Vice President Kamala Harris took an aggressive stance on school security during her time as San Francisco District Attorney.
In a 2010 speech to the Commonwealth Club of California, Harris backed adding more security measures to protect students in city schools. She said she would prefer not to take aggressive security measures but felt they were necessary. She said upping the number of police officers in school and setting up metal detectors were two ideas she’d support.
“The reality, again the harsh reality, is that if these children, as many do, think that when they walk onto the school playground, one of their classmates has a gun, they’re not going to focus, and they will not be able to be in an environment where they can learn,” Harris said in a speech uncovered by The Reload. “So, whatever we need to do to make that school safe, I say we have to do. I’d like to end violence and rid all communities of illegal weapons, but, until we do that, then we need to have safe classrooms, and if that means having a metal detector or having more school resource officers, then, you know, tough times are cause for tough measures.”
The speech sheds new light on how Harris has viewed the issue of school security over the years. It could impact how some undecided voters ultimately break, which may matter a lot in such a closely contested race.
Harris has not always supported adding more school resource officers (SROs). In fact, during her 2019 presidential campaign, she called for eliminating them altogether.
“What we need to do about demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of schools,” Harris said at Benedict College’s Presidential Justice Forum. “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.”
However, during her time as Vice President, the Biden Administration has continued to fund grants for schools looking to deploy SROs. In 2023, it also allocated $73.6 million in funding for additional school security measures. While that funding can’t be used to hire SROs, it can be used to install metal detectors.
Meanwhile, her opponent, Donald Trump, supports school resource officers. In 2018, Trump signed the STOP School Violence Act, which provided $75 million in funding for hiring more school officers–although he has also exaggerated how much financing the law provided. Additionally, Trump has backed arming teachers, who he said were better suited to protect their students than police.
“These teachers love their students, and these teachers are talented with weaponry and with guns,” Trump said during a speech at the Conservative Political Action Conference in the wake of the Parkland shooting. “I’d rather have somebody that loves their students and wants to protect their students than somebody standing outside who doesn’t know the students.”
Harris’s 2010 support for begrudgingly hardening schools dovetails with Republican Vice Presidential nominee JD Vance’s position and contrasts with Democratic nominee Tim Walz’s comments during their September debate. Vance said he didn’t want his kids to have to attend a school with visible security measures but felt it may be necessary for their safety.
“The idea that we can magically wave a wand and take guns out of the hands of bad guys just doesn’t fit with recent experience,” Vance said. “So, we’ve gotta make our schools safer. I think we’ve gotta have some commonsense, bipartisan solutions for how to do that.”
Walz disagreed. He pointed to Finland as an example of a country that doesn’t have school shootings “even though they have a high gun ownership rate.”
“No one is trying to scaremonger and say we’re taking your guns,” he said. “But I ask all of you out there, do you want your schools hardened to look like a fort? Is that what we have to do when we know there’s countries around the world that their children aren’t practicing these kinds of drills, they’re being kids.”
The Harris Campaign did not respond to The Reload‘s questions about her 2010 comments, how she’d square them with Walz’s comments, or why her views changed over time.
Harris also spoke about other gun policy areas during her speech to the Commonwealth Club. She said she’d taken a double-pronged approach to law enforcement as district attorney, with a strict policy for enforcing gun crimes and a more lenient approach to rehabilitating low-level, non-violent drug offenders. She claimed she doubled the number of violent felons her office sent to state prison but also created a new program focused on providing job training for first-time drug dealers between the ages of 18 and 24.
“I created a gun policy,” Harris said. “Some said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Well, guns kill, and so we’re going to take gun crime seriously.’ And we increase the conviction rates for gun crimes from 43 percent to over 90 percent. The basic work that must happen in responding to crime after it occurs. But then we also created a re-entry unit in our office which is one of the only re-entry units of a DA’s office in the country.”
She also said she put a particular emphasis on pursuing gun trafficking crimes, especially those where adults gave guns to minors.
“I take seriously, in particular, those cases involving anyone, be they a minor or an adult, who illegally possesses and uses a gun,” she said. “So, that often will require prosecution of those cases, but it also means that we have focused an incredible amount of attention and priority on the issue of adults furnishing guns to minors and the step beyond that. And it’s something that our new police chief–who was fantastic–George Gascone has talked a lot about, which is also focusing resources on the people who are trafficking guns into our communities in a way that they’re ending up in the hands of people who are committing violent crime.”
The 2010 comments on SROs and metal detectors are not the only time Harris spoke to the Commonwealth Club of California about gun policy. In audio unearthed earlier this week, Harris expressed doubt that the 2005 San Francisco handgun ban ballot initiative she’d backed was constitutional.
