The Brief

As President Joe Biden today bowed to the growing chorus of elected Democrats and Democratic voters calling for him to exit the 2024 race, everyone is taking another good hard look at Kamala Harris.

“Today I want to offer my full support and endorsement for Kamala Harris to be the nominee of our party this year, ” Biden wrote in a social media post, calling his selection of Harris to be his vice president “the best decision I’ve made.”

Vice presidents rarely get much attention. What attention Harris has gotten on the job hasn’t been particularly positive. Counter to the reputation she cultivated early on in her career as a pragmatic politician and sharp-minded prosecutor, public opinion on Harris soured in the summer of 2021 and has mostly stayed sour.

That was in part thanks to the White House saddling her with a series of unenviable and intractable tasks. Beyond that her role, like that of most vice presidents, has been high on profile, but low on actual responsibility. It’s a job perhaps best described by fictional Veep Selina Meyer as the political equivalent of being “declawed, defanged, neutered, ball-gagged, and sealed in an abandoned coal mine.”

Nor was Harris faring much better with voters in her home state. Last year 59% of California voters in a Berkeley Institute of Governmental Studies poll said they would not welcome her on the top of the ticket.

But now that Harris is being considered as the most likely substitute for Biden, more voters seem to be warming to her. A fresh Washington Post poll found that the vast majority of Democratic voters nationwide would be “satisfied” with Harris at the top of the ticket. The same poll found her narrowly beating Trump in a head-to-head election among registered voters.

And so the nation is catching itself back up to speed on all things Harris — and that means catching up on a life of accomplishment and controversy here. More than any other vice president in generations, Kamala Harris’ biography is singularly Californian.

Born in Oakland, bussed to school in Berkeley, tested by San Francisco’s cutthroat municipal politics and propelled onto the national stage as the state’s top law enforcement officer and then its first female senator of color, Harris’ approach to politics and policymaking were honed here.

Now that voters are reconsidering whether Harris has what it takes to be president of the United States — and as Donald Trump and JD Vance train their oppo-machine upon her — we’re resurrecting this look at her California years and career. Here are nine ways that California shaped Kamala Harris, and that Harris shaped California.

A child of Berkeley

In a state full of transplants, Harris is a lifelong Californian.

She was was born in 1964 in Oakland — the hospital a little over a mile from the city hall where, more than half a century later, she would announce her short-lived 2020 bid for the presidency. Born to immigrant parents who met while getting their PhDs and protesting for civil rights at UC Berkeley, she spent her childhood in Berkeley. Harris’ father, Donald Harris, is from Jamaica and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan, is from India. The couple split when Harris was 7, and Harris and her sister Maya were raised mostly by her mother, who died in 2009.

In the first Democratic presidential debate in 2019, Harris famously skewered Joe Biden — then her campaign rival — for his past opposition to federally mandated busing to desegregate public schools. For Harris, she said, the issue was “personal.”

Specifically, Harris rode the “red rooster” from Berkeley’s working-class flatlands to Thousand Oaks Elementary School at the base of the affluent north Berkeley hills. This was 1969, just one year after Berkeley Unified introduced its “two-way” busing program across its elementary schools. Berkeley being Berkeley, unlike local integration plans across the country, the city had undertaken this one on its own accord.

After the debate dust-up, Harris clarified that she does not support federally mandated busing, a policy stance not so dissimilar from the one she needled Biden over.

Traversing back and forth between different strata of society — black, white and Asian; well-off and working-class — is a familiar trope in Harris’ biography.

“It wasn’t a homogenous life,” said Debbie Mesloh, a friend who has also worked for Harris as a communication director and a consultant. “She’s a very resourceful person in that she can move in between these worlds.”

Vice President Kamala Harris graduated from Howard University in 1986. Her graduating year photo is in the bottom row, second from right.

Harris spent her teenage years in Montreal, moving there with her sister and mother when Gopalan accepted a university research position there. She earned a political science and economics degree at Howard University in Washington D.C. but returned to California to get her law degree in 1989 at the University of California, Hastings in San Francisco.

Until her most recent move to Washington, she called California home.

Fresh out of law school, she joined the Alameda County district attorney’s office in 1990, serving there eight years before crossing the bay to San Francisco. In 2003, she unexpectedly won election as San Francisco district attorney, where she served two terms before her narrow election as state attorney general in 2010. She was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2016.

The influence of king/queen-maker Willie Brown

Former state Assembly Speaker and San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown has helped accelerate many a successful political career in California (including that of Gov. Gavin Newsom). Harris got a boost from Brown, too.

In March 1994, San Francisco Chronicle’s legendary columnist Herb Caen described the scene at Brown’s surprise 60th birthday party. Clint Eastwood was there, wrote Caen, and he “spilled champagne on the Speaker’s new steady, Kamala Harris.” Brown had a reputation for dating much younger women. In his column, Caen described Harris, then a deputy district attorney of Alameda County, as “something new in Willie’s love life. She’s a woman, not a girl.”

The relationship ended after two years, but her connection to Brown, three decades her senior, did have an outsized effect on her career.

