Newsom Tried to Send a Prosecutor to Help Alameda County DA. Here's Why It Collapsed

Gov. Gavin Newsom is taking back state resources from local jurisdictions that don’t act on his priorities.

Twelve days ago, Newsom rescinded an offer to send a state attorney to the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office to assist with drug prosecutions, saying the offer had not been “enthusiastically embraced” by District Attorney Pamela Price.

Then, last week, he revoked a $10 million grant for San Diego County to build tiny homes for people experiencing homelessness because, according to reporting by Politico, officials didn’t act fast enough to build the homes.

Newsom, who has faced criticism from conservatives on the state’s handling of homelessness and public safety, has ratcheted up his focus on these issues in recent months. He proposed a plan to reform Proposition 47, which decreased penalties for property crimes; deployed California Highway Patrol officers across the state to aid local law enforcement; and announced a plan to hold cities accountable if they fail to build low-income housing, among other actions.

“All of us have to step up and be accountable. It’s a serious moment, a crisis for members of the community,” Newsom said at a press conference in Oakland on July 11, adding that Alameda County wasn’t responding with urgency to address public safety challenges.

According to data from the state Department of Justice, violent crime has been on the rise in the county since 2021.

“Rather than lament about it and just spend all my time pointing fingers, we’re now working around this,” Newsom said, announcing the state attorney he’d planned to send to Price’s office is now being rerouted to work with the state Attorney General’s office on cases that originate in the county.

Price, who faces a recall election in November, immediately swung back. She accused Newsom of acting rashly and said he disregarded how the negotiations played out.

“I hope the governor will get the facts and call us,” Price said at her own press conference on July 11.

Newsom first announced his plan to provide the Alameda DA’s office with extra state attorneys in February. The plan was modeled after a similar partnership agreement made with San Francisco’s District Attorney in 2023. The February announcement was timed to coincide with a deployment of California Highway Patrol officers to assist East Bay law enforcement.

The plan was seemingly simple: The three California National Guard working in San Francisco would transition to Alameda County as they finished their assignments, according to Price. Because of limits on what military personnel can work on, the attorneys would only be able to assist in drug prosecutions.

At the time, Price said she welcomed the assistance, but details remained hazy about who the attorneys were, when they would arrive and how long they would stay in Alameda County. Price said she was notified of Newsom’s February plan one day before the public announcement.

Price said there was initially confusion about how her office handles drug cases. The vast majority of drug cases follow what is called a horizontal prosecution model, which means attorneys are assigned to different parts of the court process. As a criminal case progresses, it moves from one attorney to the next. In any given case, for example, one attorney decides what charges to apply, another handles the arraignment of the defendant, another files preliminary motions and yet another manages the trial.

Some serious drug cases are handled by a coalition of law enforcement officers and prosecutors known as the Alameda County Narcotics Task Force. Assistant District Attorney Michael Nieto represents the DA’s office on the task force. He works in a vertical prosecution model, which means he handles cases from charging to disposition.

Price said Col. Mark Inaba, the Cal Guard attorney coordinating with her office, wanted the attorneys to work on serious drug cases and trials.

“We don’t operate like that,” Price recalled telling Inaba in an interview with KQED.

In 2023, alleged drug crimes made up 4% of felony arrests in Alameda County, compared to nearly 18% in San Francisco, according to data from the state Department of Justice. Price said the vast majority of the county’s drug cases are misdemeanors that often get resolved in the county’s diversion courts, not through criminal trials. Price said Inaba provided her office with a draft agreement regarding the attorneys’ work in the office and the attorneys’ resumes in early April.

Newsom’s office sent a letter to Price, dated the day before, announcing the decision to rescind his offer and outlining their efforts to facilitate the state attorney’s onboarding in Alameda County.

According to the letter, Cal Guard offered Price a legal advisor and judge advocate, both attorneys, who would work to support “the single person in your office assigned to handle narcotics cases.” Price said this referred to Nieto.

Price and Lt. Col. Brandon Hill, a spokesperson for Cal Guard, said the offer was for one attorney. Hill said the idea was to get that attorney in place in the office and then assess the need to scale up or down. Price said that the first attorney was supposed to be Maj. Frank Noey, who is serving with Cal Guard while on temporary leave from the Placer County District Attorney’s Office.

Price’s office interviewed Noey in May, according to Hill. That month, Price said Noey went on vacation, delaying the process. Hill said Cal Guard’s main point of contact in the DA’s office was Otis Bruce Jr., Price’s then-chief assistant district attorney.

Bruce stopped responding and Cal Guard didn’t hear from Price’s office again, Hill said. At the end of June, Price announced Bruce had resigned. At a press conference on June 25, Price declined to say why Bruce, who was previously accused of misconduct in the Marin District Attorney’s Office, resigned.

Bruce and Noey did not respond to requests for comment.

By the time Newsom announced he was rescinding the offer to the DA’s office on July 10, five months had passed since the announcement of the plan. It took two weeks for the San Francisco District Attorney’s Office to onboard Cal Guard attorneys, Hill said.

“Would I have wanted it to go faster? Of course. I want everything to go fast,” Price told KQED on Wednesday, adding that it regularly takes the county months to onboard new employees. “I think that there was not enough understanding about how our office works or how the county functions. We’re not the city and County of San Francisco, and that was their expectation.”

Exactly how long Noey would have been in the office is a point of disagreement.

Price said her understanding was that Noey was available from June 1 to Aug. 12 at the latest — 48 business days. According to Cal Guard, Noey would have been available for 60 days with the possibility of extending to 90. In his work email auto-response from the Placer County DA’s office, Noey said he expects to return to the county by July 29.

“If we’re going to bring someone on and train them and embed them in the office, I would want them to be here longer,” Price said at her July 11 press conference. “I thought that it would be more effective to have a lawyer who is actually trained and able to continue the case beyond a short period of time.”

Price also said there was a mismatch between the governor’s priorities and her own.

“He has a focus on working with CHP to address drug cases. We’re doing that already,” Price said. “Our office is focused on prosecuting serious homicides and prosecuting organized retail theft and prosecuting home invasions, burglaries and carjackings. These are the things that the residents of Alameda County, unfortunately, are experiencing.”

Newsom made one comment that particularly irked Price.

“The head of the narcotics unit actually has left,” Newsom said on July 11, referring to Nieto, who Newsom recently appointed to become a Superior Court Judge in Contra Costa County. “So now the unit has no supervisor and actually no personnel.”

Price said the statement was misleading. The DA’s office doesn’t have a specific narcotics unit, and Nieto hasn’t left yet because his appointment has not been confirmed. Price said the statement created the impression that her office isn’t prosecuting drug crimes.

“We recognize that we have a substance abuse and an addiction problem in Alameda County, and we’re using all of our tools to address it, not just one lawyer,” Price said Wednesday. “That was ridiculous to say that.”

Price said missing out on potentially two to three months of support from a Cal Guard attorney “is not particularly significant.”

“We have our priorities, as does the governor,” she said.

KQED’s Alex Hall contributed to the reporting.