 [Politico] Kamala Harris said police shootings and cases of alleged brutality by law enforcement officials should be handed off to independent investigators, breaking with her long-held resistance to taking prosecutorial discretion away from locally elected district attorneys.
Harris, a former career prosecutor and California attorney general, had long advocated in favor of preserving prosecutorial discretion, taking heat from civil rights activists and African American leaders in her state. While running for Senate in 2016, she was criticized for withholding her support for state legislation requiring the Attorney General’s office to independently probe fatal police shootings. Now, campaigning for president, Harris was asked about her stance amid calls for more scrutiny over the investigative process.
"I believe the best approach is to have independent investigations," Harris said in a Monday interview on MSNBC.
When Harris addressed the question head-on in 2014, she took the opposite approach. Harris said she didn’t think it good public policy to take the discretion from elected district attorneys. "I don’t think there’s an inherent conflict. ... Where there are abuses, we have designed the system to address them," she told the San Francisco Chronicle. 
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