“Crime Has Been a Euphemism for Race”: Alameda County’s Reform DA Rejects Recall Narrative

What is now a multimillion-dollar campaign to recall the elected prosecutor in Alameda County, California, began just six months after she took office. 

When Pamela Price won office in 2022, she became the first district attorney in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, in decades who hadn’t risen through the ranks of the DA’s office. Instead, Price was a former defense and civil rights attorney focused on reforming the criminal justice system and holding police accountable for misconduct.

Now, with the recall effort against her gaining steam, Price is calling out the double standard against her office, denouncing the focus on crime as the perpetuation of a racist trope.

“There is obviously no place where racism has been so accepted than in the criminal justice system,” she said. “When we talk about crime in America — for decades, if not centuries — crime has been a euphemism for race. And to be afraid of crime is synonymous often for many people with being afraid of Black people or being afraid of brown people.”

Police unions spent heavily against Price in 2018, when she first took on her predecessor, Nancy O’Malley, who had held office for a decade without facing a challenger. In June, a grand jury found that O’Malley violated county policies during the 2018 election by soliciting campaign funds from police unions.

Price lost to O’Malley in 2018 but beat one of her deputies in 2022 to become the first Black woman to serve as Alameda County’s district attorney.

It was under O’Malley’s tenure that homicides in Oakland first spiked, but Price’s opponents say they want to recall her because her reform policies have driven crime in the city, one of the 14 cities in the county. Price told The Intercept that those behind the recall campaign did not take the same tack against O’Malley when crime rose during her time in office — and that some of the cases she is being blamed for were handled by O’Malley.

Price acknowledged that violence remains an issue that she wants to tackle in office and said her policies are designed to allocate more resources toward the most serious crimes. She said, however, she has a problem with the way O’Malley never received the same scrutiny, criticism, or vitriol about crime during her tenure.

“If you did not hold Nancy O’Malley accountable, it is not fair for you to now be in the public eye suggesting to the public that I’m doing something wrong,” Price said. (O’Malley did not respond to a request for comment.)

O’Malley had been repeatedly accused of misconduct by defense lawyers. In one case, a judge knocked down the objections, but in another, charges were dismissed because of misconduct by O’Malley’s office. In 2021, a report from the ACLU of Northern California and Urban Peace Movement took the DA’s office to task for policies that resulted in “over-incarceration and criminalization” — particularly of Black and brown communities. O’Malley was also criticized for going easy on police and not investigating deaths of people in police custody.

Police and real estate investors bankrolling the recall push against Price have been among the reform DA’s most vocal and powerful opponents. That opposition has been long in the making, since Price’s 2018 campaign against O’Malley.

Things kicked into high gear after Price took office last year. The Oakland Police Officers’ Association has blamed her for crime and attacked her for charging police with misconduct. In April, Price charged an Oakland Police officer with perjury and threatening a witness in a wrongful conviction case. The union said the case was an attempt to undermine the credibility of police “and facilitate the release of convicted murderers.”

“My predecessor was the district attorney for 13 years. I haven’t seen anyone make a correlation between her policies and the rise and fall of crime.”

Under O’Malley, homicides in Oakland first climbed in 2012. Homicides fell and rose throughout O’Malley’s tenure and began to rise again in 2019, followed by another spike in 2020 amid the Covid-19 pandemic that affected cities and rural areas around the country. O’Malley announced her retirement in 2021 and left office in 2022, just before Price took office. Oakland homicides stayed level during Price’s first year on the job. 

“My predecessor was the district attorney for 13 years,” Price said. “I haven’t seen anyone make a correlation between her policies and the rise and fall of crime.”

Oakland Real Estate Interests

O’Malley had also faced a recall effort, but not because of rising homicides in Oakland. The push, which received little attention and did not go to a vote, started after O’Malley declined to prosecute one public transit officer who knelt on 22-year-old Oscar Grant’s neck before another officer shot and killed him in 2009. For her part, O’Malley is supporting the current recall effort against Price and gave $5,000 to the effort.

Supporters of the recall effort against Price, including several wearing Make America Great Again hats, rallied at the county courthouse earlier this month on the deadline to submit petition signatures to get the recall on the ballot. County election officials are still manually counting the signatures and expect a result by April 15. Price and her supporters have accused recall leaders of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to gather signatures and recruiting people who don’t live in the county to canvass for signatures. 

Two committees are leading the recall push. The first, Save Alameda for Everyone, was launched in July by Oakland residents Brenda Grisham, whose son was killed in a shooting in 2010, and Carl Chan, who is the president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce. The recall committee has also paid thousands of dollars to Grisham’s own security company. (Grisham told the press the payment was a reimbursement for security costs.)

Grisham told The Intercept that she has never blamed Price for her son’s case. Her reasons for wanting to recall the DA stem from Price ignoring victims and releasing murderers. Grisham denied allegations that signatures had been improperly collected and said there was no rule that canvassers had to be from the county. She said she was confident the committee had enough valid signatures to get the recall on the ballot. 

Grisham said she started planning the recall effort in June or July and that it shouldn’t matter who is funding the effort because they’re citizens of the county. 

