Harris

Kamala Harris was distraught as she stood before an audience one morning in July 2016. In the previous three days, violence involving police had rattled the nation.

Officers had shot and killed one black man in Baton Rouge, La., and another in his car outside Minneapolis as his horrified girlfriend and her toddler watched. At a protest against those shootings, a sniper had killed five Dallas police officers.

“I have to tell you, my heart is breaking,” Harris said at a meeting on racial bias in policing. Her voice wavered.

“As a prosecutor, my heart is breaking. As the top law enforcement officer in this state. And as a black woman.”

Harris, then California attorney general, paid tribute to officers whose families pray they stay out of danger. She also said she’d never known a black man who wasn’t racially profiled or unfairly stopped.

It was an unusually frank acknowledgment of the forces pulling her in opposite directions in the two years since police killings of black men had set off demonstrations across the country and fueled the Black Lives Matter movement.

Seeking to reconcile the competing demands of police and civil rights groups, Harris tried to avoid inflaming either side. That relatively safe approach has left her open to criticism that she could have done more to lead California’s efforts to limit police use of lethal force.

Harris did make tangible advances in police accountability. She focused on programs inside the attorney general’s office, drawing praise from civil rights advocates and scant resistance from law enforcement.

At the same time, Harris, the state’s first black attorney general, steered clear of the legislative brawls over bills on policing, including what became a groundbreaking law to curb racial profiling. Harris also rejected pleas by civil rights activists to investigate deadly police shootings of young black men in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

“She is maybe a modest reformer, and that’s fine,” said Anne Weills, an Oakland civil rights attorney. “But I don’t think that means she is particularly progressive. She doesn’t look at the big picture about how to make structural change.”

On July 8, 2016, the Racial and Identity Profiling Advisory Board met to begin its work under Assembly Bill 953, focusing on eliminating racial and identity profiling in law enforcement.

For months, Harris has been fending off accusations, most recently in a debate Wednesday, that she did too little to fight racial bias in the criminal justice system.

Harris told The Times she was frustrated by the slow pace of change, but pointed to progress made during her tenure.

“You’d be hard pressed to find any other attorney general in America who at that time was doing the kind of transformative work that we did,” Harris said.

Harris had been attorney general for nearly four years when a white police officer shot and killed Michael Brown, an 18-year-old black man in Ferguson, Mo. The shooting on Aug. 9, 2014, reshaped the politics of race and law enforcement in America.

Video of Brown’s body, left face down in the street in a pool of blood for four hours, went viral on social media. Over the next several days, images of white cops in military vehicles firing tear gas and rubber bullets at mainly black protesters came to symbolize police violence against African Americans.

Police shootings became major news in the months that followed as they were captured in smartphone videos that spread nationwide.

“The death rate from police use of lethal force has been stable for a long time,” said Franklin Zimring, a criminologist and law professor at UC Berkeley. “What happened with Ferguson … was people started to notice that these things kept happening.”

Civil rights groups pressed for new limits on police power. Law enforcement, feeling besieged, fought many of the proposals.

For Harris, the timing was difficult. Police unions had overwhelmingly opposed her when she first ran for the job in 2010, in part because she declined to pursue the death penalty against the killer of a San Francisco police officer, Isaac Espinoza, when she was the San Francisco district attorney. She labored hard to secure their overwhelming support in her run for reelection.

“She had to walk a fine tightrope,” said Brian Marvel, a San Diego police officer and president of the Peace Officers Research Assn. of California, the state’s top police advocacy group.

But civil rights advocates also set high expectations.

“We always hope that because you look like us, you talk like us, you walk like us, you come from where we come from — that you’re not just reading about this in the news. You know there is a war being waged against black bodies,” said Cat Brooks, an Oakland activist who thought Harris fell short.

Police advance through tear gas toward demonstrators protesting the killing of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., in 2014.

(Scott Olson / Getty Images)

California lawmakers put police accountability high on their agenda after Ferguson. Among the most contentious bills was one pushed by civil rights organizations to collect data on the race of everyone stopped by police statewide to shed light on racial profiling.

