Harris Cracked Down on Violent Offenders, Showed Leniency on Less Serious Crime

From the moment that Kamala Harris took her place among 57 counterparts at the 2004 California District Attorneys Association annual conference, it was an open question how, if at all, the first Black, Asian American and female D.A. in the state’s history would fit in.

Ms. Harris, whose mother was Indian and whose father is Jamaican American, did not even blend in back home in liberal San Francisco County’s law enforcement circles. The county had never before elected a woman, a Black person or an Asian American as its district attorney, much less all three at the same time. She was equally rare nationwide: When Ms. Harris won in December 2003, she became one of only three elected Black district attorneys in the entire country.

“They looked at her like she had four heads,” said Debbie Mesloh, Ms. Harris’s communications director at the time, about her appearance a month later at the district attorneys’ conference in Santa Barbara, a conclave of conservative, throw-the-book-at-them prosecutors.

“It was an organization of mostly older Caucasian Republican men,” said Gilbert Otero, the former district attorney of Imperial County, who was there. Ms. Harris, he said, had “these beliefs that didn’t normally jibe with our crowd. She and I had a little spat at one roundtable over the death penalty and the three-strikes-and-you’re-out policy — me for both and her against.”

But over time Mr. Otero came to view Ms. Harris as a law enforcement ally. He endorsed her as the Democratic candidate for state attorney general in 2010. One of her first trips after she won was to tour a tunnel dug by Mexican traffickers to transport drugs into Mr. Otero’s county.

“She kept her promise that she would show up,” Mr. Otero said. “It meant a lot to law