Loved ones of students killed in school shootings slammed Vice President Kamala Harris after unearthed comments from 2019 surfaced this week, detailing that Harris supports removing police officers from schools.
“My brother was killed in the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting because of liberal policies like the one Kamala is pushing here… I wish there had been a police officer there to protect him. Students need more protection, not less!,” school safety advocate JT Lewis posted to X. Lewis’ younger brother, six-year-old Jesse Lewis, was killed in the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting in Connecticut that left 26 children and staffers dead.
Lewis was reacting to unearthed footage of Harris in 2019, when she was a California senator, declaring her support of removing police officers from schools in an effort to “demilitarize” campuses.
“What we need to do about … demilitarizing our schools and taking police officers out of schools. 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,” Harris said in 2019 in South Carolina, when she served as a California senator running for president during the 2020 cycle.
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Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at the American Federation of Teachers’ 88th National Convention on July 25, 2024, in Houston, Texas. (Montinique Monroe/Getty Images)
Harris joined the 2019 Presidential Justice Forum at Benedict College in Columbia, South Carolina, in October of that year before she dropped out of the 2020 race and was announced as President Biden’s running mate. A college student asked Harris how she would go about expunging the records of juveniles to allow them to attend college, including expunging “a criminal offense,” not “just a marijuana expungement.”
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The Connecticut House of Representatives passed the state’s largest gun control initiative since the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting in a 96-51 vote. (AP Photo/Robert F. Bukaty, File)
“That’s a great question and a great point, because when we talk about reform of the criminal justice system, we’ve got to understand that the juvenile justice system is in dire need of reform, and I know that. And I’ve seen it,” Harris responded, touting her 2020 campaign’s “plan of action” on criminal justice reform.
“I will end solitary confinement of juveniles, which includes what we need to do to talk about and have a commitment for less incarceration of juveniles. And have guidelines in terms of exactly what those, those numbers should be, because right now, in so many states, children are being incarcerated for … a child being incarcerated for a couple of days is traumatic, much less the weeks, months and years that we’re seeing that happen,” she explained.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Harris presidential campaign earlier this week inquiring whether she still supports removing police officers from schools, but did not receive a reply.
Crews use heavy equipment to tear down the 1200 building of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School on Friday, June 14, 2024, in Parkland, Fla. On February 14, 2018, a gunman entered the school and killed 17 people. (Miami Herald)
Other family members of school-shooting victims joined Lewis in their condemnation of Harris’ 2019 comments, including Ryan Petty and Andrew Pollack, two dads who lost their respective teenage daughters in the tragic Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in 2018.
“Wreckless. Radical. Kamala wants to make schools less safe. Your kids aren’t safe with Kamala Harris in office,” Petty, who lost his 14-year-old daughter Alaina Petty in the 2018 shooting, tweeted in response to the Trump War Room posting footage of Harris’ comments.
People visit the memorial for the victims of Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School shooting in Parkland, Florida, which killed 17 people, on the fifth anniversary of the massacre on February 14, 2023. Seventeen people were killed, and another seventeen were injured after a 19-year-old former student opened fire at the school on February 14, 2018. (Photo by Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images) (Chandan Khanna/AFP via Getty Images)
“This is sickening. My daughter was killed because Parkland didn’t have enough security. We need more school resource officers — not fewer!” Pollack, whose 18-year-old daughter Meadow Pollack was killed in the same shooting, posted on X.
Harris’ comments declaring support for the removal of officers from schools were made ahead of 2020’s summer of protests and riots in response to the killing of George Floyd during a police interaction on Memorial Day of that year. Floyd’s death reignited calls from activists to defund the police, which had a cascading effect across the country as liberal cities moved to slash police budgets, and school boards also voted to sever ties with police departments.
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Researchers with the outlet Education Week found in 2022 that at least 50 school districts between May 2020 through June 2022 had removed officers from school campuses or slashed budgets for school officers. The plans to remove officers from schools, however, were short-lived in many jurisdictions, as violence broke out on campuses when students returned to the classrooms following the pandemic and its lockdowns.
In the face of violence, such as a shooting at a Denver high school, or repeated fights within the Alexandria, Virginia, school district, education officials from coast to coast backtracked on removing officers, welcoming them back to campuses in an effort to curb crime.
Vice President Harris has not sat down for an interview or held a press conference since emerging as the Democratic presidential nominee. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
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Harris officially accepted the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in Chicago last week. She rose to the top of the ticket after President Biden dropped out of the race last month amid mounting concerns over his mental acuity.