Washington.– As Donald J. Trump tests out lines of attack against Vice President Kamala Harris, he has claimed that people who shoplift in California are allowed to steal up to $950 without consequences — and that Harris is to blame.
Trump, the former Republican president, has increasingly targeted Harris’s home state of California policies as a way to portray her as too liberal to the national electorate and is trying to curb her efforts to appeal to moderate voters.
Harris, a Democrat, served as San Francisco district attorney and California attorney general before becoming a senator in 2017.
“You are allowed to rob a store as long as it is not more than $950,” Trump said at a news conference in New Jersey this month.
“There are thieves who go to stores with a calculator to find out how much they are stealing, because if it is less than $950, they are not charged. That is what she did.”
In 2014, California voters overwhelmingly approved reducing penalties for some theft and drug possession offenses.
Those changes came as crime rates in California declined from previous decades and federal courts ordered the state to reduce its prison population.
Trump has sought to pin that change on Harris, who was California’s attorney general at the time the law went into effect.
Although she never took a public position on the measure, saying she wanted to remain neutral because she was responsible for drafting the language used in the summary of the measure that would appear on the ballots.
Harris’s language in Proposition 47 was seen as cautious and honest.
Trump’s claim that shoplifting items worth $950 or less is not a crime in California is false, because such acts can be considered a misdemeanor, which carries a jail sentence of about six months.
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