Vice President Kamala Harris advocated for the removal of police officers from schools in an effort to “demilitarize” school campuses, according to unearthed footage from 2019.
“What we need to do about … demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of school. We need to deal with the reality and speak the truth about the inequities around school discipline. Where in particular, Black and Brown boys are being expelled and or suspended as young as, I’ve seen, as young as in elementary school,” Harris said in 2019 in South Carolina, when she served as a California senator running for president during the 2020 cycle.
Harris joined the 2019 Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of that year before she dropped out of the 2020 race and was announced as President Biden’s running mate. A college student asked Harris how she would go about expunging the records of juveniles to allow them to attend college, including expunging “a criminal offense,” not “just a marijuana expungement.”
“That’s a great question and a great point, because when we talk about reform of the criminal justice system, we’ve got to understand that the juvenile justice system is in dire need of reform, and I know that. And I’ve seen it,” Harris responded, touting her 2020 campaign’s “plan of action” on criminal justice reform.
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Vice President Kamala Harris has gone 24 days as of Wednesday without holding a formal press conference or sit-down interview since becoming the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee. (Bizuayehu Tesfaye)
“I will end solitary confinement of juveniles, which includes what we need to do to talk about and have a commitment for less incarceration of juveniles. And have guidelines in terms of exactly what those, those numbers should be, because right now, in so many states, children are being incarcerated for … a child being incarcerated for a couple of days is traumatic, much less the weeks, months and years that we’re seeing that happen,” she explained.
Harris has yet to release her political platform for the 2024 election cycle. Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris-Walz campaign asking if she still supports removing officers from schools but did not immediately receive a reply.
Harris’ comments on removing officers from schools preceded the protests and riots that swept the nation in 2020 after George Floyd’s killing during an interaction with Minneapolis Police and when the coronavirus pandemic and its lockdowns upended society.
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People carry signs during a “Defund the Police” march from King County Youth Jail to City Hall in Seattle Aug. 5, 2020. (Jason Redmond/AFP via Getty Images)
As calls rang out from coast to coast to defund police in response to Floyd’s death and the deaths of other Black Americans during interactions with police, school districts in liberal areas of the country also began cutting ties with police departments with the argument that officers posed a greater threat to students of color than protecting schools from potential threats.
In 2020, just days and weeks after Floyd’s death, school districts in cities like Minneapolis, Portland, Denver and Oakland voted to sever their contracts with police departments and remove school resource officers from campuses. Researchers with the outlet Education Week found in 2022 that at least 50 school districts between May 2020 through June 2022 removed officers or slashed budgets for school officers.
As students returned to classrooms when lockdown orders for the pandemic were lifted, violence frequently plagued schools, prompting parents in many districts to call on school leaders to reinstate officers. In Montgomery County, Maryland, in 2022, school district officials partially reversed course on removing officers after a shooting injured a 15-year-old. And the D.C. city council last year quietly repealed a plan that worked to gradually remove officers from schools as juvenile crime spiraled in the nation’s capital.
Demonstrators hold a sign that says “Defund the police” during a protest over the death of a Black man, Daniel Prude, Sept. 6, 2020, after police put a spit hood over his head during an arrest in Rochester, N.Y. (Reuters/Brendan McDermid)
The Denver school district backtracked its 2020 removal of officers last year after a shooting at a high school, reinstating armed officers. The Alexandria, Virginia, school district did the same in 2021.
The Virginia school district was rocked by a spate of violent fights in schools at the start of the 2021-2022 school year that some blamed on the Alexandria City Council voting to do away with the officers in the spring of 2021.
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“Our students are sending us warning shots, literally warning shots,” Peter Balas, a Alexandria City High School principal, said during an October 2021 meeting about bringing SROs back to campus. “Please reconsider this. My staff, my students. We’re not OK.”
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, appears on stage during the Democratic National Convention Aug. 22, 2024, in Chicago. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File)
In California, the Pomona Unified School Board voted to defund its school police in 2021.
Just four months later, SROs were back on campus after a shooting near Pomona High School that injured a 12-year-old.
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Fox News Digital was unable to find Harris making similar remarks about removing officers from schools in other previous statements, but she did call for the investment of “money in states to stop criminal charges for school-based disciplinary behavior” in her 2020 presidential platform.
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Harris rose to the top of the 2024 Democratic presidential ticket last month when Biden dropped out of the race amid mounting concerns over his mental acuity. Harris joined her party in Chicago last week, when she officially accepted the nomination and said she would serve all Americans, no matter their political party, if elected to the Oval Office.