Police groups — still a powerful political force in a state that has only recently tempered its strict law-and-order culture — resisted the bill, arguing it would be too burdensome.

Harris declined to take a position. After Jerry Brown, then governor, signed the bill into law, Harris won credit from civil rights groups for drafting strong rules putting it into effect.

Bill Lockyer, a former state attorney general, said Harris avoided battles in the Capitol, just a few blocks from her Sacramento office, and concentrated instead on running her own agency.

“I saw it as a general reluctance to have an active legislative role,” said Lockyer, a onetime state Senate leader who remained closely engaged in lawmaking as attorney general.

Daniel Suvor, Harris’ chief policy advisor at the time, said her preference was “to work directly with law enforcement and the civil rights community to get things done as opposed to engaging in superfluous dialogue.”

Harris’ authority over police practices was limited. In a state with nearly 80,000 police officers, the attorney general employed only about 300 — special agents who investigate healthcare fraud, gun violations and drug crimes. By November 2015, all agents in the field were equipped, on Harris’ order, with body-worn cameras.

Some advocates were seeking mandatory body cameras for nearly every officer in California. They tried unsuccessfully to pass a bill to create a statewide standard for their use. Harris spurned the proposal, saying she opposed a “one-size-fits-all approach.”

Another Harris project was anti-bias training for law enforcement agencies statewide, which proved popular. More than two dozen agencies participated in the first course. It remains part of the state’s formal officer training.

Harris’ signature achievement from this period was Open Justice, an online portal that, for the first time, made a wide array of criminal justice data available to the public, including tallies of deaths and injuries in police custody.

“She saw there was so much emotion and anecdote around the criminal justice reform conversation, and she wanted to inject data, facts and evidence into the conversation,” Suvor said.

It was the rare initiative embraced by both police and reform advocates.

“That was really, really helpful to the movement, because there was no place that we could look at in-custody deaths at the hands of law enforcement prior to that,” said Melina Abdullah, a Black Lives Matter organizer who chairs Cal State L.A.’s Pan-African studies department.

Harris was less successful in dodging political fallout when it came to calls for state investigations of high-profile shootings. Civil rights advocates viewed local prosecutors as inherently compromised in cases against police they worked closely with every day.

State intervention in local cases was a fraught issue for Harris. In 2004, Lockyer, then attorney general, had second-guessed her refusal to seek the death penalty for the killer of Espinoza, opening his own investigation into her decision. (He ultimately sided with Harris.)

“There’s no question that has influenced and did influence my perspective on this,” Harris said, adding she believed local officials are best held accountable by voters.

Community activists urged Harris to investigate two high-profile police shootings in California — Ezell Ford’s death in Los Angeles in 2014 and the 2015 killing of Mario Woods in San Francisco — but she demurred, saying she lacked legal grounds to overrule local prosecutors.

“I wouldn’t even say disappointed is a strong enough word for how we felt about how she did as attorney general,” said Kim McGill, an organizer with the Youth Justice Coalition.

Tritobia Ford, at left, mother of Ezell Ford, speaks in January 2017; protesters demonstrate against the shooting of Mario Woods in December 2015

(Los Angeles Times / Associated Press)

Critics suspected a political motive behind Harris’ stand against state probes of the L.A. and San Francisco police shootings.

“When she was running for attorney general, she was already running for president,” Weills said. “It’s a very calculated process. For her to start to alienate the whole law enforcement establishment by taking on these investigations … it might have destroyed her career.”

A 2015 bill, which failed to pass, would have required the attorney general to appoint a special prosecutor to take on cases involving police use of deadly force. Harris decline to support it.

Yet Harris did not always take a hard line against state probes of local police misconduct. She privately asked the governor for money to create teams of prosecutors to conduct such investigations in jurisdictions that consented to them. Brown refused, she told The Times.

After she won election to the U.S. Senate, and in her final days as attorney general, Harris opened civil rights investigations into the Kern County Sheriff’s Office and the Bakersfield Police Department, which remain ongoing under her successor, Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra.

