A former mentee of Vice President Kamala Harris, who is backed by 2024 hopeful, he has a progressive track record of trying to gut law enforcement.
Lateefah Simon, 47, has known Harris, 60, for 20 years and calls the vice president “aunt.” She is now running for Congress in California’s 12th Congressional District.
Harris even officiated Simon’s wedding and guided her through getting her government job, according to one report from conservative outlet the Daily Caller. The VP also campaigned for Simon in 2016 when he ran for the board of directors of California’s Bay Area public train system.
Simon’s efforts included cutting funding for public transportation law enforcement and expunging the criminal records of some novice drug dealers.
Simon told reporters in multiple interviews that Harris has had a major impact on her career.
Congressional candidate Lateefah Simon, 47, speaks at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, Illinois, on August 21
In a July interview with an NPR affiliate, she described the vice president as “a little bit of mentor and a little bit of family.”
‘[Harris] has the status of an aunt, she has the status of a mentor,” Simon said.
Simon is seeking to replace retiring Congresswoman Barbara Lee in the House of Representatives for California’s district, which includes Oakland and Berkeley, as well as other Bay Area cities.
She is running in the general election against fellow Democrat Jennifer Tran.
Simon advocated cutting funding for public transit law enforcement by $2 million and instead shifting to using “unarmed ambassadors” amid the defunded police movement following the 2020 death of George Floyd , according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle.
This happened despite the fact that 85 percent of Bay Area passengers said they would use public transit more if it were safer or cleaner, a 2023 poll found. And half of passengers said that they had witnessed a crime on public transport.
Simon says Vice President Kamala Harris is like an ‘aunt’ to her and praises her ‘mentor’ for influencing her career so much
“This call for defunding and abolition really means defunding and abolishing the way we used to do things,” Simon said when speaking about her push to reduce the number of transit police in the Bay Area.
Simon also brags on her campaign website about implementing “progressive policing policies” during her time as a public transportation official.
Harris hired Simon in 2005 to oversee a program in the San Francisco attorney general’s office to expunge criminal records of people who accused first-time offenders of trafficking illegal drugs.
A Washington Free Beacon report revealed that in 2011, Simon became program director of the Rosenberg Foundation, which partners with the liberal Open Society Foundations to advocate for decriminalizing drug trafficking and shoplifting.