Willie Brown and Kamala Harris in 1994.

“I would think it’s fair to say that most of the people in San Francisco met her through Willie,” John Burton, who used to be president pro tem of the state Senate, former chair of the California Democratic Party and a San Francisco political powerhouse in his own right, told Politico.

The speaker gave Harris a couple plum positions on two state regulatory boards — the Unemployment Insurance Appeals Board and the California Medical Assistance Commission. “If you were asked to be on a board that regulated medical care, would you say no?” Harris told SFWeekly a few years later.

Harris’ connection to Brown also helped her make connections across San Francisco high-society and California political elite. In 1996, a year after Brown became mayor and Harris broke off the relationship, she joined the board of trustees at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

When Harris ran for San Francisco district attorney nearly a decade later, her first contribution came from Elaine McKeon, chair of the museum’s board. More — much more — poured in from donors with last names like Fisher, Getty, Buell, Haas and other noble houses of the Bay Area.

But from the beginning of her political career, Harris has seen her connection with Brown as a liability — a cudgel that opponents can use against her and, at worst, a tired, sexist trope used to question the legitimacy of her ascendant career. In the first run to be San Francisco’s district attorney, Harris deliberately hired a campaign consultant known for working with clients outside the Brown political machine. During that same campaign, she described her past relationship with the former speaker and mayor as “an albatross hanging around my neck.”

As for Brown, he recently told a reporter, regretfully, that he and Harris are no longer in touch.

A lack of clarity

You saw it in the presidential race. You’ve seen it in her as vice president. As the New York Times once put it: “the content of her message remains a work in progress.” We saw it before in California.

While running the California Department of Justice, Harris was often loath to wade into the political battles taking place just a few blocks away in the state Legislature.

There was the bill that would have required her office to investigate police shootings. She did not take a formal position (though she did tell a reporter it would be bad policy). The bill died.

There was the proposal to force police departments to gather data on the ethnicity and race of the civilians they stop. Harris also declined to take a position. It passed anyway.

And on the biggest criminal justice overhaul in California in a generation, Harris also kept mum.

Prompted by a judicial decree that the state had to dramatically cut the population of its overcrowded prison system, “realignment” was a package of state policies passed in 2011 that shifted tens of thousands of inmates out of state custody and into county jails or onto the rolls of local probation systems.

Despite in many ways reflecting the lessons described in her book “Smart on Crime,” which argued that non-violent criminals can be redirected into less punitive systems without jeopardizing public safety, Harris, the state’s top law enforcement officer, was silent on the policy.

That earned a rebuke from the Los Angeles Times Editorial Board, which wrote in its endorsement of her 2016 Senate candidacy that Harris “has been too cautious and unwilling to stake out a position on controversial issues, even when her voice would have been valuable to the debate.”

What some critics call prevarication or flip-floppery, her supporters call pragmatism. Those are just two ways of describing the same quality, said Corey Cook, a political scientist and provost at St. Mary’s College, and a longtime observer of San Francisco politics.

“She’s not an ideologue,” he said, meaning rather than stake out the boldest, ideologically-coherent agenda, she tends to focus on individual fixes to specific problems. Hence the “3am agenda” of her presidential campaign, a collection of policy changes designed to address the problems that keep the average voter up at night.

“The idea that she would have consistent positions on issues informed by ideology isn’t who she is,” said Cook. Harris may appear to pick her battles, he said, because for her “the only lasting solutions are going to be the ones that are able to sustain a majority coalition of support.”

Making a mark: sex crimes, domestic violence, child abuse

Harris has never shied away from the “tough on crime” label when it comes to a certain class of criminals: domestic violence perpetrators, child abusers and sex traffickers.

After nearly a decade in Alameda County and a short stint as a deputy district attorney in San Francisco (she left, calling the leadership there “dysfunctional”), in 2000, Harris joined the San Francisco city attorney’s office under Louise Renne.

Renne said she was looking for someone to head the office’s Child and Family Service unit, which investigates child abuse cases. This was not considered a prestigious post. Prosecutors inside the unit had taken to calling it “kiddie law.”

Renne thought Harris, who had focused on child abuse and sexual exploitation cases in Alameda County, would be a good fit.

That instinct was confirmed on Harris’ first day on the job, Renne said, when a number of children who had been separated from their parents were formally adopted into new families.

“She comes into my office and says ‘Come on, Louise, we’ve got to go over to court. There are going to be adoptions today,’ and she had all these teddy bears,” Renne recalled. “She knew the occasion. She knew it was an important one and it should be celebrated.”

Harris’ focus on the victims of abuse and exploitation continued after she was elected as San Francisco’s District Attorney.

“I don’t know what the term ‘teenage prostitute’ means. I have never met a ‘teenage prostitute.’ I have met exploited kids,” Mesloh, then Harris’ communications director, recalls her boss saying at her first all-staff meeting. Harris then ordered her prosecutors not to use the term in court. A year later, Harris sponsored a bill putting the crime of human trafficking into the state criminal code.

