Here's where the 2024 presidential candidates stand on crime and criminal justice
Policing and criminal justice are two of the issues on the campaign trail ahead of the 2024 presidential election.
Former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris differ over how they would handle public safety and criminals. Broadly speaking, Republicans want to increase punishments and policing to address crime, while Democrats want to reform the system.
Here's a brief look at where the major candidates stand on the issue.
Kamala Harris
While in her 2019 campaign, she expressed support for some of the principles underlying the "defund the police" movement, she moved away from those stances. The Harris campaign has touted the Biden administration's $15 billion in funding for public safety in the American Rescue Plan and pledged to continue to invest in funding law enforcement, including the hiring and training of officers.
As vice president, she supported President Joe Biden's signing of a policing order to create a national database of police misconduct, ban chokeholds unless deadly force is authorized and mandate anti-bias training.
As a senator, she introduced the George Floyd Justice in Policing Act, which called for increasing accountability for police misconduct and banning racial profiling.
Harris has been leaning into her background as a prosecutor with a record of keeping Americans safe, touting her role in taking on big banks and drug cartels when she was California's attorney general.
Donald Trump
During his tenure in the White House, Trump played a major role in enacting the First Step Act, a criminal justice reform law that reduced some mandatory minimum prison sentences, gave judges the power to sentence nonviolent drug offenders to less time behind bars and more, such as increasing job training to lower recidivism rates.
Trump has supported rehabilitation-focused measures for nonviolent crimes -- but, at the same time, he has advocated for the death penalty for drug dealers and repeatedly used hardline rhetoric when talking about criminals.
He's also advocated for increased police powers, vowing to give officers immunity from prosecution, and issued a broad pledge to "return law and order to our streets."
ABC News' Gabriella Abdul-Hakim, Libby Cathey, Abby Cruz, Hannah Demissie, Fritz Farrow, Lalee Ibssa, Soo Rin Kim, Nicholas Kerr, Will McDuffie, Kendall Ross and Kelsey Walsh contributed to this report.
