An Oakland journalist was killed in 2007 and has become a campaign issue. Donald Trump and his backers have used it in a lot of national ads to show that Kamala Harris is not tough on crime.
Since Harris is likely to easily win California, most voters in the Bay Area probably won’t see either of the ads. They say Harris wasn’t tough enough as San Francisco’s district attorney and that he failed to stop the murder of Oakland Post editor Chauncey Bailey 17 years ago.
But Bailey’s family member and people who know about the case say there is no link between Harris’ work as a lawyer and his death.
When asked about the ad, Bailey’s sister Lorelei Waqia, who lives in Atlanta and has seen it, told the Bay Area News Group, “She had nothing to do with it.”
When contacted by email, a Trump campaign spokesperson did not react to the criticism. Instead, they pointed to current news stories that the campaign ad used as sources. A request for comment was sent to the Harris campaign, but they did not reply.
Bailey was killed in downtown Oakland on his way to work at the Post, where he was looking into a once-respected Oakland bakery that had become corrupt and full of crime. Bailey was from the East Bay and used to work as a writer for the Oakland Tribune.
The ads show a mugshot of Bailey’s killer, Devaughndre Broussard, and play out how he died in downtown Oakland from a hail of bullets.
They say that Broussard should have been in jail at the time of Bailey’s murder for assaulting someone before, but Harris, as San Francisco’s district attorney, made an exception for him and let him go.
Dan Schnur, a politics professor at the University of Southern California and a former Republican campaign spokesman, said that the ads are part of Republican former President Trump’s plan to hurt Democratic Vice President Harris’ credibility on crime with voters in the South and Midwest. Getting rid of crime was one of his main points as a candidate, he said.
Schnur said, “This isn’t the kind of ad that will decide the campaign.” “But it’s part of a bigger message plan, and these kinds of ads will have been very important if Trump wins.”
Last week, the first ad from the pro-Trump super PAC Make America Great Again Inc. showed up on the social media site X.
This election season, the PAC has spent $275.6 million to support Trump. AdImpact, a company that studies political ads, says that as of October 9, MAGA Inc. had set aside almost $67 million for future ad buys.
A picture of Harris and a picture of Broussard are shown together in the 30-second ad.
Someone speaks up and says, “As DA of San Francisco, Kamala Harris let killers go free.”
Another 30-second ad that Trump’s team paid for is more direct. It was shared by the former president on X on Monday.
It starts with a picture of a person wrapped in a white sheet at a crime scene and then cuts to a video of an actor playing Broussard firing a gun and running away.
A rough voice says, “This is a reporter named Chauncey Bailey.” “We can’t show you his face.” This man’s 12-gauge pistol blew it away.
“Unfortunately, the killer should never have been there,” the ad says next. “He should have gone to jail.”
Harris served as the district attorney for San Francisco from 2004 to 2010. Two years before Bailey was killed, Broussard and some friends robbed and beat up a man in San Francisco in 2005. Because Broussard admitted to attack, the judge put him on probation and gave him a year in county jail.
A deputy district attorney said in 2007 that one reason prosecutors agreed to probation was that Broussard was 18 years old and had never been in trouble with the law before. When Broussard was linked to Bailey’s death, the father of the man who was beaten put the blame on Harris.
But Thomas Peele, a reporter who covered Bailey’s murder, said that Harris wouldn’t have personally taken care of a case like Broussard’s as the county’s chief prosecutor.
In his book “Killing the Messenger: A Story of Radical Faith, Racism’s Backlash, and the Assassination of a Journalist,” Peele writes about how Bailey was killed.
Peele said, “It was a pretty standard deal for a first-time felony offender.”
For the attack in 2005, Broussard went to San Francisco County Jail for a year. Peele wrote that after he got out of jail, he joined Your Black Muslim Bakery in Oakland, a place that hired young men who had just gotten out of jail and put them through military-style training.
Since its start in the 1960s, the bakery has been a model of Black economic independence. It has grown into a powerful Oakland institution with strong political ties.
In the early 2000s, people who were part of it were also charged with many sexual and violent crimes. It was called a street gang by the news media.
The operation’s leader, Yusuf Bey IV, told Broussard to kill Bailey in 2007 because he was looking into the bakery’s money problems.
Later, a jury found Bey IV guilty of ordering the deaths of Bailey and two other men. It was also found that Antoine Mackey helped Broussard kill Bailey and another guy, Michael Wills, in the same year. People like Broussard, Bey IV, and Mackey are still locked up.
As of last year, Bey IV and Mackey asked the court to overturn their sentences for killing Bailey. The office of Alameda District Attorney Pam Price was against letting them go.
Price is also being accused of being too lenient as chief prosecutor, and she is fighting a well-known effort to recall her that is being backed by a Piedmont hedge fund boss.
Harris has staked a lot of her campaign on her track record as a prosecutor. She wants to set herself apart from Trump, who was found guilty of almost thirty crimes earlier this year for paying a porn star hush money.
Trump, on the other hand, has criticized Harris for causing crime and chaos in California. Last month, at a news gathering in Los Angeles, he said Harris “crushed San Francisco.”
