The Kamala Harris cop meme has returned from the days of the 2020 election following President Joe Biden’s decision to bow out of the 2024 race. Starting in 2019, the building criticisms against Harris as a presidential candidate coming from the left based on her history as a prosecutor, district attorney, and state attorney general became a meme that some suspect played a role in the early suspension of her campaign.
Now that the Vice President is a candidate once again and the presumptive Democratic nominee, this meme is seeing a resurgence.
What is the Kamala Harris cop meme?
This trend, also known as the Kopmala meme, mocks Harris for her history of prosecuting people and even calling herself a “top cop” while also attempting to position herself as a voice for the Black community. This poses a problem after the Black Lives Matter uprisings of the 2010s and 2020 which included massive protests against police racism and brutality.
Many of the gags in this meme genre show Harris Photoshopped in a police uniform (she never served as a police officer) representing her self-imposed reputation as the “top cop.” It’s also common to see her mixed with other meme formats referencing her professional history.
In 2024, when the backlash against anti-police movements has swung the political pendulum back toward “law and order” frenzy, the memes have taken on a new mood. Harris fans, as well as those desperate to stop Donald Trump from becoming president again, are using the same images to promote her campaign.
These memes are often put alongside Trump’s mug shot or other references to his arrest and conviction on 34 felony counts back in June.
Kamala Harris cop meme origins
Harris graduated with a Juris Doctor from the University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1989. The next year, after she passed the bar exam, she was hired as deputy district attorney in Alameda County, California. She became the District Attorney of San Francisco in 2004 and served until 2011 when she became the Attorney General of California.
In 2016, Harris was running for a U.S. Senate seat alongside former President Barack Obama’s campaign. Relying on the pervasive popularity of “law and order” and “tough on crime” messages among moderates and the right, she intentionally pushed the image of herself as someone who would tackle issues related to crime in the traditional American manner.
On May 25 of that year, the New York Times published an article titled “Kamala Harris, a ‘Top Cop’ in the Era of Black Lives Matter.” The aspiring senator adopted this label for herself and used it frequently during her presidential campaign in 2019. At the same time, she gained a reputation for laughing too hard at inappropriate moments.
Rise of the Kopmala meme and 2020 campaign suspension
Many leftists and progressives were not keen on Harris’ image as a cop and began to trash her history as a prosecutor, claiming that she aggressively prosecuted Black men for cannabis-related offensives, put more people in jail during her truancy crackdown, resisted allowing trans prisoners to access gender-affirming care, and imprisoned people under strict “three strikes” laws.
Her Attorney General’s office was accused of keeping inmates locked up longer to exploit their barely paid labor.
On July 3, 2019, the Facebook account The Meme-Industrial Complex posted a Photoshopped image of Harris in a police uniform arresting a little Black girl while laughing in front of a “thin blue line” flag.
Harris fans disputed some of these charges in 2019 and again in 2014. In 2019, however, she dropped out of the presidential race in December amid speculation that the Kamala Harris cop memes drove her to this decision.
Examples
kamala after she listens to the lyrics for 365 pic.twitter.com/g7gF1dQryU
— *bd*ll*h (@abxsid) July 22, 2024
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