Among those backers was hedge fund partner and Oakland resident Philip Dreyfuss, who worked with Grisham and Chan before launching a second separate committee in September, Supporters of Recall of Pamela Price. He is one of the biggest individual donors to the committee and has given $390,000 so far, more than half of the money it raised last year. Dreyfuss also gave $10,000 to support the recall of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin in 2022. (Dreyfuss did not respond to a request for comment.)

National media outlets have framed the push to recall Price as part of a dispute over approaches to criminal justice reform. Price acknowledged that was true, but also said the fight in Alameda County is being driven by other motives, including wealthy investors who want to protect real estate interests in downtown Oakland. 

Mass incarceration in California has been a failed strategy, Price said. Prosecutors in the reform movement are opposed to racism and racist policies in the criminal justice system, including mass incarceration and injustices imposed on both survivors of crime and defendants. 

“Unfortunately,” Price said, “there are many in this arena who are not opposed to the racial inequities that have infected this system.” 

Price pointed to her duty to the whole county, not just Oakland. “I’m the district attorney of Alameda County,” she said. “And any policies or practices that we implement are implemented and practiced across the county.”

“Unfortunately, there are many in this arena who are not opposed to the racial inequities that have infected this system.”

Price has lived in Oakland since 1978, during which time she said the city has always been portrayed in a negative light compared to others in the Bay Area. At the same time, she said, Oakland has been traumatized by gun violence that mass incarceration has not solved. 

“People have always denigrated Oakland,” she said. “Now I think there’s the racism associated with putting my face as the Black face of Oakland, when in fact I’m not the mayor of Oakland, I’m not the police chief of Oakland. But it serves a purpose.” 

Price added that if the people leading the recall truly cared about victims, they’d use their money to support victims in Alameda County. 

“The primary backers and funders of the recall are, in fact, real estate developers and investors that have no real interest in the manner in which justice is administered to the majority of people who live, work, and play in Alameda County,” Price said. “They are a handful of wealthy folks that have as their agenda to control the way that the district attorney’s office operates. They could care less about the victims that we deal with every day.” 

“The amount of money that they are prepared to spend to recall me could easily replenish the trauma recovery fund that the state is having to shut down because we don’t have any more funding.”

The San Fran Playbook

Opponents of the recall push have also pointed to overlaps in donors and messaging between the campaign against Price and the campaign to recall Boudin in San Francisco in 2022. Boudin’s replacement, Brooke Jenkins, has also come under fire for not disclosing payments she received from groups linked to the SF recall campaign prior to her appointment. Violent crime has increased under Jenkins, but the reaction from Boudin’s critics has been muted. 

Jenkins’s current term ends in 2025. She already has a challenger, Ryan Khojasteh, an alum of Boudin’s office who Jenkins fired shortly after she was appointed. After being let go, Khojasteh went to work for Price as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County. He’s currently working for Price part-time and launched his campaign against Jenkins in January. 

Khojasteh is hammering Jenkins for overseeing a rise in crime after promising that getting rid of Boudin would solve San Francisco’s problems. Jenkins has now turned her fire on judges, a strategy that has largely backfired so far. Efforts to oust two San Francisco judges failed in elections earlier this month. 

“Now the mayor, the DA, the police chief, who are all aligned, don’t have anyone else to blame.”

“Now the mayor, the DA, the police chief, who are all aligned, don’t have anyone else to blame,” Khojasteh told The Intercept. “So they decided to shift that to judges, and that failed.” 

Even the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which was critical of Boudin, has raised alarms about crime in San Francisco under Jenkins. The chamber’s annual City Beat poll, released in February, showed that 72 percent of residents feel San Francisco is on the “wrong track” and 69 percent feel that crime worsened in 2023, during Jenkins’s tenure. 

Although Jenkins has now fallen victim to the panic she stoked, her rhetoric has eroded faith in the entire system and made it harder for prosecutors and judges to do their jobs, Khojasteh said. Some victims have refused to cooperate because they’ve heard that DAs won’t prosecute or that judges will release people.

“That’s rhetoric coming from Brooke Jenkins making my job harder,” he said. “I’m the one begging the victim to come to court just to do the basics of my job.” 

While Price pointed to similarities between her predicament and the San Francisco recall, she noted that what’s happening in Alameda County is very different.

“It’s the same false narrative used: the ‘soft-on-crime’ trope that comes from the 1980s, from Ronald Reagan.”

“We know that some of the major donors for the Alameda County effort were involved in funding the recall of Chesa Boudin,” Price said. “So it’s the same false narrative used: the ‘soft-on-crime’ trope that comes from the 1980s, from Ronald Reagan. The difference is that Alameda County is not one city.” 

Alameda is a diverse county made up of many residents who rent, including those who may not be as accepting of the status quo as voters in San Francisco.

The linking of race and crime has been deeply embedded in how the criminal justice system functions, how it’s perceived, and the conversation that has proceeded, Price said.

“It’s a conversation about race and criminality that led to mass incarceration,” she said. “And so it’s that same conversation that we have to be willing to engage in, if we’re going to unravel mass incarceration.”

The post “Crime Has Been a Euphemism for Race”: Alameda County’s Reform DA Rejects Recall Narrative appeared first on The Intercept.