Kamala Harris' Greenwashed Justice
Kamala Harris has told the same anecdote about taking on environmental racism from industrial polluters in San Francisco dozens of times. Our investigation shows it never happened.
This investigation was reported in collaboration with RealClearInvestigations.
SAN FRANCISCO—Vice President Kamala Harris has long cast herself as a fearless pioneer of efforts to fight for social and environmental justice.
“When I was elected DA of San Francisco,” Harris told a gathering at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta last year, “I started the first environmental justice unit of any DA’s office in the country.”
In her telling, the San Francisco District Attorney formed the special environmental justice unit in the early 2000s especially to protect the long-neglected community of Bayview Hunters Point, a predominantly African American and impoverished part of the city, which had become “a dumping ground for people from other places.” In dozens of speeches and interviews in recent years, Harris has bragged that she went “after polluters” and protected minority communities in San Francisco in novel ways as a local prosecutor.
The narrative has become a bedrock of Harris’ political identity. She featured her DA environmental justice crimes unit in her first statewide television advertisement and she rarely missed an opportunity to tout the history during her presidential bid, during which she promised similar initiatives if elected.
But records from the San Francisco District Attorney’s office and interviews with local environmental advocates point to a different, far less ambitious record.
“We’re unaware of any major or semi-major environmental justice work done by Harris in Bayview Hunters Point, including on the Hunters Point Shipyard Superfund site,” said Bradley Angel, executive director of Greenaction for Health and Environmental Justice, a progressive watchdog group that seeks to “to promote environmental, social, economic and climate justice.”
Steve Castleman, an attorney with UC Berkeley’s Environmental Law Clinic, who has worked on urban pollution issues in the Bay Area, also noted that he did not know of any significant Harris environmental justice action as DA.
Far from targeting powerful corporate interests, Harris’ environmental justice unit appears to have filed only a few lawsuits, all against small-time defendants. The targets included a young man who conducted illegal smog checks at a small auto body shop in the city and a left-leaning community newspaper accused of illegally dumping leftover ink in an abandoned lot. Another defendant charged by the unit was a small construction company accused of using adulterated concrete.
The major industrial polluters of San Francisco were left untouched under Harris’ watch during her two terms that ended in 2010.
Ernie Apreza, Harris’ spokesperson, did not respond to repeated requests for comment.
Despite its green reputation, San Francisco has a fraught history of urban pollution, and Bayview Hunters Point, a roughly four-square-mile area with about 35,000 residents, is a notoriously polluted area. The community, once an industrial hub and a beacon for black workers who flocked to the city for jobs during World War II, is filled with contaminated former factories and commercial warehouses.
It is currently the site of a scrap metal recycling facility and a notorious sewage treatment plant. Diesel trucks still frequent the neighborhood, often sitting idle and spewing emissions into the air.
The yard is called a repository of radioactive waste, "piles of asbestos, ponds of oil, crushed heavy metals, discarded batteries, spilled acids, and other toxic chemicals.”
Most of all, there is the toxic legacy of the U.S. Navy shipyard that once occupied this area. The Navy once cleaned and repaired its ships used for atomic bomb missions in the Pacific at Hunters Point. The legacy left all types of hazardous waste from these operations in the soil here, a mess that remains unresolved. The city impaneled a special oversight grand jury to investigate the Hunters Point shipyard. The 2022 report concluded that much of the former area is still a wasteland of not only radioactive materials but also industrial pollution featuring “piles of asbestos, ponds of oil, crushed heavy metals, discarded batteries, spilled acids, and other toxic chemicals.”
The federal contractor hired in 2002 to clean up the area at a cost of about $1 billion, Tetra Tech, has faced major delays and a legacy of fraud. Two of its workers were sentenced in 2018 for falsifying records. Despite claims of progress, radioactive materials continue to be found, as recently as December. Against this backdrop, there were many potential investigative targets for any aggressive campaign to hold corporate polluters accountable. But Harris, records suggest, was far more keen to provide gestures toward enforcement rather than action.
In response, Harris unveiled a new initiative, which she promoted to the media. “Recognizing that criminal prosecution can be an effective way to hold polluters accountable and protect the health of our city’s residents,” read a press release from her office, “District Attorney Harris recently established the Environmental Justice Unit.”
Harris hired Davina Pujari, an experienced prosecutor with a history of environmental law and public integrity cases, to lead the office, and soon after its creation, the EJU pursued its first case.
In December 2004, the DA charged Alameda Publishing Corp. – the parent of several Bay Area newspapers catering to the black community, including the Oakland Post, the San Francisco Post, and the Berkeley Tri-City Post – and two men with felony dumping violations. The year before, the company had reportedly hired the men to haul away about 40 five-gallon buckets of red, green, black, and blue ink. In exchange for $500, the men roamed around and found an empty lot in Bayview Hunters Point where they left the unopened buckets. The crime was hardly that of a sophisticated criminal operation: Stickers left on the buckets identified the newspaper owners.
The DA’s office came down hard, charging felonies and fees related to removal of the five-gallon containers. The East Bay Express, a local alt-weekly, noted at the time that the charges were brought just one week after the paper’s longtime owner, Velda Berkley, had completed the sale of the paper. A long legal battle ensued between her and the new owner, Paul Cobb. While reporting that no firm connection could be established, the Express reported that Harris’ mother, while denying knowing Berkley, said she “might belong to a bridge group that I have gone to.”