Pamela Price: When we invest in community support for people with mental illness, when we invest in services and opportunities for young people, when we invest in our community, that’s when we’ll see crime go down.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Now, less than a year into her term, fears about gun violence, robberies and car break ins are fueling an effort to boot race out of office and prices in a tough spot. Because while the investments she wants to make take time to trickle down into the community, there are people who want something to be done about the crimes happening right now.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: The opponents of progressive policies have very strong emotional arguments they can make by pointing to these cases where, you know, perhaps some tragedy happened and there wasn’t a as harsh a sentence as maybe a victim would prefer.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So, how bad is crime in Alameda County, really? And what does Pamela Price say she’s going to do with it? All that and more on the recall right after this.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: The recall against most delays in the state has been predicated on the idea that crime is rising and that progressive policies are contributing to rising crime.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez is a politics and government reporter for KQED.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: It’s a bit of a messy argument, though, because crime has risen and dropped in trends that we see happening across the country. Sometimes, as some of our colleagues here actually have shown, the crime rates are actually higher in places with conservative district attorneys. But there is a climate of fear around crime. And so what we’re seeing is the earliest hints of a recall, a recall that has been established as a campaign committee, which means it’s taking the legal steps to establish itself, which means it’s very early. We don’t know how much money they’re going to raise or can raise or how effective they’ll be. But there’s a recall.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Who is behind this recall effort in Alameda County to get Pamela Price: out of office.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: But I want to temper first by saying until we see where the money is coming from. We won’t have a full picture of all of who is behind this recall effort. But so far, the names that were registered on the documents with the Albany County Elections office are Carl Chan, who is a Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce leader; Phillip Dreyfus, who donated $10,000 to the effort to remove former San Francisco district attorney Chesa Boudin; and Brenda Grisham. She’s the principal officer of the recall effort against Pamela Price, and Grisham is a victims rights advocate.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And I know Brenda is actually someone who’s personally affected by crime in Alameda County. Can you tell me a little bit more about her background?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Ms. grisham is from East Oakland. Her son, Christopher, was shot and killed in 2010.
Brenda Grisham: And this year, it will make 13 years.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: And they never caught the person who shot and killed her son. But having lost her son so early, she took that pain and galvanized it into action. And she formed a foundation named after her son, Christopher Lavelle Jones Foundation.
Brenda Grisham: We just recently celebrated the 12 year anniversary of the foundation because it took me like a year to figure out how I wanted to keep Christopher’s name alive.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: She’s essentially taken that experience and used it to help others who went through what she did.
Brenda Grisham: Here in our local area. I’ve helped with getting some policies and procedures to help with the victims of crime, have helped in getting the victims of crime money increased so that families can, you know, really take care of the business after the loss of a loved one.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: What is her main argument for recalling price? Why does she want to be involved in this?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: So they have not made any formal announcements yet. And when I talked to Ms.. Grisham, she said that she would not speak on behalf of the recall during our interview. But what she said personally, she doesn’t believe that folks should see lighter sentences.
Brenda Grisham: Oh, sentencing is definitely an issue. Yes. We got to get to a common ground. I don’t see that’s going to happen.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: She thinks that progressive DA’s have made too many arguments about why perpetrators of crime do what they do. Trying to analyze too much, the systems that push them into that crime and saying, you know what? If you decided to do that crime, that’s made the choice, you’re done.
Brenda Grisham: The idea of who the victim is is what the problem is. The people that have been traumatized by the actual act are the victims.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: You know, Ms.. Grisham has personal experience with, too. She related to me an experience where she brought some of her fellow members from her foundation who are all victims or survivors of crime, to speak to Pamela Price. And she described a very tense situation where perhaps the price was perhaps not as politic with them as she could have been, in fact, to hear Grisham tell it. D.A. Price was defensive.
