Kamala Harris

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Kamala Devi Harris (born 1964 in Oakland, California) is the current District Attorney of San Francisco. She is the first female District Attorney to be elected in San Francisco, the first African American elected as District Attorney in California, and the first Indian American elected to the position in the United States. 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 attended the historically black Howard University in Washington, D.C. and received a J.D. from University of California, Hastings College of the Law in 1990. She is the daughter of an Indian American mother, Dr. Shyamala Gopalan, a breast cancer specialist, who emigrated to the United States in 1960, and a Jamaican American father, Stanford University economics professor Donald Harris.

Harris served as Deputy District Attorney in Alameda County, California from 1990 to 1998. She then became Managing Attorney of the Career Criminal Unit in the San Francisco District Attorney's Office. In 2000, San Francisco City Attorney Louise Renne recruited her to join the her office, where she was Chief of the Community and Neighborhood Division, which oversees civil code enforcement matters.

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. The Los Angeles Daily Journal recognized Harris as one of the top 100 lawyers in California. Additionally, she has served on the boards of several community organizations.

In April 2004, when police officer Isaac Espinoza was gunned down in the Bayview district, Harris announced that she would not seek the death penalty for the man accused of his killing, a decision which triggered protests from police officers and some citizens. Others were very supportive of the decision in a community where capital punishment is overwhelmingly opposed. 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 the end, he ruled that Harris had acted within her legal authority.^[1]

Harris ran unopposed for re-election in 2007. She has received acclaim from some for increasing conviction rates over previous DA, Terrence Hallinan (whose conviction rate was 52% versus the 83% state-wide average) and the overall professionalism of the office, but has been criticized for selectively prosecuting cases to bolster the conviction rate, which now stands at about 67%. Harris has also faced criticism in the face of continuing poor relations with police and rising violent crime rates. ^[2]