.

She also addresses police brutality. “I know how difficult and dangerous the job is, day in and day out, and I know how hard it is for the officers’ families, who have to wonder if the person they love will be coming home at the end of each shift,” she writes. “I also know this: It is a false choice to suggest you must either be for the police or for police accountability. I am for both. Most people I know are for both. Let’s speak some truth about that, too.”

Of one of her first cases as a prosecutor, Harris writes that she begged a judge to hear the case of an innocent person arrested during a drug raid, so that the woman wouldn’t have to spend the weekend in jail. It was “a defining moment” in her life, she writes. “It was revelatory, a moment that proved how much it mattered to have compassionate people working as prosecutors.”

Harris explicitly acknowledges the immense power of prosecutors in the criminal justice system and the myriad misconduct issues it has created.

“America has a deep and dark history of people using the power of the prosecutor as an instrument of injustice,” she writes. “I know this history well—of innocent men framed, of charges brought against people of color without sufficient evidence, of prosecutors hiding information that would exonerate defendants, of the disproportionate application of the law.”

What her book doesn’t address, however, is the many times her own office contributed to that dark history.

As I wrote last year, the California Attorney General’s office under Harris defended egregious prosecutor misconduct in several cases:

As California Attorney General, Harris’ office continued to display indifference toward concerns of misconduct. In March 2015, the California A.G. appealed the dismissal of a child molestation case after a Kern County prosecutor falsified an interview transcript to add an incriminating confession.

Harris’ office, citing state court precedent, tried to argue that the prosecutor’s action “was certainly conscience shocking in the sense that it involved false testimony by a prosecutor in a formal criminal proceeding. But it did not involve ‘brutal and … offensive’ conduct employed to obtain a conviction.” In other words, the defendant’s false confession wasn’t beaten out of him, and therefore didn’t violate his constitutional rights. The appeals court disagreed and threw out the conviction.

In another 2015 case, Baca v. Adams, Harris’ office opposed a post-conviction appeal by a defendant who was sentenced after the prosecutor in his case lied to the jury about whether an informant received compensation for his testimony. A state court found the prosecutor’s testimony was “sheer fantasy,” but declined to overturn the conviction.

In Baca, Harris’ office only withdrew its opposition after an embarrassing (and filmed) hearing before the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, where a panel of three Ninth Circuit judges pointedly asked why such prosecutors weren’t being charged with perjury and threatened to release an opinion naming names if Harris’ office continued in its folly.

In 2015, Harris’ office also appealed the removal of the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office from a high-profile death penalty case after a bombshell report revealed a long-running and unconstitutional jailhouse snitch program.

In 2014, the California Attorney General’s Office opposed releasing nonviolent California inmates—part of the state’s compliance with a 2011 Supreme Court ruling that found its prison system was unconstitutionally overcrowded—arguing that “if forced to release these inmates early, prisons would lose an important labor pool.” Harris said she was unaware of her office’s work and was “shocked” to read about it in the newspaper.

Those weren’t the only times that Harris’ office appeared somewhat less than progressive. As Reason wrote in a separate article about Harris’ record on criminal justice reform:

As attorney general of California, Harris challenged the release of a man who had been exonerated by the Innocence Project and had his conviction overturned. Harris argued that Daniel Larsen, who spent 13 years in prison for the crime of possessing a concealed knife, had not produced evidence of his innocence fast enough. A federal judge overturned his conviction after finding that Larsen had shown he was innocent, that the cops testifying at his trial weren’t credible, and that his attorney, since disbarred, was constitutionally ineffective because he had failed to call any witnesses.

When the Supreme Court decided that California’s overcrowded prisons represented cruel and unusual punishment, Attorney General Harris fought a ruling ordering California to release some of its prisoners. Harris claims she had to fight the ruling for Gov. Jerry Brown. “I have a client, and I don’t get to choose my client,” she said. But the attorney general in California is an independent, elected position, not an appointee serving at the governor’s pleasure.

Then there was Harris’ crusade against Backpage, an online classified ad service popular with sex workers. As Reason’s Elizabeth Nolan Brown wrote on the “performative feminism” of Harris:

In October of 2016, just before she faced voters in her Senate bid, Harris spearheaded the arrest of current and former Backpage executives on charges of pimping and conspiracy, under the (ultimately unsuccessful) theory that providing an open online platform for user-generated content made them responsible for any illegal activity committed by users who connected through the site. Federal law explicitly says otherwise—something Harris certainly knew, as she had petitioned Congress a few years earlier to change the law so that she and other prosecutors could target Backpage (and its deep assets) through state criminal justice systems. What’s more, myriad federal courts have affirmed that prosecutions like the one Harris attempted are illegal.

A Sacramento County Superior Court rejected Harris’ case against Backpage, ruling that “Congress did not wish to hold liable online publishers for the action of publishing third party speech and it is for Congress, not this court, to revisit.” Undeterred, Harris—as one of her final acts as California’s top prosecutor—filed nearly identical charges against Backpage in another California court, a move the First Amendment Lawyers’ Association called “a gross abuse of prosecutorial discretion” and part of Harris’ pattern of disrespecting due process and constitutional rights.

Meanwhile, an actual underage sex-trafficking scandal implicated dozens of police officers and other local authorities throughout the San Francisco Bay Area. Oakland went through two police chiefs trying to address it, with a third doing only questionably better. People were pleading for the state to step in and oversee an independent investigation, since local governments seemed more motivated to quash a PR nightmare than punish public officials. Harris and her office refused to intervene.

None of this is unusual for state attorneys general, who most often reflexively defend prosecutors and the state’s position, but it is a far cry from being a check on abusive government and injustice.

Harris is now one of the most vocal advocates for criminal justice reform in the Senate and has sponsored several important bills. She has plenty to draw on from her Senate record to present herself as a progressive candidate, but if she wants to talk about her record as a prosecutor, well, we should speak some truth about that, too.