Now, as she runs for president, Harris has more forcefully backed independent investigations of police wrongdoing. She has promised the U.S. Justice Department would pursue more robust oversight of racial bias in police departments nationwide. She has also vowed to push legislation to end racial profiling.

July 25 (UPI) — The Trump administration admitted that it canceled nearly $8 billion in grants slated for hundreds of clean energy projects “based solely” on whether a state voted for Kamala Harris for president, it was reported Friday.

In a recent court filing, a lawyer for the Energy Department said none of the axed projects lost their funding “based on any programmatic, statutory, cost-reduction or performance-based factor.”

The Trump administration attorney added, “The 284 terminated grants had a recipient location and/or at least one place of performance in a state that awarded its electoral votes to Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and has two Democratic-caucusing senators.”

The government’s admission, first reported by The New York Times, came out as part of a July 15 court filing in a class action lawsuit over the slashed grants.

The Department of Energy selected 600 grants for cancellation and sent the list to the Office of Management and Budget, which terminated 284 of them in October.

“Nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled,” OMB Director Russell Vought wrote on X.

Despite also being recommended for cancellation from energy officials, the OMB left untouched hundreds of projects in places that voted for Trump, court documents show.

“The inclusion of grants in the October notice tranche was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient’s state, i.e., whether the recipient’s location and/or place of performance was in a Blue State or a non-Blue State,” Trump administration lawyers wrote.

Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate minority leader, called the move “unprecedented Trumpism and something we should never become numb to.”

“Trump admits he’s ripping the rug out from under hardworking families so he can get revenge on the Americans who didn’t vote for him,” the New York democrat added. “It’s sick and deranged. His ego is so fragile, he’ll punish families already struggling to put food on the table for a little bit of vengeance.”

Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., said, “This mass partisan retribution is appalling, outrageous, dangerous, lawless, unconstitutional, unpatriotic and a massive offense against the Republic.”

“Every elected official must denounce this imbecilic deep betrayal of America,” Raskin added in a statement. “And the illegally impounded funds must be restored and released immediately to the blue states.”

Unlike Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris was caught before his death and was made to pay the price for his many years of criminal behaviour – but only in the UK

Survivors of Rolf Harris have spoken out for the first time about his abusive behaviour, with one branding the late entertainer and artist as a “disgusting old man”.

The Australian star, who died in 2023, was jailed in the UK for five years and nine months for indecent assault in 2014. One of those who helped to convict him was the best friend of his daughter Bindi, known as Victim A, who was just 13 years old when his attacks started.

Now a new documentary features other women revealing what they went through, with one assaulted by Harris when she was a teenager on a Mediterranean holiday, another attacked while making a TV commercial and a third while on tour with her theatre group in London.

Sunny was 15 when she was filming a TV ad alongside Harris, who was the face of a brand called British Paints. She said the assault happened soon after he arrived on set and stood very close to her, “right in my face”. “That’s when he assaulted me, then walked off. The reason I am doing this is to say to him ‘you are a disgusting old man and you can’t get away with it any more’. Just f*** right off,” she says.

Pamela was on holiday with her boyfriend and another couple in Malta in 1970. “I was 18, everything was fun,” she remembers, until they ran into Harris in a bar and he took her into another room to show her “more of his art”. “He just pushed me against the wall and he put his hands on my breast. He kissed me which was not very nice, very horrible,” she says. “And then he put his hands in my pants, up my dress. And then he said ‘I’m sorry’, and then he cuddled me.”

She believes she knows why his mood changed suddenly. “I really thought he was going to rape me – I had my period at the time. I think that’s why he stopped.”

Although the paedophile and serial sex offender had made the UK his home, he travelled regularly back to native Australia. Another victim, called Nina, said that she was 14 in 1984 when Harris came in to a motel where she was staying with her family because of her dad’s job.