Some Democrats say Harris’ prior life as a prosecutor with a focus on sex crimes would be a key advantage in a potential general election contest against Trump, who has been found liable in a civil case for sexual assault and recently became the first former president to be convicted of a felony. In that case, the 34 counts were related to the falsifying of business records in connection to an alleged sexual encounter with a pornographic film actress.

But using the full force of the law to penalize pimps, traffickers and other abusers has earned Harris some criticism from civil libertarians and from advocates for sex workers.

In one of her final acts as California’s attorney general, Harris had the CEO of Backpage.com, Carl Ferrer, arrested on pimping charges. Backpage was an online classifieds site known for its “adult services” section, which prosecutors had long warned served as a marketplace for sex traffickers.

The arrest was based on a contentious legal argument that pit anti-trafficking fervor against the First Amendment. Since Backpage was merely a platform for ads, its lawyers argued, it was protected by the same law that protects Google from being held liable for illicit websites listed in its search results. A superior court judge agreed and threw out the case, though an amended charge, pursued by Harris’ successor, then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, led Ferrer to plead guilty to money laundering and conspiracy to facilitate prostitution and to the shuttering of the site.

The Harris mantra: ‘Smart on Crime’

One of the reasons Harris became known as a rising-star District Attorney was her focus on prevention, which she explained in her book, Smart on Crime, written in 2009, the year before she ran for attorney general.

“Public health practitioners know that the most beneficial use of resources is to prevent an outbreak, not to treat it,” Harris wrote. “Instead of just reacting to a crime every time it is committed, we have to step back and figure out how to disrupt the routes of infection.”

Kamala Harris as San Francisco District Attorney on June 18, 2004.

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Marcio Jose Sanchez

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AP Photo

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Harris’ “Back on Track” program, considered the most successful implementation of this idea, redirected first-time, non-violent drug offenders into supervised education, job training courses, therapy sessions and life skills classes. It was a modest program, but a novel one compared to what most other big city law enforcement officers were doing in 2005.

“In that time period, I think that she was a radical,” said Mesloh. The program has since been emulated by cities around the country. When Harris became attorney general, she launched a similar pilot program for Los Angeles County.

Harris’ focus on prevention produced some of her key accomplishments as district attorney. But in the context of the 2020 presidential primary, some of those same accomplishments struck many critics on the left as overly punitive.

The year after launching Back on Track, Harris introduced an anti-truancy initiative. Based on a statistical correlation that chronic class skippers are more likely to be both perpetrators and victims of homicide, Harris’ office began threatening the parents of persistently absent students with prosecution.

Harris has been quick to point out that the “stick” in this carrot and stick approach only came out after a series of escalating interventions, including mandatory meetings with school staff and social workers. No one went to jail under the program, though a handful of parents were fined. Within a few years, city truancy rates fell by a third and Harris took credit.

In 2010 her office sponsored a bill to take the program statewide. In the hands of other district attorneys, the statute was used in at least a handful of cases to put parents behind bars. Critics have said that the policy has been disproportionately wielded against poor parents of color.

In a 2019 interview, Harris said she regretted any “unintended consequences” of the state law.

Harris has (almost) always opposed capital punishment

Her opposition to the death penalty has been one of the most controversial stands in her career, but it’s also an example for those who criticize her lack of consistency.

On April 10, 2004, three months after her inauguration as San Francisco’s new district attorney, 29-year-old police officer Isaac Espinoza was gunned down by a 21-year-old with an AK-47. Three days later, Harris made good on a campaign promise and vowed not to seek the death penalty for the shooter. David Hill was later convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.

The decision engendered a predictably fierce backlash from the police union and rebukes from politicians. “This is not only the definition of tragedy,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein said at Espinoza’s funeral, “it’s the special circumstance called for by the death penalty law.” The assembled officers cheered while Harris remained seated.

Some of Harris’ critics say she has wavered in tougher political circumstances.

In 2014, when a federal court judge ruled that California’s administration of the death penalty was unconstitutional, Harris appealed the decision as state attorney general, arguing that it was “not supported by the law.”

Harris later said that she was obligated to defend capital punishment as the legal representative of the state. Many have pointed out that she was happy not to defend a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage that voters passed in Proposition 8 when it was challenged a year earlier. Harris’ response: She was merely reflecting the position of her client, Gov. Jerry Brown’s administration.

She also explained that the judge’s ruling, which held that the long delays between sentencing and execution in California amounted to “cruel and unusual punishment,” could be used to justify speeding up the state’s system of capital punishment.

Prosecutorial overreach controversies

Both as district attorney and as state attorney general, Harris led offices that criminal justice advocates say was overly aggressive in pursuing convictions and lacked transparency in a way that belies Harris’ brand as a “progressive prosecutor.”

In March 2010, just as Harris was campaigning to become California’s attorney general, San Francisco authorities shut down a police department crime lab in the city’s Hunters Point naval yard. A technician named Deborah Madden was accused of skimming drugs, raising broader questions about the lab’s ability to appropriately handle evidence in criminal cases. (Madden later pleaded guilty).

