Harris’ Truancy Crackdown Comes Back to Haunt Her
Among the claims made by the much-discussed but still unverified ABC whistleblower is the following: “Harris campaign gave questions to ABC that were not to be included in the debate. Including questions regarding her time as DA in SF and her time as California Attorney General.”
On the surface, this alleged request seems counterintuitive. When in control of the microphone, Kamala Harris is pleased to boast about her cartel-fighting role as California attorney general. When not in control, however, Harris has every reason to fear honest questions about her tenure as a prosecutor, particularly about her bizarrely ruthless crackdown on truant parents.
The story of Harris’ truancy program has resurfaced in a brutal 13-minute documentary, Arrested by Kamala: A Black Mother’s Story, which is now posted on YouTube and elsewhere. The documentary, by enterprising Los Angeles filmmaker Joe Gilbert, has raised blood pressure levels throughout the Kamala camp. The rap version of the story, written and produced by Silent Jay, has already gone viral, as has a punchy three-minute version.
In the way of background, as the San Francisco prosecutor in the early 2000s, Harris noticed that high school dropouts committed a disproportionate amount of crime. She figured that if she could reduce truancy, she could increase graduation rates and lower homicide rates. She liked the idea so much that she took it to the California Legislature and sought a statewide law to punish parents of truant children. That the law would fall most heavily on poor black women did not trouble her.
Running in 2010 for attorney general, Harris made the truancy program part of her campaign. She won the election, and the law passed in January 2011. Under the new law, parents or guardians could face as much as a year in jail for their kids’ truancy.
“We are putting parents on notice,” the childless Harris said at her inauguration. “If you fail in your responsibility to your kids, we are going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law.”
In March 2019, when Harris was hoping to secure the Democratic nomination for president, the liberal Huffington Post did a hit piece on Harris and the program. The article focused on the travails of a woman named Cheree Peoples, the “black mother” featured in the Gilbert documentary.
Peoples’ story is real and harrowing. On the morning of April 18, 2013, Peoples felt the full force of Harris’ law when the police came knocking at the door of her suburban LA home. Still in her pajamas, Peoples was promptly handcuffed and perp-walked to a waiting police car while an eager array of camera crews clicked away.
The crime? Peoples’ then 11-year-old daughter, Shayla, had missed 20 days of school that school year. Unreported by the media was the reason for her absences. Shayla’s enduring affliction with sickle cell anemia landed her repeatedly in the hospital to receive blood transfusions and emergency medical care. On other days, she was in too much pain to attend school.
Although Shayla’s absences were, in fact, excused by her school and buttressed with ample documentation from the regional children’s hospital, prosecutors had an example to make, and Cheree Peoples apparently filled the bill.
Refusing to cop a guilty plea, Cheree fought the charges in court for the next two years. This principled resistance cost Cheree her job and her home and wore Shayla down. While living under duress in a motel with her now homeless mother, the 12-year-old Shayla suffered a stroke, resulting in permanent paralysis of her right arm and right leg.
Cheree’s persistence paid off. In 2015, prosecutors finally just dropped the case against Peoples. In 2018, the California Supreme Court ruled that Kamala Harris’ policy of arresting parents for truancy was unconstitutional, and Harris’s abusive program was ended.
As the Huffington Post pointed out, on the presidential campaign trail in 2019, Harris tried to finesse her way out of the positions she had championed just a few years earlier. In her campaign-oriented memoir, for instance, Harris claimed that, with the truancy program, she was “trying to support parents, not punish them.”
Peoples’ experience has taught her not to believe anything Harris says. She cooperated fully with Gilbert, as did her daughter Shayla, now 22. In a case like theirs, video has a power that print does not. In watching Cheree speak, the viewer does not doubt for a moment the sincerity of her outrage.
Shayla’s witness is more powerful still. The video clips of her throughout her ordeal show a heartbreakingly resilient and good-spirited child. They also show her to be impressively well-spoken. Despite her many absences, this child has clearly received a better education than the great majority of her public school peers.
Gilbert skillfully contrasts the sincerity of Cheree and Shayla with the callow, ambitious Harris. In one revealing sequence, Harris explains how truancy costs school districts funding and then boasts, amidst the cackles, of how much she can save the state by prosecuting the parents of truants.
“I am not a political person,” says Cheree at film’s end. “But I want people to know what Kamala Harris did to me. If she does it to me, she will abuse anyone if you give her the power. My message to all Americans, especially black Americans is, do not trust Kamala Harris!”
Cheree is very persuasive.
Jack Cashill’s new book, Ashli: The Untold Story of the Women of January 6, is now available in all formats.
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