“Rolf Harris started to touch me in quite an imposing way. He was rubbing himself up against me and putting his hands over my shoulders and touching my chest. I just didn’t know how to make him stop,” she recalls. “He was reciting a poem while he was groping me, rhythmically, groping my breasts in time to his little nursery rhyme. Obviously for him this was funny and this was how he was treating a child.”

Nina reported him to police at the time but the programme finds that New South Wales authorities have no record of her complaint. She now feels angry that they ignored what she told them. ‘They were looking at their watches, yawning. By disregarding it, this behaviour is escalated. He’s repeated it over and over again with children, and all those children have been damaged by him. The police could have addressed that in 1984 and they just didn’t choose to. The whole thing leaves you feeling isolated. It’s hard to describe the impact that has on your development and confidence.”

One of the most disturbing elements of the two-part documentary is how many people knew what he was up to but did nothing to stop him as he hung out with pals including Jimmy Savile. Investigative reporter Meirion Jones describes how his wife was warned about Harris while working at the BBC. He says an executive told her not to get into a lift with him on her own or walk up the stairs in front of him. “Management knew Rolf Harris was in the habit of groping, and they were trying to transfer that problem to the people around him, saying to women, ‘don’t put yourself in a position where he might attack you’.”

The first episode also features Cathy, who had come to London on a six week tour with her theatre group in 1986, when she was 15. She was told that Rolf Harris was going to come and watch their final performance to give feedback. “He said to me ‘come and sit on my lap’ and he was telling me how talented he thought I was and that I should keep going,” she remembers, growing tearful. “

He started to put his hand on my legs and going under my skirt. This is all happening while we’re all singing and talking and laughing. It was so bizarre, no one knew anything was going on. I just went really quiet and was in shock, I just thought ‘I wish my Mum was here’. I went to the bathroom and I started to cry, I wasn’t sure if it had really happened. I composed myself and walked out and when I did he was right by the door – with a big smile on his face. That’s when he assaulted me. He put his fingers inside me and assaulted me and then he just walked away.”

She said the assault has had a lasting impact on her and she never returned to the theatre group. “For that one moment of whatever he got from it – it destroys people’s lives. Not just six months or a year, your whole life. Nothing is the same.”

Ben Markham, Detective Inspector with the Metropolitan Police who worked on Operation Yewtree, said Victim A was motivated to come forward after seeing Harris appear on screen at one particular event in 2012. “The turning point came with the Queen’s jubilee,” he explains. “It was like a dam bursting, she just felt ‘this is enough’.

Rolf Harris: Primetime Predator is streaming now on Amazon Prime Video.

VICK Hope has shared a rare glimpse inside her and husband Calvin Harris’ £15M Ibiza home.

Calvin, 41, bought the stunning 138-acre farm, known as Terra Masia, back in 2022, and the couple spend their summers there – with the Scottish DJ remaining close to maintain his dual-residency at nearby superclub Ushuaïa Ibiza,

Last summer, Vick, 36, gave birth to their son Mica at the Spanish home, and has now shared a glimpse of the little one with dad Calvin at the home.

In a Father’s Day post for Calvin shared on Sunday, Vick shared a video of the musician serenading Mica in a sweet moment.

The clip sees Calvin sitting on the floor of their Ibiza home – which is neutrally decorated with a beige couch and textured nude rug – and playing a ukulele.

His son can be seen adorably dancing along to the tune, bobbing up and down in between his dad’s legs.

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In the clip, Calvin and Vick’s sprawling farm backdrop can be seen – with a large window showing the beautiful views and collection of trees.

Vick wrote alongside the video: “Happy first Father’s Day, love from the person you make dance the most”.

A number of celebrities took to the comment section on the post, with Davina McCall writing: “Awwwwwww xxxx my heart”.

“Awwwwwwww ❤️,” said Carol Vorderman.

The clip is a rare glimpse into Calvin and Vick’s life in Spain during the summers, with the couple – who married in 2023 – famously private about their personal lives.

The residence holds special memories for the couple, with Calvin reportedly popping the question to Vick underneath a grand tree there, as well as welcoming their son there.

