As S.F. DA, Harris Raised the Bar for Murder Charges ‘Unbelievably High.’ So Cops Started Going around Her

As San Francisco district attorney, Kamala Harris developed such a reputation for her unwillingness to prosecute murder cases that police regularly went around her to secure arrest warrants and would even seek out more aggressive federal prosecutors when they had a case they felt should be pursued.

Five months after Harris took office, police began taking the unprecedented step of going to judges to obtain Ramey warrants, which are issued before charges have officially been brought by a prosecutor, in order to arrest murder suspects, according to local media reports. Police also brought local murder cases to federal prosecutors to handle instead of Harris’s office. They also routinely pushed a reluctant Harris to work with grand juries to build cases and protect witnesses who may be afraid of coming forward.

Law enforcement began using Ramey warrants shortly after Harris started as district attorney because of Harris’s unwillingness to charge cases where police believed they had enough evidence and witnesses to move forward. San Francisco police resorted to Ramey warrants an estimated 20 times and Harris’s office released about half the suspects arrested under those circumstances, the San Francisco Chronicle reported in 2006.

Ramey warrants were not a tool police used during the tenure of Harris’s predecessor, progressive district attorney Terence Hallinan, who Harris defeated in a competitive 2003 election after she exaggerated her prosecutorial record during the campaign.

National Review has reached out to Harris’s campaign for comment.

By the end of 2005, two years into Harris’s tenure, her office had charged 38 total homicides. By way of comparison, her predecessor, Hallinan, prosecuted 54 homicides in 2001 and 2003 combined, SF weekly reported in January 2006. (Statistics from 2002 were not available because of a state record-keeping issue).

Harris’s reluctance to prosecute came against a backdrop of rising homicide rates in the Bay Area: Murders increased from 132 in 2001 and 2003 to 184 from 2004 through 2005.

Harris was particularly reluctant to bring charges in gang-related murder cases involving black suspects. Harris charged only three out of 70 black suspects in cases with black victims and gang ties over her first 20 months in the district attorney’s office, according to a San Francisco Journal report.

A police officer who worked with District Attorney Harris’s office on homicide cases during much of her tenure told National Review that Harris and her deputies made the ultimate decision on whether to charge homicide suspects.

“Kamala started making the charging decisions,” the officer said. “Kamala was ultimately thumbs up thumbs down on prosecuting. All the sudden the bar gets raised unbelievably high. The common response we’re getting back from the DA’s office is ‘hey you need more evidence. This isn’t good enough to go forward.'”

“Those cases were previously charged by other DAs but we were told we needed more evidence. These were prosecutable cases not being prosecuted.”

The reluctance to prosecute homicide cases was apparent from the very beginning of Harris’s term: She inherited a backlog of 73 homicide cases from Hallinan’s office and immediately began negotiating deals with the suspects. To resolve 32 of the cases, Harris’s office negotiated deals for manslaughter and lesser offenses like assault and burglary, a move police considered a fire-sale, the Chronicle reported.

Another tactic police used to combat the issues they were having with Harris’s office was to have federal prosecutors handle local murder cases. In 2005, federal prosecutors indicted a dozen gang members on homicide charges with assistance from grand juries, helping to reduce the number of homicide cases with black victims and black offenders.

Police pressed Harris to use grand juries several times to gather more evidence and to give protection to witnesses who might be afraid to testify, a move Harris’s office made sparingly. The cases police took to federal prosecutors were ones that Harris would not convene a grand jury for, the officer said.

One murder where Harris’s office did bring a grand jury was the case of Max Chenier, a 23-year-old budding rapper who was gunned down in November 2005 sitting in a car waiting for his grandfather.

In the days after the killing, police tracked down suspect Marcus McNeil after he fled to Ohio. McNeil, 19 at the time, was previously convicted twice on weapons charges, yet Harris’s office declined to pursue the murder case against him.

Eventually, Chenier’s family pressured Harris’s office into convening a grand jury in early 2006 to examine the case. But the grand jury did not produce an indictment after Harris’s office failed to provide testimony from key witnesses and present important evidence for the case, according to Chenier’s uncle Maurice, an attorney and former political candidate who has criticized Harris’s handling of his nephew’s case for almost 20 years.

“She wasn’t charging the murder and they kept telling me all of this stuff about ‘well we got to develop it’ and the police are telling me ‘hey we gave her everything.’ They kept sending the police more things to do, more investigatory items, they did everything,” Chenier told National Review.

“I started to realize that hey, this whole thing, this is all political.”

He said the line prosecutor on the case failed to call the investigating police officer to testify before the grand jury and did not seek testimony from an eye witness on the scene who hesitated to come forward, even after Chenier got a video statement from him. The line prosecutor also questioned the credibility of Max Chenier’s grandfather, who had left the car right before his grandson was murdered.

Maurice Chenier interacted repeatedly with Harris’s office as he pushed her to do more on his nephew’s case. When he confronted Harris on the mistakes her office made with the grand jury, Harris abdicated responsibility and blamed a subordinate on the case.

“When I told her about all the things she did wrong, that they didn’t present, she said she has the right to rely on the junior attorneys, or the attorneys under her. Why should she be held accountable for what they did wrong?” Chenier said. “They wanted to bury the case. Harris was taking a tough-on-gun stance.”

An additional issue that came up during Harris’s district attorney tenure was her apparent mismanagement of witness protection. Under Harris’s leadership, multiple cooperating witnesses were shot dead, local media reported at the time. Both witnesses were killed in San Francisco after going into city without police protection.

However, a highlight of Harris’s time as San Francisco district attorney was the high conviction rate for cases she did end up prosecuting. But Harris’s convictions did not result in long sentences for the defendants.

“There were lots of convictions but no consequences. She was obsessed with conviction rates,” the officer said. “Everybody’s getting convicted but nobody’s going to jail. Everybody’s probation, probation probation,” the officer added.

The homicide rate in San Francisco ended up dropping significantly by the end of Harris’s tenure due to a historic plunge in 2009 for reasons that remain unclear. Police attributed the trend to a larger homicide unit and a targeted approach oriented towards gang violence.