Billionaire heats up race for Alameda County D.A.
For the first time since the Reagan era, Alameda County is seeing a serious contest for district attorney. And thanks to internationally known billionaire and progressive George Soros, it’s turning into a real barn-burner.
The Alameda County D.A.’s job has been basically handed off from the outgoing district attorney to his or her top deputy for decades.
In 1981, when President Ronald Reagan chose District Attorney D. Lowell Jensen for a post in the U.S. Department of Justice, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors
promptly named his chief assistant, John J. Meehan ,to the job. When Meehan retired, he was succeeded by his chief assistant, Thomas Orloff.
And when Orloff retired in 2009, the supervisors picked his chief assistant, Nancy O’Malley, to fill the job.
Under normal circumstances O’Malley, who was elected on her own in 2010 and reelected in 2014, would be a shoo-in for re-election. She’s liberal, she’s scandal-free, and she has the backing of labor unions, political clubs and just about every elected official in the county. Her supporters include U.S. Sen. Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor in the Alameda County office.
O’Malley has amassed a $977,000 war chest, no small thing in Alameda County politics.
But thanks to progressive crusader Soros and his California Justice & Public Safety Political Action Committee, the Alameda County’s D.A.’s race is turning out to be anything but normal.
The goal of the California Justice PAC is to elect “reform-reminded” district attorneys across the country, and during this election cycle the committee is active in three Northern California races — Sacramento, Contra Costa and Alameda counties.
The PAC’s candidate in the Alameda County race is Pamela Price, a civil rights lawyer with no experience as a prosecutor who is running against O’Malley on a platform emphasizing bail reform and fairer treatment of blacks and Latinos in the criminal justice system.
So far, the Soros PAC has spent more than $559,000 to help Price and attack O’Malley.
Price’s campaign has also benefited from an $80,000 Facebook ad campaign paid for by the Real Justice PAC, a group created by supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders “to fight structural racism and defend our communities from abuse by state power.”
As a result, county voters are seeing mailers and TV ads with messages proclaiming that “Stop and frisk is racist — Pamela Price will fight to end it” and “D.A. Nancy O’Malley never prosecuted an officer for murder. But she has taken their money.”
One anti-O’Malley piece shows a blurred photo of a man who died while being pinned to the ground by police, with the caption: “D.A. Nancy O’Malley did nothing.”
O’Malley has responded with her own mail barrage, calling attention to Price’s comments that she would not prosecute misdemeanors. One O’Malley mailer declares in boldface: “She won’t prosecute domestic violence cases, drunk driving or theft.”
For her part, Price insisted to us, “I would prosecute domestic violence cases” and “some” DUI cases, seemingly contradicting her recorded comments during a recent debate before an East Bay lawyers group in which she flatly declared she “would stop prosecuting misdemeanors in Alameda County.”
Price, who briefly represented Celeste Guap, the teen caught up in an East Bay sexual misconduct scandal involving Oakland Police and other departments, said she was drawn into the race by what she sees as the “absolutely outrageous” over-prosecution of young blacks and other minorities in Alameda County.
Price defended the attacks on O’Malley as both factbased and fair — citing, for example, a $10,000 contribution that the D.A. received from the Fremont police union just three months before she cleared the police union president and a second officer of wrongdoing in the shooting of an “unarmed, pregnant, 16-year-old girl.”
“My issue is a lack of accountability,” said Price, noting that she got into the race because it was a matter of whether “I was going to stand here and throw rocks, or am I going to go and do something about it.”
O’Malley has said her decision to clear the officers in the Fremont shooting wasn’t “influenced in any way by any politics” — and that she had asked for an independent review by the state attorney general to avoid “the slightest appearance of impropriety.”
As she sees it, one the biggest ironies in the campaign is the involvement of billionaire Soros, noting that progressives complain about Wall Street billionaires controlling the system, “and here we have a Wall Street billionaire funding her campaign.”
O’Malley’s take: “I love the campaigning and meeting people, but I am disappointed that this has become a smear campaign on me and my office.”
Welcome to the campaign trail — it can be a bumpy ride.
Scoot: One of the conditions the city is setting for the rental scooter companies to go legit in San Francisco is for them to keep the two-wheelers off the streets and sidewalks until they receive official permits. Since the scooters started showing up on St. Patrick’s Day, City Hall has received 1,873 calls complaining about parked scooters blocking sidewalks. The Department of Public Works responded by sending out crews daily and impounding scooters.
To date, they have impounded 503 scooters — 208 from LimeBike, 193 from Bird and 102 from Spin — and levied $46,520 in fines, most yet to be paid. But they’ll have to pony up if they want a permit.