Calvin bought the Ibiza property after selling his two multi-million pound mansions in Los Angeles.

The chart-topping DJ and producer’s sprawling 138-acre residence is known as Terra Masia, which is the largest organic farm in the White Isle.

It can produce veg, eggs, wine and farm-to-table meals, and also hosts special events such as weddings.

At the time, a source told The Sun: “Calvin employs an expert team including farmers and chefs.

“But that hasn’t stopped him getting involved and he regularly gets his hands dirty, helping to plant seeds and everything else involved in running a farm.

“He is really passionate about what he and the team are doing.”

When the couple aren’t spending their summers in Ibiza for Calvin’s residency, they reside in a countryside home in the Cotswolds.

There are plenty of compelling storylines involving Southland teams and athletes heading into the CIF state track and field championships this weekend in Clovis, perhaps none more enticing than Long Beach Wilson’s bid for the national record in the girls’ 4×400 relay.

Having just smashed Long Beach Poly’s 22-year-old California standard of 3:35.49 with their 3:33.83 clocking at the Southern Section Masters Meet in Moorpark last Saturday, the foursome of Brooke Blue, Brooklyn Fowler, Saniah Varnado and Clara Adams will try to go even lower.

Adams also established herself as the favorite to win the 400 meters at Buchanan High in Clovis — prelims are Friday and finals Saturday — after a blistering 51.98-second effort at the Masters Meet that broke the Southern Section record. The Bruins are vying for a fourth consecutive team title.

Servite won the boys’ team title last year and is well positioned to defend it if the Friars pile up points as expected in the relays and sprints, paced by junior Benjamin Harris, who anchored their nation-leading 39.70 clocking at the Arcadia Invitational, which broke the Friars’ own 4×100 state record. Harris remains the front-runner in the 100. His wind-aided 10.17-second timing in the 100 last weekend equaled the fourth-fastest time in state history.

Harris is the clear favorite since the last two state champions — Brandon Arrington of Spring Valley Mount Miguel (who reclassified from the 2026 to the 2025 recruiting cycle) and Concord De La Salle’s Jaden Jefferson (who graduated early) — are not in the field. Harris’ wind-aided 20.51 in the 200 two weeks ago also sets him up for a duel with Nicolas Obimga of Torrance (the wind-legal state leader at 20.66) and Elk Grove’s Cy Lugo (20.67), the Sac-Joaquin Section record holder.

In the 400, Servite’s Jaelen Hunter (whose 46.32 last spring was a state freshman record) will try to avenge his loss to Loyola’s Ejam Yohannes by 11-hundredths of a second at the Masters Meet.

Defending state 300 hurdles champion Jayden Rendon of Carson faces stiff competition in that event from state leader Brady Tse of San Jose Harker, Palm Desert’s Kingston Penny and Etiwanda’s Brandon Andrade.

Venice senior Lawrence Kensinger threw himself into the front-runner role with a personal-best and City Section record mark of 65-11 on May 21 and Sherman Oaks Notre Dame’s JJ Harel will try to repeat as high jump champion after clearing a state-leading 7-01 in the section finals two weeks ago.

Braelyn Combe beat Santa Rosa Montgomery’s Hanne Thomsen by five-hundredths of a second in a personal-best 4:35.64 in last year’s state 1,600 final and the Corona Santiago senior is favored to win that event again while attempting to become the first girl in state history to pull off a 1,600, 800 and 4×800 relay trifecta.

Irvine’s Summer Wilson, who broke the Woodward Park course record at the state cross-country finals in the fall and breezed to victory in the 3,200 meters at last week’s Masters Meet in a personal-best 10:14.25, is the co-favorite to win the eight-lapper Saturday along with La Jolla’s Chiara Dailey, the San Diego Section 800, 1,600 and 3,200 champion.

NEW YORK — Kamala Harris “wrote off rural America” during the 2024 presidential campaign and failed to attack Donald Trump with sufficient “negative firepower,” according to a long-awaited post-election autopsy released on Thursday by the Democratic National Committee.

