“Democracies around the globe understand that excessive punishments — like life sentences, life sentences without parole, the death penalty — those sentences do nothing to prevent crime. There’s crime in Alameda County, there’s crime everywhere and people do not want to experience it. … It’s incumbent on everybody with a leadership role in this conversation to be honest about what will and will not solve crime.”
-Cristine Soto DeBerry
Executive Director of Prosecutors Alliance Action
The online misinformation campaign against Pamela Price, the first African American to serve as district attorney in Alameda County, began shortly after her inauguration on Jan. 3.
“I saw a post on Nextdoor either late January or early February where people were saying that I had bought new televisions for all the inmates at the Santa Rita jail,” Price said. “I was still trying to figure out what we were going to do about these holes in the walls in my office and they were telling people I was buying new televisions. It was ridiculous.”
But string together enough ridiculous lies and exaggerations, and you get the ham-fisted recall campaign targeting Price now.
“Crime did not start on Jan. 3 in Oakland or anywhere else in Alameda County. It has been a rising trend,” Price said in reference to her first day in office. “Public concern about crime and the lack of feeling safe in our communities did not start on Jan. 3. But the people who lost the election began this recall as soon as I got elected. … They don’t want our policies to make a difference. … They want to see Black and brown youth overcriminalized. … They’ve been very clear about that.”
Price hasn’t been in the job long enough for her policies to have an impact on crime trends in Alameda County. But rather than engaging in thoughtful discussions about what the new district attorney is trying to do, her opponents paint her as a radical bent on destroying public safety. They’ve made her a scapegoat for problems she inherited in an office that, for decades, was led by moderates.
The group behind the Price recall effort is Save Alameda for Everyone, or SAFE. It, among other things, claims Price’s refusal to charge juveniles as adults and her reluctance to use harsher penalties in some high-profile cases have made Oakland less safe.
It’s hard to deny the similarities between the recall against Price and the one that ousted progressive District Attorney Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022. People also blamed him for crime trends that were outside his control. And some of the biggest financial backers of the recall against him were folks in real estate and the tech industry, which is the case in the Price recall movement. The effort has raised more than $500,000, according to financial filings.