Five years ago, when Kamala Harris was running for president, she labeled herself the “top cop” and “progressive prosecutor” that was “tough on crime.” With that came backlash from some criminal justice reform advocates and even those in law enforcement. In 2024, it’s unclear where she stands ideologically as vice president.

Yet in her first speech this week as the likely Democratic presidential nominee, she was clear about how she plans to take on Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.

“I was a courtroom prosecutor, and in those roles I took on perpetrators of all kinds,” Harris said to campaign staffers at her Delaware headquarters. She went on to list some of the types of cases she once prosecuted: “Predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain. So, hear me when I say I know Donald Trump’s type.”

“In this campaign, I will proudly,” she repeated, “I will proudly put my record against his.” 

As those remarks were met with applause from the crowd, reactions from those in the criminal justice reform space were more mixed. Some were on high alert and listening for words that could feed into Trump’s rhetoric about, and toward, Black people — the former president said that Black people can relate to him because of his criminal conviction and pending prosecutions. Others were energized, and for some it sparked curiosity and critiques about her past as San Francisco’s district attorney and California’s attorney general. And other critics were simply skeptical about her ascension.

“I do believe that the normal process that would take place at the Democratic National Convention should still take place as it has in years past. I don’t think it’s very democratic to simply appoint her as the nominee,” said the Rev. Keyanna Jones, an activist and pastor at Park Avenue Baptist Church in Atlanta.

Jones, like some on the left, are not convinced that Harris is the right candidate.

In her second year as California’s AG, Harris’ office fought to keep a man behind bars even after his defense attorney was disbarred and two judges said he would not have been convicted had jurors heard additional evidence. And in the following year, legislation Harris supported to criminalize truancy led to a Black mother’s arrest for her daughter’s school absences while she was receiving treatment for sickle cell disease.

Read More: Where Does Kamala Harris Stand on Key Issues Affecting Black Voters?

“Those are not things that I can support or get behind,” Jones said. “She does not represent me or any of my values.”

While part of that skepticism is fueled by misconceptions about Harris’ prosecutorial and legislative record, her legacy in the criminal legal system is complicated. As a prosecutor, she mixed criminal justice reform with a tough-on-crime approach that put her at odds with progressives and police. 

She “did the work as a prosecutor”

In her decades long career, Harris has spent more time as a prosecutor in California than as a senator or vice president in Washington.

Her career has been filled with roles where she and the other 1% of elected Black women prosecutors broke barriers. She was the first Black and South Asian woman to get elected as San Francisco’s district attorney, California’s attorney general, and vice president of the United States. 

In 2005, as San Francisco district attorney, she created one of the first Back on Track programs in the country. It is described as “a reentry initiative aimed at reducing recidivism among low-level drug-trafficking defendants.” This is where the term “progressive prosecutor” was born. As the DA, she was against utilizing the death penalty as a form of sentencing for a high-level felony. Yet, in 2010, as the California attorney general, her office continued to pursue the controversial form of punishment in criminal cases. 

As the state’s AG, she became the head of over 1,100 federal prosecutors. In 2014, prosecutors in the attorney general’s office argued against releasing incarcerated individuals who are eligible for early release because they needed them for cheap labor to fight the California wildfires. Harris conceded at the time that she wasn’t aware of her office’s stance.

But for Max Parthas, that was a missed opportunity by Harris to correct an ongoing human rights issue of using incarcerated people to work free-world jobs at a low cost.

“Harris’ office put out a letter saying that it would cost over a billion dollars a year for California to pay inmates salaries for the work they do, and California can’t afford them, so they just kept doing it,” said Parthas, the national campaign coordinator and a founding member of the Abolish Slavery National Network.

As a chief prosecutor, Harris enforced policies and laws that included criminalizing marijuana, but her office didn’t issue jail sentences for low-level amounts. Since then, Harris has changed her tune about prosecuting individuals for smoking weed, and as a first-year senator, she co-sponsored a bill that reclassifies the plant’s addiction level to less than that of heroin.