The committee’s chair, Ken Martin, shared the 192-page report only after facing intense internal pressure from frustrated Democratic operatives concerned with his leadership. Martin had originally promised to release the autopsy, only to keep it under wraps for months because he was concerned it would be a distraction ahead of the midterms as Democrats mobilize to take back control of Congress.

On Tuesday, Martin apologized for his handling of the situation and conceded that the report was withheld because it “was not ready for primetime.”

Although the autopsy criticizes Democrats’ focus on “identity politics,” it sidesteps some of the most controversial elements of the 2024 campaign. The report does not address former President Joe Biden’s decision to seek reelection, the rushed selection of Harris to replace him on the ticket or the party’s acrimonious divide over the war in Gaza.

“I am not proud of this product; it does not meet my standards, and it won’t meet your standards,” Martin wrote in an essay on Substack on Thursday. “I don’t endorse what’s in this report, or what’s left out of it. I could not in good faith put the DNC’s stamp of approval on it. But transparency is paramount.”

A spokesperson for Harris did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The initial reaction from Democratic operatives was a mix of bafflement and anger over Martin’s handling of the situation.

“Why not say this in 2024, or bring in more people to finish it, instead of turning this into the dumbest media cycle for 7-8 months?” Democratic strategist Steve Schale wrote on social media.

Report says Democrats don’t ‘listen to all voters’

The postelection report, which was authored by Democratic consultant Paul Rivera, calls for “a renewed focus on the voters of Middle America and the South, who have come to believe they are not included in the Democratic vision of a stronger and more dynamic America for everyone.”

“Millions of Americans are suffering from poor access to healthcare, manufacturing and job losses, and a failing infrastructure, yet continue to be persuaded to vote against their best interests because they do not see themselves reflected in the America of the Democratic Party,” the report says.

The autopsy points to a reduction in support and training for Democratic state parties, voter registration shifts and “a persistent inability or unwillingness to listen to all voters.”

Thursday’s release comes as Martin confronts a crisis of confidence among party officials who are increasingly concerned about the health of their political machine barely a year into his term. Some Democratic operatives have had informal discussions about recruiting a new chair, even though most believe that Martin’s job wasn’t in serious jeopardy ahead of the midterm elections.

Were Democrats too nice?

The report found that Harris and her allies failed to focus enough on Trump’s negatives, especially his felony convictions. This was part of a broader criticism that Democrats’ messaging is too focused on reason and winning arguments, “even in cycles when the electorate is defined by rage.”

“There was a decision in the 2024 Democratic leadership not to engage in negative advertising at the scale required,” the report states. “The Trump campaign and supportive Super PACs went full throttle against Vice President Harris, but there was not sufficient or similar negative firepower directed at Trump by Democrats.”

The report continues: “It was essential to prosecute a more effective case as to why Trump should have been disqualified from ever again taking office. The grounds were there, but the messaging did not make the case.”

Trump’s attack on Harris’ transgender policies were cited as a key contrast.

Specifically, the report suggested the Democratic nominee was “boxed” in by the Trump campaign’s “very effective” ad that highlighted Harris’ previous statement of support for taxpayer-funded gender-affirming surgeries for prison inmates.

Democratic pollsters believed that “if the Vice President would not change her position – and she did not – then there was nothing which would have worked as a response,” the report said.

‘The math doesn’t work’

The report criticized Harris’ outreach to key segments of America while condemning the party’s focus on “identity politics.”

“Harris wrote off rural America, assuming urban/suburban margins would compensate. The math doesn’t work,” the report says. “You can’t lose rural areas by overwhelming margins and make it up elsewhere when rural voters are a significant share of the electorate. If Democrats are to reclaim leadership in the Heartland or the South, candidates must perform well in rural turf. Show up, listen, and then do it again.”

The report also references Democrats’ underperformance with male voters of color.

“Male voters require direct engagement. The gender gap can be narrowed. Deploy male messengers, address economic concerns, and don’t assume identity politics will hold male voters of color,” it says.

Peoples writes for the Associated Press.