Harris immediately dismissed 20 drug cases, but the number eventually grew to over 1,500 after documents showed that prosecutors within Harris’ office had known about Madden’s potential unreliability months before the lab was closed, but had neglected to tell defense attorneys.

A superior court judge later excoriated Harris’ office, writing that the violations infringed on the defendants’ constitutional rights.

Afterward, Harris formed a unit to handle the sharing of evidence with criminal defense attorneys. She has also said that she did not know about the problems at the crime lab until after the scandal blew up.

But that hasn’t done much to assuage the concerns of critics who say Harris had a tendency toward prosecutorial overreach, which continued once Harris became the state’s attorney general.

Kamala Harris is sworn in as California’s attorney general on Jan. 6, 2011.

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Office of the Attorney General of California

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In 2015, for example, lawyers for an inmate convicted of murder attempted to have the case thrown out after new evidence suggested that Riverside County prosecutors lied on the stand during the initial trial. Harris’ office, representing the state prison system, resisted, only backing down after footage of one of her deputies being eviscerated by three federal judges went viral.

A spokesperson for her since-abandoned presidential campaign said Harris ordered her office to drop the challenge as soon as “she became aware” of the case.

Critics point to other examples. There was her office’s decision to defend a molestation conviction that local prosecutors had secured with a false confession.

Asked about that case, the spokesperson said that it was “long-standing practice” for prosecutors within the Californian Department of Justice to file legal motions without the express approval of the Attorney General, implying that, again, Harris was not aware that her office was making the argument. But in this case, the spokesperson added, state prosecutors believed “the original case…was valid and that the victim in the case deserved justice.”

Another example: her office’s refusal to take over a 2011 Seal Beach mass shooting case after a judge recused the entire Orange County District Attorney’s office for widespread prosecutorial misconduct. Harris defended her decision: “it was being handled at the local level.”

Such a track record is to be expected of any prosecutor, said Sally Lieber, who worked with Harris on human trafficking legislation while representing Mountain View in the state Assembly.

“It is an adversarial system and so she was filling a particular role, but I think that she was able to do it in a very sophisticated, smart and responsive way,” she said.

As California’s AG: Playing hardball

Harris’ biggest accomplishment while California’s attorney general was to secure a financial settlement with some of the country’s largest banks accused of illegally foreclosing on homeowners.

In September 2011, Harris pulled out of ongoing negotiations between attorneys general from nearly every US state and the five banks, calling the proposed deal of $2-to-$4 billion “crumbs on the table.”

Harris was not the first attorney general to walk away, but the departure of the country’s largest state seemed to have its intended effect.

A few months later, with California back in the mix, a new deal was struck. This time, California got $20.2 billion in debt reductions and direct financial assistance.

Still, some consumer groups and outside experts were critical of the deal, arguing that the banks would have been forced to write off much of that bad debt eventually. “All sizzle, no steak,” is how Georgetown law professor Adam Levitin put it.

But Harris’ willingness to play hardball did result in a bigger settlement, said Rob McKenna, former Washington attorney general who was part of the negotiations.

“It’s possible for states to overstate the impact they had on the final settlement. The former New York Attorney General (Eric Schneiderman) would sometimes make claims about the settlement and improvements he had obtained,” he said. “But it’s fair to say that Attorney General Harris negotiated and obtained some improvement in the settlement for California.”

Kamala the campaigner

Harris launched her 2020 presidential campaign high on fanfare and hype, only to flame out less than a year later before even making it to Iowa. It was a historically stark underperformance from a candidate that many Democratic insiders believed would be a formidable contender.

In California, Harris’ electoral track record has been mixed.

Her first spin on the campaign trail was a superlative success. In her 2003 race for San Francisco District Attorney, she pushed out a two-term incumbent and won more votes than any other candidate running for a city-wide office that year.

Harris’ first run for statewide office didn’t go quite smoothly. Her race for Attorney General against Republican Steve Cooley wasn’t called until weeks after Election Day. Yes, Harris won. But she did so by less than a percentage point.

Now, after 18 years in which not a single Republican has won statewide office in California, it’s easy to look back at that nail-biter of an election and see an early sign of Harris’ weakness as a candidate. But at the time, the calculus was a little different. Cooley, a relative moderate, was considered the favorite to win against Harris, a San Francisco liberal. This was 2010, which proved to be a historic landslide election for the GOP. The fact that Harris eked it out despite those headwinds, and as the first woman and person of color to hold that office no less, cemented her status as a rising star in the Democratic Party.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and Democratic vice presidential candidate Sen. Kamala Harris talk as they assess the damage during the Creek Fire at Pine Ridge Elementary on Sept. 15, 2020, in Auberry.

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Gary Kazanjian

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Also rising was Gavin Newsom. The two were San Francisco friends and ran in the same social circles even before their political careers ignited. They share the same political consultants. And when the two most prestigious California elective offices opened up — for governor and U.S. senator — they sidestepped a ballot rivalry when she successfully ran for the Senate, as did he for governor.

