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Vice President Kamala Harris is facing scrutiny from a California sheriff after refusing to say whether she voted for a proposition in her home state aimed at curbing the surging crime and theft in the state.
"California's Democrat leaders have long taken the side of criminals instead of standing up for crime victims and ordinary residents," Riverside County Sheriff Chad Bianco told Fox News Digital. "Proposition 36 will roll back some of the most harmful soft-on-crime policies California Democrats have enacted. It is the single most important thing on California's ballot this year, and will help clean up our streets and keep our neighborhoods safe.
"The Vice President's reluctance to vocally support this critical public safety measure is yet another failure in a long career of failures when it comes to keeping our citizens safe."
Harris, a former San Francisco district attorney, California attorney general and U.S. senator before she was elected vice president in 2020, declined over the weekend to answer about how she voted on Proposition 36. The California ballot measure would reverse criminal justice reforms made in her home state in recent years.
CALIFORNIA’S BATTLE OVER CRIME AND HOMELESSNESS IS A WARNING TO THE NATION
"I'm not going to talk about the vote on that because honestly it's the Sunday before the election, and I don't intend to create an endorsement one way or another around it," Harris said. "But I did vote."
The initiative, if passed, would make the crime of shoplifting a felony for repeat offenders and increase penalties for some drug charges, including those involving the synthetic opioid fentanyl. It also would give judges the authority to order people with multiple drug charges to get treatment.
The ballot measure is an effort to roll back Prop 47, labeled by supporters as the Safe Neighborhoods and Schools Act, passed by Californians in 2014. Prop. 47 reclassified felonies down to misdemeanors "unless the defendant had prior convictions of murder, rape, certain sex offenses, or certain gun crimes."
But in the last several years, retail chains and mom-and-pop shops have been hit hard by theft, smash-and-grab robberies and organized retail crime gangs. Prop. 36 — titled the Homelessness, Drug Addiction, and Theft Reduction Act — seeks to undo portions of Prop. 47 by boosting penalties for some crimes and could increase depending on each category.
Harris was California's attorney general at the time of Prop. 47's passage, and while she did not take a public position on it, her office was in charge of writing the title and summary of the measure on the actual ballot, which some residents felt was misleading.
"Quite frankly, we were lied to and misled by our state, in that the name and the description on the ballot was not something that we were getting," Bianco, a prominent Prop 36 supporter, told Fox News Digital earlier this year.
"We voted for a proposition that was named the Safe Schools and the Safe Streets Initiative and it contained absolutely nothing to do with safe streets or safe schools, and it was everything that is bad about public safety right now, directly contributing to the increase in homelessness, mental health and drug addiction. Directly resulted in what we see now in our serial theft cases, in our retail theft cases and issues in crime of residential burglaries and those types of things."
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris campaign but did not receive a response.
Fox News Digital's Danielle Wallace and Jamie Joseph contributed to this report