Brenda Grisham: She never talked to them as they were victims. She never said, I’m sorry for your loss. None of that. She had a condescending tone that I don’t like. When you’re being professional, you don’t talk to people like they are, but they feel.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: And Joey know that there’s usually like this ramp up that happens to a recall campaign that really builds from stories or cases that people end up really pointing to as examples and rationale for recalling someone in office. Right. What are some of the important cases in Alameda County that are really fueling this effort to recall Pamela Price?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Just to take a step back from this, the opponents of progressive policies have very strong emotional arguments they can make by pointing to these cases where some tragedy happened and there wasn’t a as harsh a sentence as maybe a victim would prefer. And so we’re seeing this argument being made in the case of Jasper Wu, a toddler who was shot and killed in 2021 while in a car with his mother heading home to Fremont from San Francisco. Jasper was sadly caught up in gunshots between adult men who were shooting at one another. There are two men who are defendants in the in the case of the death of young Jasper, Wu, Ivory Bivins and Trevor GREENE were both 24 and 22, respectively. And essentially, Pamela Price has decided not to pursue what we call special circumstances enhancements with those two men.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Special circumstances are basically an add on charge that a d.a. Can apply that can lead to much harsher punishments for people accused of murder. That could mean life in prison without parole or even the death penalty for the accused. Pamela Price has vowed to stop pursuing special circumstances, citing numbers that show that black defendants are disproportionately more likely to face these charges. But some residents strongly oppose this idea, especially when it comes to high profile crimes where people really want to see justice come down hard, like in the case of Jasper Woo’s death.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: You know, it touches on a few different things in the community, right? Jasper Woo is an Asian child, so it touches on the hearts of those who have been really affected by the anti-Asian hate we’ve seen since the rise of the pandemic. It also touches on this fear of rising crime and this idea of lawlessness. It’s kind of a nexus case of all of these fears that are really coming together.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: But to be clear and just to clarify, these two men are still facing charges, just not these sort of special circumstances enhancement that people, it sounds like, are really want to see.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Yeah, if convicted, Bivins is facing 265 years to life in prison. Green faces 175 years to life in prison. These men are facing incredibly steep charges for what they did. The only difference here is there is some possibility of parole.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, I want to talk, Joe, more about this feeling that crime is up and these fears around crime, because it does sound like the tension here is between, you know, these progressive policies that maybe take a longer to really see the fruits of, whereas, you know, there’s this feeling that people want something to be done about crime right now. And they know that especially in Oakland, there’s really this feeling of rise in crime is particularly relevant. What does the data actually show, though?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Alameda County has more than a dozen cities in it. Oakland is not the only one, but perhaps the city that will become the crux of most discussions will be Oakland. Oakland’s crime numbers have fluctuated. In June, a number of crimes across the city were down. Number of types of crimes, including assaults, were down. The crime rate itself was down in total compared to the same time last year. But as we see happen in summer months, this is a normal occurrence. In July, those numbers tracked up. Crime was up compared to the same time last year. You could have different arguments about why it’s up at the same time last year, higher than last year, but it is up in July. But as we’ve seen, they’ve gone up and down and down and up. And historically, at least compared to decades ago, crime is low. But what we hear and what we hear across the state and the country is this fear of crime. And a lot of it has been stoked by these videos. We see viral videos of crime. And people are afraid.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Coming up, Pamela Price’s thoughts on the recall and what happens from here. How has Pamela Price responded to this effort to recall her, Joe?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Pamela Price had some real harsh words for those who are behind this effort.
Pamela Price: These are election deniers. They lost the election. So they want to have a do over.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Subverting democracy that they’re comparable to the people in the January six insurrection, that they’re Republicans, that they’re out-of-towners. And she was she didn’t hold back.
Pamela Price: Their candidate lost. And so they want to have a second bite at the apple. And that’s not that’s undemocratic. That’s not how democracy works. People get to vote and your vote matters.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: The opponents of a power price say that crime is worse and people are afraid. And that’s bad. While prices fault for her progressive policies. And Pamela Price will argue a D.A. is one actor among many in the criminal justice system, including the police offenders, the role of education, the county and economic health and all of those have a place in the crime rate. And the D.A. does not really have a strong influence on crime.
Pamela Price: A D.A. has no effect whatsoever on crime rates. That is a failed measure. And it’s been proven over and over across the country. That’s not how you measure the performance of your district attorney. When we invest in community support for people with mental illness, when we invest in services and opportunities for young people, when we invest in our community, that’s when we’ll see crime go down.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: I will say I have spoken to some academics about this. They also argue that really what you need is a preponderance of data about recidivism and diversion rates. The progressives have the tough argument here because their argument is one that is measured in time, whereas people who have a more kind of law and order view are measuring it by individual trauma and individual pain, which is much easier to show.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: So if Pamela Price thinks crime rates are a bad way of measuring the success of a day, how does she measure success? Like what accomplishments does she really point to?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: I think what she really points to is, is how she is trying to wrap around services.