Newsom has said — and recently reiterated — that he would not challenge Harris for the Democratic presidential nomination should Biden withdraw. Although Newsom’s name frequently appears on lists of hypothetical Biden replacements, she is already on the ticket and is seen by many as the heir-apparent.

Regardless, both are publicly saying now, again and again, that they are backing Biden.

This story incorporates prior reporting and interviews from CalMatters’ 2020 election coverage.

California community college districts are spending millions of dollars on artificial intelligence-powered chatbots intended to help students navigate admissions, financial aid and campus services.

However, they struggle to consistently provide clear and accurate answers, leaving students frustrated and seeking help from others on unofficial social media channels.

In testing by CalMatters, they often answered general questions correctly but struggled with more specific ones. East Los Angeles College's bot couldn't even correctly name its own president.

Contracts for these chatbots can be pricey and last for years. Three community college districts that responded to a CalMatters survey reported annual costs ranging from about $151,000 to nearly half a million dollars. At the Los Angeles Community College District, the state's largest community college system, contracts and amendments approved since 2021 total about $3.8 million through 2029, according to district board documents.

Community college districts that responded to CalMatters have contracted with chatbot platforms such as Gravyty and Gecko, which district officials say handle thousands of conversations each month, many outside regular office hours, helping to reduce calls and save students unnecessary trips to campus.

Some of these chatbot platforms rely on manually maintained libraries of frequently asked questions and campus websites to answer questions, which can lead to errors when information is outdated or questions fall outside the system's database.

However, officials are working to improve them. Districts like the Santa Monica Community College District have moved to ChatGPT-integrated AI systems that scrape the college's website to generate answers, which officials say seem more reliable. In the Los Angeles district, officials say they plan to transition to a new AI chatbot platform as early as late spring.

Looking for answers

Improvements to the chatbot couldn't come soon enough for students like Pablo Aguirre, a computer science major at East Los Angeles College and an information technology intern at the Los Angeles college district office.

Aguirre mostly avoids the chatbot himself because, he said, it might provide unreliable or outdated information. He recalled using the bot to find financial aid information, but said he gave up after it kept asking him questions instead of giving him a clear answer.

"I just didn't find it as useful," Aguirre said. He usually turns to Google, social media platforms like Reddit and the college's website when looking for answers.

"Online, some pages don't work," Aguirre said, recalling a 404 error message on the college's website. Even when pages load, he said, it can be difficult to find the right one, such as when he was trying to figure out where to sign up for Extended Opportunity Programs and Services, a state-funded program that supports disadvantaged students. "That's where I just jump on Reddit," he said.

Students walk through the Fresno State campus on Feb. 9, 2022.

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Larry Valenzuela

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CalMatters

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Aguirre's experience isn't unique. Reanna Carlson, a commercial music major at Fresno City College and student government vice president, said her college's chatbot, dubbed Sam the Ram after its mascot, repeatedly gave her unclear or incorrect answers to basic questions about campus services. Her district, the State Center Community College District, has a nearly $870,000, three-year contract for Gravyty, formerly Ocelot, through June 20, 2026, according to district board documents. Officials pointed out that the contract comes with other services, including tools that let staff engage in live chats or send text messages to students.

"I think the chatbot is outdated and can't navigate the services we provide on campus effectively," Carlson said. "I don't think it's the most beneficial option when it comes to asking questions."

Oddly, Carlson got accurate information on the availability of free food at her campus' Ram Pantry only when accidentally adding a typo to her query. Repeated CalMatters testing confirmed the same outcome, though the bot sometimes lists links that include the food pantry after clicking an adjacent "sources" button.

"If it weren't for the amazing staff on campus that constantly remind students of our services, I'd be lost," Carlson said.

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Screenshots via Fresno City College website

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Testing chatbots

When CalMatters tested community college chatbots, they generally returned quick, accurate responses to common questions but were less consistent with more specific ones.

For example, when asked, "Who is the current president of ELAC?" East Los Angeles College's chatbot incorrectly named Alberto Román, who left the position last year to become the district's chancellor. In another test, when asked, "What is the financial aid office's current schedule?" the bot provided incorrect hours and dates.

East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park on March 14, 2024. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters

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Jules Hotz

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CalMatters

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East Los Angeles College in Monterey Park on March 14, 2024. Photo by Jules Hotz for CalMatters East Los Angeles College's chatbot claims to support several languages, including English, Spanish, Chinese and Vietnamese. But CalMatters found inconsistencies when asking it in Spanish, "Do I need a Social Security number to enroll?" Instead of answering the question, the system directed users to visit the registrar's office to update their Social Security number. When asked the same question in English, the bot pivoted to discussing financial aid.

Fresno City College's chatbot, powered by the same AI provider as East Los Angeles College's system, Gravyty, showed similar problems when asked whether a Social Security number is required to enroll. It also often failed to direct students to the correct offices and, in some cases, listed incorrect locations and hours.

Concerns with chatbots have surfaced elsewhere. In New York City, reporting by The Markup and THE CITY found that a city-run AI chatbot provided guidance that could lead to illegal behavior, prompting Mayor Zohran Mamdani to terminate it in February.

