Facing possible recall, Price blasts ‘hatred’
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price, facing a possible recall election after 14 months in office, said Friday the campaign against her was being “financed by billionaires who have no interest in public safety.”
“I plan to push back against the hatred and racism that they have brought to Alameda County,” Price said in an interview after taking part in a panel with other county prosecutors at UC Berkeley.
The former civil rights lawyer, the county’s first Black district attorney, was elected in 2022 after a campaign in which she promised to end mass incarceration, reduce sentences for defendants under the ages of 25 and crack down on police misconduct. A recall campaign began almost immediately, and last Monday its sponsors said they had submitted 123,000 signatures to county election officials, 50,000 more than the minimum needed to qualify for the ballot.
Recall supporters have raised more than $2 million, with the largest donation, $390,000, provided by Oakland resident and financier Phillip Dreyfuss of Farallon Capital.
Friday’s panel was moderated by former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin, who was recalled by the city’s voters in 2022 after a campaign that similarly accused him of being soft on crime. He is now executive director of the university’s Law & Criminal Justice Center.
While introducing the panel, Boudin said that as district attorney he had sought to “decrease reliance on incarceration as the primary response to social problems,” while seeking greater enforcement against large businesses and gun manufacturers.
“In the process, I made some powerful enemies,” he said.
One was the conservative Heritage Foundation, which cosponsored the panel along with the UC Berkeley School of Law. Participants in the session included Charles Stimson, a Heritage Foundation lawyer and coauthor of a book called “Rogue Prosecutors,” attacking district attorneys such as Larry Krasner of Philadelphia and Boudin. One chapter decries the “disastrous consequences of Boudin’s policies.”
“It looks like an excellent work of fiction,” Boudin said while introducing Stimson as a speaker.
“From Chesa’s experience and my experience, we’ve become a punching bag,” Price told the audience of law students.
“Long sentences do not reduce crime,” she asserted. Crime in the county had been rising during the tenure of District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, said Price — who ran unsuccessfully against O’Malley in 2018 — but “after my election, suddenly I’m responsible for things many moons before.”
She said her sentencing policies have not led to increases in crime, and that meanwhile her office has established a mental health commission and civil rights bureau and reached settlements with businesses for improper disposal of hazardous waste.
Another participant, Contra Costa County District Attorney Diana Becton, said she had also acted to “decrease our reliance on punishment” since her election in 2018. She had previously been a judge for 22 years and is the county’s first female and first non-white district attorney.
Different views were expressed by two Southern California district attorneys, Summer Stephan of San Diego County and Michael Hestrin of Riverside County.
“How did we come to a time when the only thing we talk about is the rights of the accused? What about rights of the victims?” Stephan asked. “You can’t stop holding people accountable because there have been injustices in the past.”
Hestrin said legislation transferring large numbers of inmates from state prison to county jail, following a U.S. Supreme Court mandate to reduce prison overcrowding in California, had filled Riverside County’s jails and forced the sheriff to release convicted car thieves after they had served just a week of their one-year sentence.
“In the last 10 years, car thefts have gone through the roof in my county,” said Hestin, who has been district attorney for 10 years. “I want the tools to keep my county safe.”
But he later told Price and Becton that “we agree on far more than we disagree on,” and that Price had been “caricatured by political opponents.”