What seems like Harris flip-flopping, said Lillian Henny Alexander, a family law attorney in Harris County, Texas, is really an evolution. 

“What she’s going to appropriately do is expand her messaging,” Alexander said. “I think the way that she does it is to say, ‘Look, I did the work as a prosecutor, but here’s some receipts of where I was still sensitive to race and if you feel that I wasn’t sensitive to race or poverty, or circumstances, here’s how my initiatives will be better.’”

While in Congress, she co-authored the first draft of the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act. Biden also campaigned to sign it once it got through the U.S. Senate and onto his desk. The proposed police reform package has not made it to a vote in the Senate and was reintroduced in May by the late Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, who represented Texas. 

Perhaps with Harris as president, some hope, there’s a fighting chance to have some form of a robust criminal justice and policing reform as well as movement with other proposed bills that have stalled in Congress.

“She has more than proven that she has the qualifications, the charisma, the leadership and the respect to be our commander-in-chief,” said Sherry Boston, district attorney for DeKalb County, Georgia.

Boston, a Democrat who is also going to be on the ballot this November, supported Harris when she first ran for president in 2020. As an elected prosecutor, Boston sees her record in a much more positive light.

“When I look at myself, who became DA in the 2016 election, and those that have come in 2018 and 2020, we have seen the evolution of criminal justice reform from the prosecution space. I can tell you that the work that I’ve been able to do was done on the shoulders of Vice President Harris,” Boston told Capital B.

Boston pointed to Harris’ Back on Track pre-trial diversion initiative, which has been replicated in DA offices across the country, including her own.

“Now in 2024, we say the word ‘diversion’ and everybody knows what we mean, but when she was DA, that was not the case,” Boston said.

What the critics say

Harris’ critics also wonder if she learned from the criticism she faced during her 2020 campaign. And they hope that she’s mindful of the words she uses to describe people with justice system involvement — even Trump.

During her speech this week, she reminded supporters that she was a prosecutor for 30 years who has handled “perpetrators” like Trump before. 

“I just don’t feel comfortable with a cops and robbers scenario. I’d like for us to get to a point where we’re talking about the positive things of the candidate who is running, rather than trying to find out who’s the worst of the worst,” Parthas said.

Words like “offender,” “inmate,” “felon,” and “convict” are examples of dehumanizing language, DeAnna Hoskins, president and CEO of JustLeadershipUSA, a national organization of justice-impacted individuals that aims to reduce mass incarceration by 2030, said. “For the people who support you, when you dehumanize him [Trump], and they’re not in our world, it dehumanizes us. 

“We’re just asking, do not get caught up in the dehumanizing language — hold him accountable for his actions, and the policies he’s violated that turned into a criminal charge, but please refrain from using the word ‘felon’ and all of that rhetoric.”

There’s just too much on the line for many voters

Defense of Harris’ record does not fall entirely on deaf ears among criminal justice reformer advocates like Robyn Hasan-Simpson, who said she was initially wary of Harris but is now glad she is positioned to become the Democratic presidential nominee.

Hasan is the executive director of Women on the Rise, an advocacy group by and for formerly incarcerated women of color. Through her organization, Hasan has been an outspoken proponent of diversionary programs, and learning about Back on Track helped to sway her to Harris’ side.

“She’s done a lot around abortion access and [has] been pro Medicare,” Hasan said. In the aftermath of the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn Roe v. Wade, Hasan, like many women, have been ready for a candidate that unequivocally supports the right to choose.

Hasan said she was hearing a lot of apathy from the people around her when the candidates were Biden and Trump, but now they’ve become reinvigorated. She was one of 44,000 Black women to join a Zoom call earlier this week in support of Harris’ candidacy.

And for Hoskins, there’s just too much at stake.

“Everybody has stepped up. We have too much on the line. Project 2025, is not going to win. I ain’t built for what Trump is bringing to the table — you gotta be born into slavery for what they finna bring.”

This story has been updated.