A former aide of Vice President Kamala Harris who is supported by the 2024 hopeful has a progressive history of trying to erode law enforcement.
Lateefah Simon, 47, has known Harris, 60, for two decades and refers to the vice president as “auntie” — she’s now running for Congress in California’s 12th Congressional District.
Harris even officiated Simon’s wedding and advised her on getting her government job, according to a report from conservative outlet Daily Caller. The vice president also campaigned for Simon in 2016 when he ran for the board of directors of California’s Bay Area public rail system.
Among Simon’s efforts were pushing to cut funding for public transportation law enforcement and expunging the criminal records of some first-time drug dealers.
Simon told reporters in multiple interviews that Harris has had a big impact on his career.
Congressional candidate Lateefah Simon, 47, speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, on August 21.
In a July interview with an NPR affiliate, he described the vice president as “a little bit of a mentor and a little bit of family.”
“(Harris) has aunt status, she has mentor status,” Simon said.
Simon is seeking to replace outgoing Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the House of Representatives for the California district that includes Oakland and Berkeley, as well as other Bay Area cities.
He is running in the general election against fellow Democrat Jennifer Tran.
Simon advocated cutting funding for law enforcement on public transportation by $2 million and instead switching to using ‘unarmed ambassadors’ amid the defund police movement following the death of George Floyd in 2020, a report from the San Francisco Chronicle.
This happened even though 85 percent of riders in the Bay Area reported they would use the public transportation system more if it were safer or cleaner, a 2023 survey revealed. And half of riders said they They had witnessed a crime on public transport.
Simon says Vice President Kamala Harris is like an ‘aunt’ to her and praised her ‘mentor’ for influencing her career so much.
“This call to defund and abolish…really means defund and abolish the way we did things before,” Simon said when speaking about his push to reduce the number of transit police in the Bay Area.
Simon also boasts on her campaign website about implementing “progressive policing policies” during her time as a public transportation official.
Harris hired Simon in 2005 to oversee a program in the San Francisco Attorney General’s Office to expunge the criminal records of first-time offenders accused of trafficking illegal drugs.
A Washington Free Beacon report revealed that in 2011 Simon became program director of the Rosenberg Foundation, which partners with the liberal Open Society Foundations to advocate for the decriminalization of drug trafficking and retail theft.