'Good answers with fewer errors'

Santa Monica College's chatbot, powered by Gecko, was more successful in answering most questions. The single-college district uses a ChatGPT-integrated chatbot that scans the college's website, which staff regularly update and monitor. The district has contracted with Gecko since 2019 and renewed its annual contract for the tool late last year for $57,000, according to district board documents. It initially showed a major hiccup: when asked about mental health counseling, the bot did not mention the campus' Center for Wellness and Wellbeing. It does now.

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Screenshots via Santa Monica College website

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District officials say chatbots' problems stem from how the tools are configured and the information they draw from, rather than the technology itself.

The Los Angeles district originally adopted its chatbot through Ocelot, which later merged with Gravyty The same chatbot platform is also used on the California Student Aid Commission website.

Betsy Regalado, one of the district's associate vice chancellors, said the current system relies on a manually maintained library of frequently asked questions that staff at each of the district's nine colleges help maintain and review at least once or twice a year for accuracy. She added that chatbots are primarily geared for the public rather than enrolled students, who can access more detailed personal information through their campus portal.

"The current chatbot that we have uses a library of questions. If you don't have that question in that library, then those poor people don't get an answer or they won't get an accurate answer," Regalado said.

She said the district plans to transition all nine colleges to Gravyty's platform as early as late spring at no additional cost under its existing contract, which runs through 2029. The new system will use AI to scrape college and external websites to generate responses.

"We're ready for the modernization of (the chatbot) and the change to generative AI. That is the new world out there," Regalado said.

Santa Monica College is one of 116 campuses in the California community college system.

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Courtesy Santa Monica College

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Santa Monica College's chatbot similarly initially relied on a manually loaded library of common questions and answers before transitioning to its fully AI system, according to Esau Tovar, the college's dean of enrollment services. In an email, he said the bot "was never designed to address all aspects of the student journey," but to answer general questions from students.

Tovar said the bot draws responses from the college's website, meaning accuracy depends on how current and complete that information is. As a result, the college prioritizes keeping its website up to date so the bot provides "good answers with fewer errors" rather than "great answers with potentially more errors."

Widely used, cautiously trusted

Acknowledging limitations, community college districts justify the costs by pointing to heavy student use, which would cost significantly more if performed by call center staff around the clock.

Regalado said the Los Angeles district colleges average 5,000 to 7,000 interactions per month. Other districts reported similar monthly use, including 5,000 interactions at the State Center Community College District, which includes campuses in Fresno and nearby counties, and 4,000 conversations at Santa Monica College. Regalado said that as long as the chatbot remains heavily used, her district would continue to support it.

Tovar said the chatbot provides 24-hour support regardless of time zone or location, which he said is helpful for international students when they are out of the country. He said that answering the tens of thousands of questions the chatbots receive around the clock would cost significantly more if handled by staff.

"Every technology has a cost. We would simply not be able to assist all students if they could only reach us using traditional methods," Tovar said.

But high usage and expanded access do not always translate into trust, especially when students need precise answers to delicate topics.

Bryan Hartanto, a civil engineering major at Santa Monica College from Indonesia, said the college's newer chatbot system is smoother and can be a useful starting point, especially for students more comfortable communicating in languages other than English. But as an international student he worries that following inaccurate guidance could jeopardize his visa status.

"Maintaining status as an international student right now is very, very sensitive," Hartanto said. "I would still rely on human or email communication."

Martin Romero is a contributor with the College Journalism Network, a collaboration between CalMatters and student journalists from across California. CalMatters higher education coverage is supported by a grant from the College Futures Foundation.

This article was originally published on CalMatters and was republished under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives license.

A city of Los Angeles commission on Thursday recommended increasing the power of the City Council over the police department, a shift supporters said would make the agency more accountable to the people.

Right now, the council has no direct authority over the LAPD. Instead, a five-member Police Commission appointed by the mayor oversees the department.

The structure has sometimes frustrated members of the City Council who want to weigh in on police policy — especially amid what some see as the department’s heavy-handed approach to protestors.

Under the proposal, any police-related ordinance enacted by the council would be reviewed by the Police Commission. The panel would have the option of vetoing it within 60 days. After that, if the commission takes no action, the ordinance would become law.

The Los Angeles Charter Reform Commission voted down stronger language that would have given the council more direct control over police policy.

Community activists hailed the recommendations.

“Months ago, police reform wasn’t even on the Charter Commission’s to-do list,” Godfrey Plata of LA Forward said in a statement. “Today, because community members came together to force conversations that likely never would have happened on their own, we have multiple reforms headed to City Council. That’s a huge victory.”

The recommendation goes to the City Council, which will decide whether to place it on the November ballot, along with a series of other recommended charter changes.

Criticism of police commission

The recommendation comes amid growing frustration over the rising liability costs caused by police misconduct and a sense the Police Commission has done too little to reform the department.

“The police commission is borderline useless,” Baba Akili of Black Lives Matter told the Charter Commission during public testimony.

