Pamela Price is the new District Attorney (DA), or chief prosecutor, of Alameda County. She was just elected in November 2022, and has been in office barely half a year. She is a reformer, one of many “progressive prosecutors” across the country trying to turn around the runaway train of mass incarceration that has ballooned to two million people behind bars, over five times as many as there were fifty years ago. And, Black men are six times as likely to be incarcerated as white men.
Courtesy of Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club
But there is also a contrary national wave, working to undo the reforms of the progressive prosecutors. Here in Alameda County, there is already a recall petition to remove DA Price from office.
The recall campaign is at the beginning stage, but the rhetoric is explosive. Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce President Carl Chan, one of the recall proponents, said in an interview that Price was emboldening criminals by signaling a lack of consequences. “Six months in, you’re already pretty much destroying the legal system,” said Chan. In response, Price drew a comparison to the January 6, 2021 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, stating the recall proponents were “trying to seize control from local voters because they refuse to accept the results of a legitimate, democratic election.”
The recall campaign began even before Price took office. So it’s clear that the recall is not really based on moves that DA Price has made on specific cases. It’s based even less on the trends in crime under her leadership as a prosecutor. Yes, some categories of crime are up this year–but they were trending up under her predecessor, Nancy O’Malley, as well. National studies show that progressive prosecutors are not tied to the rise in violent crime.
The debate over the recall is really about policy. Old-line prosecutors like O’Malley, and Price’s 2022 opponent, Assistant DA Terry Wiley, hold relatively traditional law enforcement views. O’Malley, for example, has argued for stricter charging and sentencing laws. The California District Attorneys Association, which she led in 2019-2020, has opposed many bills to decrease prison populations, release elderly prisoners, impose community-based punishments for some misdemeanors, and to increase protections for juveniles in the criminal justice system.
For her part, DA Price has laid out an ambitious reform platform. During her 2022 campaign, she committed to “take aggressive steps to restore public trust in our criminal justice system, ensure public safety, end mass incarceration and root out racial, socioeconomic and gender disparities within Alameda County’s criminal justice system.” Her platform includes pledges “not to seek the death penalty, to respect ‘sanctuary city’ policies, and to investigate ‘excessive sentencing practices with a special focus on racially-biased prosecutions.’”
According to Politico, “Price’s supporters say the longtime civil rights litigator has done precisely what she campaigned on. She has sharply curtailed the use of sentencing enhancements that add time for factors like gang membership, sought to avoid condemning people to life without parole, revived probes of police shootings and jail deaths, reviewed old convictions and expanded oversight of a troubled county jail.”
[The following are excerpted, paraphrased remarks from a recent panel discussion including Pamela Price and former San Francisco D.A. Chesa Boudin, sponsored by the Wellstone Democratic Renewal Club.]
We must break apart the falsehood that we cannot have both safety and justice. That approach is a lazy one. In fact, the status quo is failing to make us safe.
Years of incarceration is not the marker for how much justice we’re getting.
Prosecutors are responsible for defending the interests of the entire community. That includes the defendants.
We are smart and capable of doing two things at once.
We seek justice with compassion–for everyone involved, including victim and defendant. We refuse to hold to a one-dimensional lens. Look at what is impacting the person. We must have a goal of preventing recidivism, re-offending. We need healing. We are just starting to have a discussion about restorative justice.
Some say “the only way to get justice is to charge the highest possible crime, for the longest possible sentence.” Protesters demand juveniles be tried as adults. But we need to follow the science of brain development, as required in 2016’s Proposition 57 on Criminal Sentences & Juvenile Crime Proceedings.
Since the 1970s, we decided that prisons are the way we are going to solve problems. But they fail 70% of the time. That is a failed prescription.
The SF DA’s office, under Boudin’s progressive predecessor George Gascon, started neighborhood courts, adjudicated by local people on a restorative basis. Of 4,000 cases heard by trained community members since 2013, 95% were resolved successfully.
Criminal justice must be independent of the pain and make a plan that will prevent the pain from happening again. We have to be honest and say that more punishment just leads to more pain. Lying to the victims will not make it any better.
Crime victims come to us and say, “as the DA, you represent me. You have to win for me the highest penalty possible against the perpetrator.” In fact, DA’s do not represent individual victims of crime. We are not their lawyer, but are lawyers for all the people–not to do the bidding of the most retributive voice.
But the needs of victims are extremely important. Progressive DA’s like us actually do much more for victims than the law and order DA’s. Under those DA’s, victim services were only available at all to people who commit to full cooperation with prosecutors. Worse, they may declare you a material witness, in fact putting a victim in a cage if you don’t cooperate.
In this country, 80% of the prosecutorial action is around misdemeanor conduct. Here in the Bay Area, it is around 70%.
Unlike the status quo, we believe in focusing on serious or violent crimes.
In general, it is the role of the police to investigate crimes and make arrests, and the DA can do little without the police doing their investigative work.
99% of auto burglaries are not solved by the police. Arrest rates in Oakland are terrible [low].
Cops have to realize they will never be able to hire enough to do the job the way they think they should do it.
DA Price meets frequently with local police chiefs, and tells them, “I won’t tell you how to do your job. Don’t tell me how to do mine….I don’t have a tension with cops if you are doing your job, on a constitutional basis.”
Also [speaking of the phenomenon of police refusing to enforce the law, as a demonstration, or to undermine progressive prosecutors], telling people that you won’t do your job encourages vigilantism.
The newest person to show up to the criminal justice conversation–the progressive prosecutor–is not the cause of the failures of the system over the last fifty years.
Crime went up in San Francisco when DA Boudin was recalled.
We are dealing with macro [society-wide] issues here that are not in the purview of the DA, even of law enforcement. The solutions lie with all of you in this room, and beyond.
*
NOTE: As a newspaper that accepts tax-exempt donations, we do not endorse candidates for office. We do, however, cover campaigns without editorializing. We see the attempted recall as a significant social and political event that the community will want to hear more about as the months go by.