Kamala’s Long-Time Protégé Wants to Defund the Police and Empty Jails

(DCNF)—One of Vice President Kamala Harris’ long-time pupils has spent her career working to weaken law enforcement.

Lateefah Simon, who is running for Congress in California, has known Harris for roughly two decades, with the now-vice president officiating her wedding, mentoring her, giving her a government job and campaigning on her behalf in 2016 when she ran to join the board of directors for the Bay Area’s public train system, according to multiple media reports. Simon ultimately succeeded in her 2016 run for office, providing a major boost to her long career working to weaken law enforcement.

Following the death of George Floyd in 2020, Simon pushed to cut funding for law enforcement on public transit in the Bay Area by $2 million and shift the resources to “unarmed ambassadors,” The San Francisco Chronicle reported. Nearly half of people who ride public trains in the Bay Area said they had witnessed a crime, and roughly 85% of riders reported they would use the system more often if it were cleaner or safer, according to a 2023 poll.

“This call for defunding and abolishing — it really means defund and abolish the way we did things before,” Simon said about her push to reduce the number of transit police in the Bay Area, according to the Chronicle. Simon brags on her campaign website about implementing “progressive policing policies” during her time as a public transit official.

After Harris hired Simon in 2005 to oversee a program in the San Francisco Attorney General’s Office that expunged the criminal records of some first-time drug dealers, she joined the Rosenberg Foundation in 2011 as its program director, the Washington Free Beacon reported. The Rosenberg Foundation joined forces with the Soros family’s Open Society Foundations in 2014 to successfully advocate for a ballot initiative that sought to decriminalize drug dealing and retail theft.

In interviews, Simon has made it clear that Harris has been a very strong influence on her career.

She described the vice president as “a little bit mentor and a little bit family” in a July interview with a Bay Area NPR affiliate. Harris “is auntie status, she is mentor status,” Simons said.

Simons has most recently been employed by some of the anti-police megadonors supporting Harris’ presidential campaign.

Between 2016 and 2022, Simon was the president of the Akonadi Foundation, a nonprofit founded to fund activism aimed at diminishing the power of law enforcement and reducing the number of criminals in jail, public records show. The Akonadi Foundation was co-founded by Quinn Delaney, a major Democratic donor who endorsed Harris shortly after President Joe Biden announced he was suspending his reelection campaign.

Delaney was one of the primary donors working alongside George Soros to elect liberal prosecutors in California during 2020 and opposes a 2024 ballot that will increase the penalties for retail theft, according to Politico.

Simons’ most recent job has been as the president of MeadowFund, a donor-advised fund founded by Patty Quillin, the wife of Netflix CEO Reed Hastings, according to her LinkedIn page. Quillin and Hastings donated $1.75 million to support George Gascon, the Soros-backed candidate for Los Angeles District Attorney in 2020, Deadline reported. The couple has also emerged as major financial backers of Harris’ White House bid.

While Harris reportedly invited Simon to speak at the Democratic National Convention and has praised her at private fundraisers, the vice president has stopped short of endorsing her protégé. Despite presenting herself as a tough-on-crime prosecutor, Harris has received extensive support from donors seeking to weaken law enforcement.

The Simon and Harris campaigns did not immediately respond to the Daily Caller News Foundation’s request for comment.

All content created by the Daily Caller News Foundation, an independent and nonpartisan newswire service, is available without charge to any legitimate news publisher that can provide a large audience. All republished articles must include our logo, our reporter’s byline and their DCNF affiliation. For any questions about our guidelines or partnering with us, please contact [email protected].