In addition, the charter reform panel recommended strengthening the role of the council to terminate officers involved in misconduct. Right now, the City Council has no such role. Under the recommendation, the council would be able to override a decision by the police chief and civilian Board of Rights panel if they decide to retain an officer accused of wrongdoing.

The commission also voted to recommend the police department be required to buy $1 million worth of liability insurance for each officer to be paid out if there is a legal settlement or judgment when an officer engages in misconduct. The cost would not be able to exceed $20 per officer.

Commissioners said skyrocketing judgments and settlements connected to police misconduct necessitated the creation of an insurance program.

Other recommendations

Previously, the Charter Reform Commission recommended increasing the size of the City Council from 15 to 25 members, shifting to a ranked-choice voting system and lowering the voting age to 16 in city and school board elections.

Each of those recommendations would need to be approved by the City Council before it can appear on the ballot.

The commission was born out of calls for reform in the wake of the 2022 City Hall tapes scandal. Three members of the City Council and a labor leader were caught on audio tape making racist and disparaging remarks during a discussion of how to retain power through political redistricting.

City Council President Nury Martinez and the labor leader, L.A. County Federation of Labor President Ron Herrera, resigned their positions.

LA28, the committee behind the upcoming Summer Games and Paralympics in Los Angeles, made recent headlines after supporting and defending their chair, Casey Wasserman, whose name appeared in the ongoing Epstein files released last month.

The 35-member committee, which seems to be the only entity that could remove and unseat Wasserman, said that after they reviewed his documented interactions with Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, they did not go “beyond what has already been publicly documented.”

"The Executive Committee of the Board has determined that, based on these facts, as well as the strong leadership he has exhibited over the past ten years, Mr. Wasserman should continue to lead LA28 and deliver a safe and successful games,” the committee said in a statement.

Despite local leaders and organizations, including members of the L.A. City Council, L.A. Mayor Karen Bass, representatives on the L.A. County Board of Supervisors and the Los Angeles County Legislative Delegation, demanding his removal from the games' leadership, the board has remained steady in its defense of Wasserman.

For starters, the official LA28 website only lists the names of the 35-member committee, failing to provide any additional information on their external position, affiliation, or background.

Despite the limited information that the board provides about its members, the influence they hold is exponential. Overall, they are in charge of the successful execution of the 2028 games through things like ensuring the games remain on budget, managing environmental sustainability and venues and securing corporate partnerships with companies such as Starbucks, Delta, Google, and Comcast.

Among the committee members who continue to defend Wasserman are local business, sports, and political leaders, including the following:

Latinos

• Beatriz Acevedo

Beatriz Acevedo is a Latina entrepreneur, co-founder and president of Mitú, or we are Mitú, a digital news and culture source for Latinos. Acevedo, who was born in Tijuana and raised in Mexico City, also co-founded SUMA Wealth, a financial wellness company and app that is said to help Latinos with tips about financial literacy and wealth-building tools.

The app uses AI “financial coaches” that help subscribers with budgeting, investing and receive personalized financial coaching.

“Your financial future can shine brighter than your abuela's saints' candles with our unlimited money-making tips, deals, and financial tools,” the official website states.

Acevedo is also the president of her family’s foundation, the Acevedo Foundation, which, according to its website, is committed to creating more equitable access to capital and mentorship for Latino entrepreneurs to elevate the community's needs and build generational wealth. She is also a member of the Latino Community Foundation.

• Jessica Alba

Jessica Alba is known for acting roles in movies like “Fantastic Four” and “Good Luck Chuck,” among others. She is also the founder of the Honest Company, an L.A.-based consumer goods company specializing in baby, beauty and personal care items, including diapers and wipes, utilizing non-toxic, plant-based ingredients.

In 2015, numerous lawsuits claimed the company had deceptive labeling of ingredients, specifically sodium lauryl sulfate in laundry detergent.

The actress, who last month made a surprise dancing appearance during Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show, has also openly spoken about experiencing sexual harassment “all the time along the way” throughout her career in the Hollywood industry.

• José E. Feliciano

José E. Feliciano is a Puerto Rican-born American businessman, investor and multi-billionaire.

He is the co-founder of investment firm Clearlake Capital, a private investment firm in the technology, industrial and consumer sectors, managing over $90 billion of assets. The company is the majority owner of Chelsea Football Club, having acquired the team in May 2022.

Through the Kwanza Jones and José E. Feliciano Initiative, Feliciano and his wife have also donated to causes at Princeton University and Stanford University. He also serves on the boards of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Latino and today is one of the wealthiest Americans.

• Pete Rodriguez 

Pete Rodriguez is a labor union leader and member of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Joiners of America, one of North America's largest building-trades unions, representing over 500,000 members in the construction and wood-products industries.

Besides joining the union in 1996, when he was doing highway and bridge work, there is not much public information about him. His father was an immigrant who arrived in the U.S. undocumented and worked as a union laborer as well.

Members Tied to President Donald Trump 

• Kevin McCarthy

Kevin McCarthy served as the Speaker of the House of Representatives from January to October 2023. The Republican from Bakersfield, California, concluded his 16-year career after he was the first Speaker of the House in U.S. history to be formally removed from the position. McCarthy was initially a supporter of Trump until he stated Trump “bears responsibility” for the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol, a statement that he later retracted and once again became a vocal supporter of Trump's return to power.

