California's Top Cop Targets Crimes Against Kids
SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) - Attorney General Kamala Harris is starting her final four years as California's top law enforcement officer this week with a major initiative aimed at protecting children.
She plans to announce during her swearing-in Monday that she is creating a bureau within the state Department of Justice that will focus on crimes against children.
Some of its work will expand on priorities during Harris' first four years, including deterring school truancy and the trafficking of young women for sex, domestic labor or sweat shops.
The bureau also will tackle what Harris says are "tragically flawed" foster care and adoption systems and fight discrimination in schools, such as bullying.
"In the coming term, we're going to double down. We're going to use the power of this office to lift up the next generation of Californians," Harris said in remarks prepared for her inauguration speech. She added later that, "We can't keep letting down our most vulnerable children today, then lock them up tomorrow and expect a different outcome next week."
Harris, 50, is one of the California Democratic Party's brightest stars and is expected to make a future run for governor or the U.S. Senate.
She has declined to discuss her political plans, but San Jose State University political science professor Larry Gerston said her choice of a focus for her final term can only enhance her chances.
"It's one of those issues that no one can deny is a problem and no one can criticize someone for taking it on," he said. It will help her standing with educators and women, he said, at a time when she is the only high-profile woman prominently mentioned as a candidate if U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer retires in 2016 or when Gov. Jerry Brown is termed out of office in 2018. Both are Democrats.
Yet it also has been a theme throughout her career, which began with prosecuting child sexual assault cases in Alameda County. She later led the San Francisco City Attorney's Division on Children and Families before becoming San Francisco district attorney.
Harris barely squeaked into statewide office four years ago, but since then has had "an astounding ascendance when it comes to the political hierarchy in the state," Gerston said. She was best known in her first term for helping negotiate a tougher, larger settlement with the nation's top five banks after the foreclosure crisis, and for refusing to defend Proposition 8, the statewide initiative that banned gay marriage until it was rejected by the courts.
But she also emphasized the damage from truancy in two reports, the first of which found that 30 percent of California elementary school students miss enough school each year to harm their academic performance. The second, in September, found that black elementary schoolchildren were chronically truant at nearly four times the rate of all students and faced suspension from school at disproportionately high rates.
"The evidence is simply overwhelming: A child who is chronically truant in elementary school is three times more likely to drop out and become a perpetrator or a victim of crime," she said in her prepared remarks. "It's time to say that in the state of California it is a crime for a child to go without an education."
A bill backed by Harris in 2010 lets prosecutors charge parents with misdemeanors bringing up to a year in jail and $2,000 fine if their children miss too much school. Brown approved a sequel last year, requiring prosecutors to report to school officials whether they file such charges. But Brown vetoed two other Harris-backed bills on the grounds that collecting more truancy and absenteeism data, as she proposed, "would not get to the root of the issue - keeping kids in school."
The bureau's goals are in line with the "My Brother's Keeper" classroom-to-jobs initiative outlined in September by President Barack Obama, whom Harris counts as a friend. The goals may include a push for more training of teachers, school nurses and counselors to help students who experience traumatic stress from domestic violence, poverty, substance abuse or mental illness in their families.
Its focus on the child welfare system is intended to address systemic issues, for instance by targeting charities or websites that exploit adopted or foster children.
Unscrupulous group homes, for instance, have been known to capitalize on the placement and care funds for foster youth. Internet sites with few safeguards have sprung up to aid the informal relocation of children, often adopted from other countries, if their adoptive parents decide they can't handle the youngsters' mental, physical or developmental disabilities.
The bureau will be paid for with existing funds, aides said.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press.
