If you have ever spent five minutes in a room with California Attorney General Kamala Harris, you would agree with me that she is a natural leader. I felt that way when I first met her in 2000 and soon began encouraging her to run for public office. She had brains, grit and incredible charisma. But in 2003 when she told me she wanted to run for District Attorney of San Francisco and asked, "Where do I start," I didn't have an answer.
I proceeded to search high and low for somewhere to send her. I went to the Democratic Party and all the major women's political organizations, but at that time there was no training for women running for local offices. This seemed crazy to me. Wasn't there somewhere I could send Kamala to make sure she received expert training? Unfortunately, I couldn't find any resources, so I told her to come over to my apartment and we would figure it out. I knew that in order to begin raising money and gaining traction, she needed to start with the basics -- writing a bio. Once we had a bio, we moved on to fundraising and she was off and running.
This experience with Kamala coincided with the realization that 1992, the "Year of the Woman," was just that -- one year, and not an upward trend. That year had led to a dramatic increase in the number of women in Congress, but at the local and state level, our numbers remained low. With a few like-minded women, I decided to create a training program for Democratic women interested in running for office in Northern California called Emerge America, and I am proud to say that we are now in 14 states, and opening three more this year. While we have had tremendous success, we have a long way to go in terms of the number of women running for office -- and particularly for elected law enforcement positions.
This past Tuesday, the Women Donors Network released a shocking report on the number of women and people of color who serve in elected prosecutor positions across the country. Of the 2,437 elected prosecutors in the US, 79 percent of them are white men. 17 percent of them are women, but only 1 percent of them are women of color. And if you disregard Virginia and Mississippi, 99 percent of them are white. Even more shocking, 85 percent of incumbent prosecutors ran unopposed.
And it's not just prosecutors who are elected -- in many states, it's sheriffs and judges as well. The impact of having the right people in these offices is profound, and as it stands, they simply aren't being vetted. We need intelligent Democratic women attorneys and police officers to consider themselves competitive candidates for these law enforcement positions, and we need Americans to not only focus on lawmakers, but also law enforcers.
I think back to that experience with Kamala and I can honestly tell you that even with all of Kamala's strengths -- an extremely successful litigation career, an excellent fundraising network and plenty of charisma -- taking on "the Old Boys' Club" was extremely challenging. There is a serious breach in our political system when elected officials remain in office purely because there was no other candidate. One option is no option in a democracy.