Pamela Price: We have established a civil rights bureau. We’ve created a community support bureau. We have worked on the victim witness advocates making sure that we’re expanding those services, as well as expanding the outreach of the collaborative course, the mental health courts, and dealing with mental health diversion.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: She tells me we helping getting multilingual support for victims of crime. We’re updating collaborative courts so that we can have more diversions for people who use drugs and have other low level offenses, aren’t going to jail, but are instead are getting help that they need. There’s mental health courts where she’s hired some of the first mental health clinicians. You know, the mental health courts had attorneys, but no mental health experts. So she hired the.
Pamela Price: Obviously our Public Accountability Unit, which is part of the Civil Rights Bureau, initially looked at eight cases of police misconduct and we’re holding police accountable.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: But one of the other major tenets of helping to stem the cycle of crime from her point of view, is to reduce sentencing with the hope that reducing sentencing can help communities heal, can help individuals get out of the cycle of crime.
Pamela Price: And the mandate is the same. We cannot continue to over incarcerate and over criminalize black and brown people in this community.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: She’s only been in office six months before this recall campaign started. And I think she’s going to try to argue that, hey, give me time to to do what you elected me to do. I said all this on the campaign trail. I said I was going to lessen the sentences. I said I was going to do special circumstances. I said I was going to charge minors as minors and not as adults. These are the reasons that you voted for me. She will say.
Pamela Price: Alameda County is a very special place that I’ve been embraced by for 40 years, and I was elected to do the job and I’m going to continue to do the job that I was elected to do.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: We’re still early on, it sounds like. But I mean, you’ve already been talking about this sort of comparison that a lot of people are making between what happened in San Francisco and the recall of former district attorney Jason Boudin. But is that a fair comparison here?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: I think the lessons that we can take from Chase’s recall are select ones. But you have to remember the recall. Chase Aberdeen was in San Francisco, which is both one city and one county in Alameda County. There’s more than a dozen cities. So that’s a lot of places to gather signatures. There’s a lot of ground to have to cover. That’s going to cost some money. And so what will determine the viability of this recall effort will be the amount of money that we see it raising in the near future. Another big difference that folks pointed out to me is that the demographics of Alameda County are a lot different. San Francisco has become wealthier. San Francisco has become whiter. San Francisco has a very small black population. And now I’m not going to argue that the black population in Alameda County is monolithic. There are certainly people across the political spectrum there. But because there is a higher black population in Alameda County, there are more folks who have a more direct experience with law enforcement. More progressive folks who have argued and will argue that they want criminal justice reform. And that’s something that might have a stronger pull in Alameda County than we saw on San Francisco.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, what are you going to be watching, Joe, in the next couple of months?
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: I’m going to be watching to see how Pambo prizes arguments evolve around keeping herself in office. I’m definitely interested to see if she continues on the same tack and the same set of arguments the Chaser routine used before he was ousted. I’m curious to see how much money the recall proponents raise and if they’re able to signature gather to the level that they want. I’m interested to see some of the cases that Pamela Price tries and see if they continue to garner the same attention as Jasper Wu’s case. There was just a community meeting just the night before. We’re recording this in the Oakland Hills, where a lot of folks in those wealthier areas were quite angry, detailing car break ins and such. And Pamela Price had to answer to a lot of angry folks who thought that her policies might be making them less safe. And she argued directly to them that she didn’t think that her policies add anything to do with the level of crime, that they should direct their ire to the police.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Well, Joe, I’m sure I’ll be talking with you about all of this again sometime soon. But thanks so much for breaking this down. I appreciate it.
Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez: Absolutely. Thank you for having me.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra: Now that the necessary papers have been filed, the campaign will have to gather more than 93,000 signatures to get this question of whether to recall Pamela Price on the ballot. And it’s going to take a lot of cash to get that task done. Upwards of $1,000,000, according to one estimate. That was Joe Fitzgerald Rodriguez, a politics and government reporter for KQED. This 40-minute conversation with Joe was cut down and edited by producer Maria Esquinca. Alan Montecillo is our senior editor. He scored this episode and added all the tape. And I am Ericka Cruz Guevara. Welcome back to The Bay. It’s so good to be back in your feed. Hope you can wrap us back into your daily routine here. And we appreciate you for listening and for rocking with us and for sticking around. We’ll talk to you next time.
