Kamala Harris
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Kamala D. Harris (born 1964 in Oakland, California) is the current District Attorney of San Francisco. She is the first woman to be elected as District Attorney in San Francisco and the first female Indo-/African-American to serve as top prosecutor in the state's history. She was elected in December 2003 with over 56 percent of the votes, in a run-off election against the two-term incumbent, Terence Hallinan.
Harris is the daughter of a prominent Indian-American breast cancer specialist who emigrated to the United States in 1960, and an Jamaican-American professor of economics at Stanford University. Harris attended Howard University in Washington, D.C., and received a law degree from Hastings College of the Law in 1990.
A prosecutor, Harris served as Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County from 1990 to 1998. She then became the Managing Attorney of the Career Criminal Unit in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. In 2000, City Attorney Louise Renne recruited her to join the City Attorney's office, where she was Chief of the Community and Neighborhood Division.
In 2004, The National Urban League honored Harris as a "Woman of Power" and she received the Thurgood Marshall Award from the National Black Prosecutors Association in 2005. California’s largest legal newspaper, the Daily Journal, recognized Harris as one of the top 100 lawyers in California. She has served on the boards of several community organizations, and founded the Coalition to End the Exploitation of Kids (CEEK).
In April 2004, when police officer Isaac Espinoza was gunned down in the crime-riddled Bayview district, Harris was seen as soft on crime when she announced that she would not seek the death penalty for the man accused of his killing, a decision which triggered a torrent of protests from police officers and some citizens. Other citizens werre very supportive of the decision. Harris had made a campaign promise that she would not seek the death penalty if elected. Attorney General Bill Lockyer even threatened to intervene on behalf of the State of California to take the case out of Harris' jurisdiction. In July 2006 her effectiveness was tested again after 4 robbers T-boned a police car killing one of the officers.
Harris has had much smoother relations with city politicians than her controversial predecessor Terence Hallinan. As a result, she has been able to secure more resources for the District Attorney's Office. This has been an important turnaround from Hallinan's term, when the office saw its resources actually shrink.
