“We're putting parents on notice,” California Attorney General Kamala Harris warned upon her inauguration in 2011. “If you fail to fulfill your responsibility to your children, we're going to work to make sure you face the full force and consequences of the law”.
Two years later, Cheree Peoples, a single mother of a child with special needs, was jailed for a truancy law that Vice President Harris championed as San Francisco District Attorney and later as Attorney General .
Harris repeatedly asserted the need to crack down on truancy during his law enforcement career. “These kids will invariably be the ones who end up in our criminal justice system,” Harris said while testifying in favor of a statewide truancy law. In it in 2011 opening speech, Harris said it was “time to get serious about the problem of chronic truancy in California.” He noted that as San Francisco's district attorney, he “threatened the parents of truants with prosecution” and saw truancy rates drop.
But Peoples was not a deadbeat parent who allowed his children to play with gusto. Her daughter Shayla has sickle cell disease, a rare genetic disease that affects her patients with chronic pain. After Shayla, then 11, missed 20 days of school in 2013, police officers arrested Cheree for violating the truancy law, a misdemeanor that carries a $2,500 fine and up to a year in prison Peoples, who had a young son when she was arrested, battled the court system for two and a half years to clear her arrest, which she worried would hurt her future job prospects.
“It hurts that some of the policies in which [Harris] governed has criminalized people like me,” Peoples said in one Twitter broadcast this week.
History of the towns gained national attention during Harris' 2019 presidential campaign as an example of the conflict between Harris' image as a progressive champion and her tenure as California's top cop. The Peoples saga has gained renewed attention following Harris's surprise rise to the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee.
“Kamala Harris was the attorney general … which means she was the boss of the person who came to arrest me,” Peoples said during the issue.
“His name is attached to this law, because he pushed it to the governor without a vote of the people.”
Harris' crackdown on parents appears to be at odds with his personal narrative, as well as the causes he has claimed to champion on the campaign trail. “He was raised by a single mother; I know firsthand how stressful and expensive it is to juggle work and school schedules.” said Harris, who has two stepsons with her husband, corporate attorney Doug Emhoff.
Harris has it he lamented that “in our criminal justice system, a single mother can be in jail awaiting trial for days, weeks, months, or even years, not because she is a threat to her community, but simply because she does not can afford to post bail.”
But Peoples says Harris' anti-truancy initiative fell hardest on precisely those groups Harris now says he wants to help. Parents charged under California law are “more than likely … low-income. Most of the time we're single parents,” said Peoples, who has been homeless at times during his legal battle.
According to Peoples, she and other parents charged under the truancy law became scapegoats for California officials struggling to make up for the Golden State's chronic budget shortfalls. She was arrested by the county's gang prevention team, according to local reports reports at the time. she was released the same day she was booked, but it was only after the a long court battle that the charges were dropped, said a reporter who interviewed Peoples during the 2020 campaign.
“They intertwined truancy with the economic problem with California and the deficit,” Peoples said on the show. “How much money is it costing the state because of these truant kids. I was the reason, I'm to blame that the state went broke because my son was sick.”
“But it even cost more money to prosecute me for two and a half years.”
According to Peoples, she was arrested even though she had a 504 plan, an agreement between school districts and parents to provide care for students with disabilities. Peoples was eventually arrested after she refused to take Shayla to school to prove to administrators that her daughter was indeed sick.
“You want me to send my kid to school like this? I'm going straight to the ER,” said Peoples, who showed videos of her daughter in the midst of a painful sickle cell flare-up. “This is what I faced when I see my child with sickle cell pain, and you want me to take her to school first, so you tell me she's too sick to come to school?”
Harris' presidential campaign did not return a request for comment.
Peoples said she is not a supporter of former President Donald Trump, is “not political” and would be “very, very happy to see a black woman elected.”
But he acknowledges resentment toward Harris, who has not apologized for the truancy bill.
“I'm not a politician. I'm a mother who's just trying to take care of her daughter, trying to make a way like everyone else.”
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