After San Francisco kicked out its progressive district attorney, a new one steps intooffi ce just across the bay

By Scott Wilson

March 20, 2023 at 6:00 a.m. EDT

OAKLAND, Calif. — For more than a decade, the district attorney for Alameda County, where this city is the center of gravity, prosecuted crime the old-fashioned way, with stiff sentences and the reliable support of law-enforcement unions at election time.

That changed sharply in November. Nancy O’Malley, the incumbent, declined to seek reelection amid the strengthening national push to reexamine who is punished and for how long. In her place, voters chose Pamela Price, a civil rights lawyer, who four years and apandemic earlier had lost her challenge to O’Malley.

Now, a woman who made a living taking on the local justice system is running it. “They elected me with a mandate,” Price, the first Black woman to serve as Oakland district attorney, said in an interview. “And,

to me, the right prosecutor for the moment is one who is not wedded to the status quo.”

Price has, in a few short months, abandoned the status quo.

The speed with which she is moving to remake the office has delivered a shock to the system at a time when this city just marked a record third-straight year with more than 100 homicides, most of those carried out with guns.

Price’s approach will provide a stark test of whether some of California’s most liberal voters will continue to support more-lenient approaches to prosecution and imprisonment at a time of rising gun violence, street crimes and homicides. Those who have tried to carry out similar programs have found that the public’s patience is thin in this liberal state with a historical affinity for conservative, tough-on-crime measures.

Since taking office, Price has endorsed a plea bargain in one murder case that surprised even the judge because of its leniency. She is formalizing new sentencing guidelines that will favor probation and reduce jail time by ending the use of “enhancements” — sentencing add-ons that include the use of a gun in the commission of a crime.

And she has signaled loudly to law enforcement agencies that her approach to police misconduct allegations will be much different from her predecessor’s.

In her dozen years in office, O’Malley brought one homicide case against a police officer, charging a White San Leandro officer with manslaughter in the fatal shooting of a Black man.

Before completing her first month in office, Price reopened eight cases involving law enforcement-involved deaths, one of them more than 15 years old.

“She’s going to be learning a lot along the way,” said Antoine Towers, a father of three teenagers who works on nonviolence programs in schools and is part of the nonprofit Oakland Violence Prevention Coalition. “She may make some mistakes, she will learn some lessons, but will she figure it out? And will it be too late once she does?”

Towers’s 21-year-old brother was fatally shot a few years ago. A few years before that, his 17-year-old nephew was killed while being robbed in Oakland.

Towers, who spent six years in some of California’s most notorious state prisons for committing an armed carjacking when he was 18 years old, said he did not vote for Price, preferring her opponent because of his knowledge of the anti-violence programs already underway.

Towers, who is Black, said he understands the toll that incarceration has taken on his community. But, as Price advocates for lighter sentences and alternatives to prison time, he worries that the line between right and wrong is becoming blurred.

“Is it really helping us as a community?” Towers said. “How do we get to a place to make good decisions about ourlives when many here feel that the decision you make doesn’t matter either way?”

A mixed message around the bay

The clarity of Price’s mandate — at least over the long term — is clouded by a look across the bay to Alameda County’s angry, and at times unruly, cousin San Francisco.

In June, San Francisco voters recalled Chesa Boudin, a liberal former public defender turned district attorney, amidrising property crime and an overriding sense, amplified by his opponents on social media, that the city had become unmanageable.

Brooke Jenkins , a former prosecutor under Boudin who helped lead the recall effort, was appointed by MayorLondon Breed (D) to replace him and then won election in November.

She stepped up prosecution of property crime and street-level drug dealing, crimes that liberal critics say disproportionately target Black and Latino residents. But one of her sharpest departures from Boudin has been in her relationship with a traditionally politically powerful police force.

Last month, Jenkins dismissed a case filed by Boudin against a San Francisco police officer who fatally shot an unarmed carjacking suspect, citing an “internal conflict” in a letter to the state attorney general explaining why she intended to drop the case.

“Good cops want bad cops ferreted out,” Jenkins said in a recent interview. “But what I don’t want to see is prosecutions of police officers as something used politically.”

Jenkins describes herself as “a prosecutor who is looking away from the historical method of punishment and incarceration,” an echo of Price and of Boudin. But she added a caveat.

“No one wants to further the prison-industrial complex,” she said. “Where it gets tricky is when people say, ‘But I want to feel safe.’ There’s a gray area there, but I think the bottom line is people do want prosecutors to act like prosecutors.”

Will voters prove fickle?

Price’s arc from civil rights lawyer to prosecutor began in Cincinnati, where she was born 66 years ago. She attended schools where Black children accounted for 95 percent of the student body. She visited Yale College on a school-sponsored trip and, on what she called a long-shot whim, later applied and was accepted.

“I got to see something very different than what I was living,” she said of New Haven, Conn. “We were told to have hope and put it in a can. But we didn’t have a can to put it in where I had come from.”

Price headed west to study law at the University of California at Berkeley and has lived in the Bay Area ever since, practicing law and advocating for police reform, affordable housing and other issues that she says today are some of the root reasons that “people first pick up a gun.”

In 2018, Price lost to O’Malley in the June primary and then decided to run for Oakland mayor that November. She finished third.  In winning this past November, Price beat Terry Wiley, O’Malley’s second-in-command. She secured 53 percent ofthe vote in the general election, despite being outspent.

Jason McDaniel, an associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University, said White liberal voters often are key elements of the racial coalitions that decide local races, including Price’s.

