Opinion: I fact-checked assumptions about Kamala Harris’ past
Kamala Harris was the San Francisco District Attorney (DA) from 2004 to 2011 and the California Attorney General (AG) from 2011 to 2017. The DA is an elected position that determines which arrests in a district to prosecute. The AG is an elected official who advises the governor and state...www.urbanlegendnews.org
A study done by the NAACP and the Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) found that when looking at the top 25 major cities in California from 2006 to 2008, Black people were incarcerated for marijuana offenses at four to twelve times the rate of white people. However, San Francisco had such low marijuana arrests the city was not even included in the study. This suggests that, when Harris was DA, marijuana convictions also likely were relatively low and that, accordingly, the claim that Harris “prosecuted minor drug offenses ruthlessly” is not accurate.
She also started a program for first time offenders where they could earn their GED, job training and benefits. Once they completed their program, their record was expunged.
It was highly successful, and only 10% of people who completed the program were convicted of a crime again.
She was truly at the forefront of a lot of major criminal justice reform that we want to see happen. She stopped the trans panic defense, required her officers to wear body cams, refused to seek the death penalty, created re-entry programs, aimed to stop truancy - realizing that truancy led to incarceration, ignored prop 8, required officers to take implicit bias tests.
And she did this at a time when it wasn’t popular to do so.
She has some errors of course, and she has political moments too - where she’s clearly appealing to the people she needs to appeal to in order to keep power.
But we can’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. And we also can’t have progress without failures and missteps - so punishing people who try is not the way to go.
What does any of this have to do with my post?