What are some things that you had to let go of?
There are practices in this office that I think I know are not serving this community, but it’s how we’ve always done it. This issue around arrest warrants in this county — we mail out notifications to people that they have a court date. And if they don’t come to a court date, a bench warrant may be issued, but we don’t communicate that very well. Bail is another problem in this community. We had to say, “OK, what is the long-term impact of changing money bail, and how does that interact with our other partners in the criminal justice system?” It’s been a longer discussion around how we fix money bail out in Alameda County. It’s also been a longer discussion about how we address some of the in-custody deaths at Santa Rosa County Jail. Very serious issues, but we just kind of scratched the surface. My sense is that we’ve done amazing things, but we would have been able to move faster if we did not have so much resistance both within and without.
How do you think the last two years would have been different if you hadn’t had to focus on responding to a recall effort?
I think the anxiety that people in office are feeling now would not have ever risen to this level, and it would have allowed them to be more open about the challenges that they were facing. I think that once the people who no longer wanted to be here found an opportunity and got support for having a recall, it undermined the stability of the people who were here. That they were under pressure. We have 422 employees. These folks come to work every day committed to do their job the best that they can do. And on the outside, all that they are hearing over and over again — that they’re doing a terrible job. That the DA is creating a hostile work environment. It demoralizes my team. I think that we would have been able to heal and reduce some of the anxiety that people felt about change and the transition if we had not had a lot of fomenting from the outside and people trying to destabilize the office. There’s a lot to do, and we’ve stayed focused, and we have done a lot. I don’t know that we would have done more, but I think it just would have been a lot easier for us.
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price at her office in Oakland on July 16, 2023. (Juliana Yamada/KQED)
Your administration has had some caustic exchanges, sometimes on social media, with the county sheriff’s office, the governor, the California Highway Patrol, and the former district attorney you replaced, Nancy O’Malley. Why do you think there have been so many disagreements between high-level officials and your administration?
Law enforcement has for decades controlled the decision-making and the conversation about what justice looks like in district attorney’s offices. In November of 2022, the voters said we want to have a different conversation. It was driven by our efforts in 2018 to show people that the district attorney’s office is an elected office, and that it belongs to this community, and that we should have a voice in determining what kind of justice we’re going to be receiving from our district attorney’s office. The conversation became more intense nationally in the George Floyd period. For the most part, law enforcement and police unions weren’t really part of that conversation. Not in Alameda County. So it was only after we won that suddenly they woke up and said, “Wait a minute, somebody else who we don’t control is now leading that conversation.” I think that that’s part of the backlash and what people have to anticipate when you have a change as dramatic as the one that we’ve had in Alameda County.
[Editor’s note: Price unsuccessfully ran against O’Malley in 2018.]
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