“But these voters are also often more willing to hold those they elect accountable — especially women of color,” he said, noting the recent defeat of Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot after a single term amid a backlash against crime.“ Their support can drop off very quickly.”

Since winning, Price has spoken with Boudin and Diana Becton, the district attorney in next-door Contra Costa County, and others in what she describes as the progressive prosecutor movement. She also met with members of Martin Luther King Jr.’s family and calls herself a “drum major for justice,” a reference to King’s sermon at Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta two months before his assassination in Memphis.

Her approach is being tested immediately, even though it is too early to tell whether the public supports the changes.

“She’s consistent,” said Barry Donelan, the president of the Oakland Police Officers Association, which represents more than 700 department members. “The residents of Alameda County knew what they were voting for.”

‘A throwaway kid’

Long a proving ground for police-reform initiatives, Oakland was experimenting with reducing and reallocating police budgets years before the national movement to do so. The calls for reform picked up momentum after the videotaped murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in May 2020.

So did the surge of crime that many cities experienced during the pandemic, short-circuiting the debate over whether more police officers result in less crime. 

The Oakland Police Department has been under federal oversight since 2003, and over that time, its staffing levels have ebbed and flowed. Once employing more than 800 people, the force dipped into the low 600s last year before rising just above 700 employees in recent weeks.

Homicides have risen, too, during the pandemic and in its immediate aftermath.

“Ideology meets reality in Oakland,” Donelan said. “When the defund movement happened, murders skyrocketed.”

Donelan said “a revolving door policy” adopted by prosecutors during the pandemic — largely to keep jails as empty as possible to prevent illness from spreading among inmates — also kept too many dangerous people on streets where guns abound.

Last year, Donelan said, was the third straight that Oakland police confiscated more than 1,000 guns. Of the roughly 1,400 seized last year, he said, about 1,000 had been used in crimes.

“This is the legacy that the new district attorney has inherited,” Donelan said.

Any grace period Donelan offers Price, however, is tempered by her decision to reopen eight cases in which civilians died in encounters with law enforcement. The cases, all of them reviewed internally, date from 2007 through 2022.

The earliest case involved an Oakland police officer who Donelan said had been cleared after extensive investigation and “comes to work every day making the public safer.” He called Price’s decision to reopen the case “cruel.”

But Price said that the county is “desperate for police accountability,” and she believes the public will have more confidence in the process if the cases are reviewed.

“The relationship too often between the community and the Oakland Police Department has been one of danger,” Price said. “I have a mandate to undo that.”

On March 1, Price circulated within her department a draft of new sentencing guidelines, policies consistent with her promise to shorten or forgo jail sentences, especially in the cases of young offenders. One element of her 10-pointcampaign platform pledged to “stop over-criminalization of youth.”

Her intention was on display a few weeks earlier in an Oakland courtroom. Prosecutors announced that a plea agreement had been reached in the case of Delonzo Logwood, who in 2008 allegedly killed three people. He had just turned 18 years old.

The agreement dropped two of the murder charges and recommended a sentence of 15 years, roughly a fifth of what Logwood faced.

According to reporters in the courtroom, Alameda County Superior Court Judge Mark McCannon responded with dismay when the deal was presented. He did not sign off on it, saying, “I’m going to need to get here, okay? Because I’ve never seen a case get pleaded down like this before.”

He is expected to announce his decision in the coming weeks.

“We have to hold young people accountable, but we have to do it in a way that will not destroy their lives,” Price said when asked in the interview about the case. “We can’t throw kids away, and I can say that because I was a throw away kid.”

Daring to think differently

A measure of the willingness of some in Oakland to try something different, even very different, is captured in the case of Jen Angel.

Angel was a 48-year-old baker, a White Midwestern transplant to the Bay Area who sold must-have cakes and pies from a house turned bakery in a tough part of this city’s tough downtown.

On Feb. 6, Angel was attacked and robbed. She was preparing to leave a Wells Fargo Bank parking lot when two men smashed her car window and grabbed her bag. As she pursued them on foot, she became trapped in the door of their moving car, her head slamming along the ground for 50 yards. She died Feb. 9 of brain injuries.

By consensus, Angel’s wide circle of friends and family made clear that she would not want those who had killed her to be prosecuted and imprisoned, preferring instead a sentence that relied on restitution.

“She would want us to be brave enough to try something different in her honor,” said Emily Harris, a close friend, who works at the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights. “She would say, ‘Let’s imagine the world we want. Let’s try itout. Let’s test it.’”

On a recent morning, three women worked behind the counter at Angel Cakes, kneading dough and stocking shelves. The bakery survived the pandemic lockdowns in part through personal donations to Angel from friends.

Price was in office little more than a month when Angel was killed, and her death has provided a concrete case to implement her pledge to prosecute and sentence even violent cases differently, this time with support from the victims’ family and friends.

“The case says a lot about Oakland, and it says that we recognize that our systems are failing,” Price said. “I’m not surprised that Jen Angel, her family and her friends, say this is not working, that I don’t want to be a part of something that is racist, that is archaic, that does more harm than good. I understand that they want no part of it.”

Donelan, the police union president, said Angel’s case “has been the subject of much discussion” within the department whose members he represents. He said the department is investigating the case and hopes to

make arrests, leaving the decision on charges to the new district attorney.

“What that will be will have to be determined,” Price said.

Alice Crites in Washington contributed to this report.