SAN FRANCISCO — On April 28, San Francisco County district attorney Chesa Boudin, secretary of state Dr. Shirley Weber, former presidential candidate Tom Steyer, and a formerly incarcerated activist held a briefing and film premiere on fixing the broken US misdemeanor system. The film, Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem by the nonprofit film studio Brave New Films, examines America’s history – in the Reconstruction Era and today – of using the misdemeanor system to uphold white supremacy.

The event, which was cosponsored by the League of Women Voters of California,  ACLU Northern California and Initiate Justice, addressed the human costs of the misdemeanor system, consistent role in upholding racism from the Civil War through today, and the data-driven solutions and alternatives.

“We know from overwhelming amounts of evidence that even short periods of incarceration, a day or two days, can lead to someone committing crime in the future that they never otherwise would have done,” said San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin, whose reform-minded approach follows the evidence, which shows that criminalizing misdemeanor offenses is counter-productive. “Even more profound than incarceration or future criminal behavior is something that I think is very close to home for all of us in this moment just days after the verdict against Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd. That was a case that was about Black Lives Matter, it was a case that was about police excessive force, it was a case about police officers brutally murdering an unarmed Black man. But let’s not forget why those police officers were there. Police were responding to an allegation of a $20 bill that might have been counterfeit. And we’re still making sense of the killing of Daunte Wright. For what? What was he stopped for? For having an air freshener hanging from his rearview mirror.”

“I love what was said in the film that misdemeanors weren’t minor. I heard that a lot. ‘It’s just a minor offense. You can get it expunged, it will go away.’ And I found myself in desperation feeding my kids in a supermarket. At the time I remember thinking, ‘I don’t know what they’ll do, I don’t know what will happen but my kids are hungry.’ And I just started feeding them stuff as we were walking around the store. And as we begin to walk up to the front of the store, I was approached by an undercover officer in the store. And he arrested me. He took me to this room and took my kids, and I ended up going to jail for that,” said formerly incarcerated activist/author and Women in Transition Re-entry Project executive director Lisa James, tearfully. “I remember coming home from prison, thinking that I would be able to start my life over. I didn’t realize – I was so naïve – that society had set up a system that was dead-set against me making it from one level to the next in my life. I began to start realizing the truth about how the system was designed to keep me from moving forward, to keep me from getting my children, to keep me from getting a job, to keep me from doing anything productive.”

“Black life is so fragile that these kinds of things happen daily to our children. And most families and most parents are so concerned because these supposedly minor misdemeanors become major events that can escalate within seconds and change your life forever,” said California Secretary of State Dr. Shirley Weber. “This film was wonderful because it shows the two stories: the past and the present. Because sometimes people don’t want to recognize the fact that the brutality that African Americans suffer in this country is really organized and designed by the systems itself that it is designed to perpetuate: the dominance of African Americans by whites.”

“As you’ll see in the film, it’s all too easy to do the same thing the same way, even when it fails to keep us safe, even when we spend obscene amounts of money, and even when it’s inherently racist,” said Robert Greenwald, founder of Brave New Films and director of Racially Charged: America’s Misdemeanor Problem. “Many of us know how hard it is for data and for science to combat emotion. The film is one piece of an effort to combine emotion and data in the fight for justice, to put a face on policy.”

“Police, under the guise of law, have the ability to control people and specifically controlling, punishing, and keeping down African Americans. You really can’t separate the way this misdemeanor system has worked, from the way that the cash bail system has worked, from that, from the police violence against black men,” said Tom Steyer, former 2020 presidential candidate, businessman, activist and founder of NextGen America. “These aren’t just isolated incidents but they are part of a systematic racism.”

13 million people a year – most of them poor and people of color – are abused by this system. Many of the instances of police violence that prompted recent racial justice protests started with alleged low-level misdemeanor infractions like passing counterfeit bills, selling loose cigarettes and having a broken tail light. In addition to the social and financial costs, the spread of COVID-19 in jails and prisons has added another layer of urgency to reform and reduce misdemeanor prosecution as a matter of justice, equity and public health.

For more information about the film, who profits from the current misdemeanor system and what reform-minded prosecutors and citizens can do, visit misdemeanorfilm.org.

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Press Contact: Elizabeth Leslie eleslie @ lwvc.org, 916-442-7215