• Reince Priebus

Reince Priebus served as Trump’s chief of staff for the first six months of his first term. He was removed as White House chief of staff in July 2017 after being blamed for poor performance and leaking of documents. He also serves as a political analyst for Fox News, appearing across their platforms and news segments.

• Diane Hendricks

Billionaire Diane Hendricks, considered to be the wealthiest person in Wisconsin, has been a Trump mega-donor for years. Hendricks, who has openly said to be anti-union, faced controversy in the past for paying zero state income taxes in 2010, 2012, 2013, and 2014, although it was classified as legal due to business tax classifications. She has previously said to have built the majority of her multi-billion-dollar fortune through ABC Supply, one of the largest roofing supply companies in the U.S. Before that, she worked as a Playboy Bunny for about a year as a teenager, a job she said she took to support her child and pay her bills.

• Patrick Dumont

Billionaire Patrick Dumont is the owner of the National Basketball Association team, the Dallas Mavericks. He was also recently appointed chairman and chief executive officer of Las Vegas Sands, a casino and resort company. He is also the son-in-law of Miriam Adelson, an Israeli-American physician who has been ranked as one of the wealthiest people in the world and has been a major Trump benefactor, as well as one of the largest donors to Republican causes. In 2018, Trump awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest U.S. civilian honor, for her work in support of Jewish causes and advocating for strong U.S.-Israel ties.

Others

Jeffrey Katzenberg served as chairman of Walt Disney Studios from 1984 to 1994 and later as the chief executive officer and founder of DreamWorks Animation. For decades, he has been a top Democratic Party fundraiser, involved with campaigns for Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton and was a co-chair for Joe Biden’s 2024 campaign.

Contrary to popular belief, the majority of the board is not made up of former Paralympic athletes; instead, the majority of its members are billionaires and prominent political and business figures.

CNN reported last week that, according to their sources, the U.S. and International Olympic committees, which oversee and approve major LA28 decisions, have been engaged in backchannel conversations about Wasserman’s role, with a potential replacement floating around.

This story first appeared on The LA Local.

Homeless outreach workers are now roaming daily across the Eastside, including Boyle Heights, to provide hygiene kits and tents and connect unhoused residents to temporary housing.

The effort is part of a new year-long program launched last Thursday by Councilmember Ysabel Jurado, which works in partnership with Urban Alchemy, a San Francisco-based nonprofit that provides services to unhoused people.

The program — Leading Outreach with Valued Engagement, or LOVE — will be in effect through March 2027. The program costs $300,000 and is funded through Jurado’s discretionary funds. The team is made up of three people, which includes two on-the-ground outreach practitioners and a third person directing their operations.

Boyle Heights has seen a recent rise in homeless encampment reports. In the first quarter of 2025, 635 encampments were reported in Boyle Heights, compared with 379 during the same period in 2024, according to an analysis by The Eastsider.

Homeless encampments were also a source of discussion at January’s Community Police Advisory Board hosted by the Hollenbeck Community Police Station. 

Attendees expressed frustration about unhoused people living in an alley behind the Benjamin Franklin Library and a growing encampment near Hollenbeck Drive and South Boyle Avenue, according to a summary of the meeting. 

Encampments move from one place to another, said Susana Betancourt, a member of the Community Police Advisory Board. Betancourt talked about pressuring property owners to clean up. “They not only have tents, the encampments there, but they put their vehicles,” she said.

Jurado, in a statement to Boyle Heights Beat, said her office works with service providers “to respond to encampments thoughtfully.”

“We coordinate every two weeks to prioritize areas of greatest need, making sure neighbors get consistent support and that unhoused residents are connected to housing, health care, and other services,” she said. 

Jurado touts the new program as giving unhoused residents better access to “life-saving health care, stable housing, [and] pathways to recovery.” The LOVE program, Jurado said, will help “reach neighbors before situations become emergencies.”

“Addressing homelessness isn’t one-size-fits-all. I invested in the LOVE Team because every person’s needs are different,” Jurado said. “The team is out in the community every day, visiting every neighborhood in the district each week, building trust, and connecting neighbors to housing, health care, and support services that help them regain stability.”

Outreach workers are tasked with providing crisis intervention and de-escalation, assessing individual needs and connecting people to interim housing referrals. They will also distribute food and Narcan, as well as offer “post-placement follow-up to help people remain housed.”

Jurado said workers will exclusively offer daily outreach to CD 14 neighborhoods, which include El Sereno, Lincoln Heights, Boyle Heights, Eagle Rock, Highland Park and downtown Los Angeles. 

Mason Santa Maria, a spokesperson for Jurado, said outreach workers have already identified unhoused residents who are not yet logged into the Homeless Management Information System, an online database tracking services accessed by people who are unhoused or at risk of homelessness. 

“It’s hard to keep track of people when they don’t have a stable address,” Santa Maria said. “This is a way to keep track of them.”

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