Kamala the Unfriendly Cop

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Kamala Harris has the mindset of an unfriendly cop. 

Exhibit A is her controversial campaign against truancy.  As San Francisco’s district attorney, and then as California’s attorney general, Kamala vigorously pushed for laws to jail or fine parents whose children failed to show up for school. 

The San Francisco law, adopted in 2004, said that to be truant, a student needed only to be more than 30 minutes late without a valid excuse on more than two occasions.  Parents of students guilty of 20 or more unexcused absences in a year could be sentenced up to a year in jail or a $2,500 fine. 

In 2011, when she was running for attorney general of California, Kamala lobbied the state Legislature to adopt a similar law, which for the first time imposed criminal penalties on the parents of truant children.  If a child was absent for 10 percent or more of school days without a valid excuse, parents could be fined at least $2,000 or face up to one year in jail. 

The chief defect of these laws was that they blamed the parents for the child’s truancy, and then tried to solve the problem by punishing the parents.  In fact, truancy was very often the result of conditions about which parents could do little or nothing.  Truancy could be the result of a child’s mental or physical illnesses, family crises, bullying, unreliable transit or any number of problems too big for the parents — who were very often poor and disadvantaged — to remedy on their own. 

Had Kamala done a little elementary research, she could have discovered all this before she brought down the legal sledgehammer.  When — too late — she discovered the underlying causes of truancy and realized the hardships that she was imposing on hapless parents, she tried to claim that it was “never her intention” to punish the parents at all.  Any jailings that occurred were “unintended consequences” of the law. 

These “Who, me?” protestations were disingenuous to say the least.  As district attorney, Kamala had openly declared truancy to be “a parent issue” resulting from “neglect.”  To underscore the point, she had her office send letters to every household with a child in public school making clear that truancy was a crime, and letting parents know that they could be thrown in jail for it.  And when she took the oath of office as California attorney general, she said in her inaugural address that she was “putting parents on notice” that they could face “the full force and consequences of the law” if their children racked up too many unexcused absences. 

The human cost of Kamala’s misguided policy was soon apparent.  In 2013, a Los Angeles woman named Cheree Peoples was handcuffed and dragged from her home in her pajamas by two burly police officers while photographers compounded her humiliation by snapping pictures.  “You would swear I had killed somebody,” Peoples declared. 

She hadn’t killed anyone, but she had allowed her daughter Shayla to miss 20 days of school that year.  Shayla missed school because she suffered from sickle cell anemia.  That meant that she was often in too much pain to leave the house, or else she was confined to a hospital bed.  Peoples had explained all this to the local school authorities, but that was not enough to save her from the “full force and consequences” of Kamala’s law. 

Kamala finally said that she “regrets” that parents were arrested under her law, but she stood by the law itself.  When confronted with the case of a homeless mother of three who was working two jobs and was arrested when her kids missed school, Kamala tried to claim that it was all for the mother’s own good: the arresting authorities were able to connect her with social services that could help her meet the law’s requirements.   

Spoken like a cop, Kamala.  No mention of the fact that to get this help, the indigent mother had to take time off from work, meet with prosecutors and judges, pay court fees, and enroll in mandatory parenting classes.  But hey — it was all for her own good, right? 

Happily, California governor Gavin Newsom has just signed a law repealing Kamala’s policy of jailing parents.  But because Kamala herself stands by that policy, voters might want to think long and hard before they put the awesome powers of the U.S. presidency in the hands of someone who has the mindset of a cop.  Just think of what she might make us do — all for our own good, of course. 

Picryl, public domain.

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Image: Department of Defense via Picryl, public domain.