Annelise Finney [00:00:29] I think we’re seeing voters really question can the East Bay as kind of progressive bent, deliver the types of results on things like public safety, housing, homelessness, drug use? Can these progressive vision deliver these results or not?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:00:45] Today, KQED reporters Annalise Finney and Alex Hall explain the choice before voters and what this says about life in the East Bay right now.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:05] So we’re talking about two different recalls here. But there is, of course, some overlap and sort of the backdrop. So, Annelise, I want to start with you and sort of the broader context here. What has been going on in Alameda County in the last couple of years that’s relevant to both of these recall attempts?
Annelise Finney [00:01:25] A big part of both of these recalls are concerns about public safety. Crime in the East Bay has been a big topic of conversation over the last few years. 2023 was a particularly bad year. Now, since then, that has sort of began to decrease, particularly among violent crimes. But there’s still this narrative over the last few years that has shaped a lot of voters approach to this coming election and these recalls. And a lot of that has to do with the reality of crime and also a fear of crime that sometimes is somewhat separate from those statistics.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:01:58] Alex I feel like that feeling these fears around crime have been especially the case in Oakland, right?
Alex Hall [00:02:07] Definitely. That’s what the organizers of the recall talk about a lot. Illegal dumping, all kinds of stuff. Neighborhood blight in Oakland that it was never like this before that this is different and that, you know someone should be held accountable for that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:24] I do hear that idea a lot, that it’s never been this bad before.
Annelise Finney [00:02:29] I think it’s worth pointing out that and actually in Oakland, it has been worse than this before. What we’re seeing now is an uptick from recent years. But in the 1970s, 80s. What we’re seeing now isn’t that bad, but it still feels really bad to a lot of people now, and it is worse than recent years.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:02:43] We want to dive in then first to the D.A. recall. And Annelise, I want to start with you here. Before everyone knew who Pamela Price was, right before she was D.A. So remind us, when she first ran, who she was as sort of a candidate.
Annelise Finney [00:03:01] So Pamela Price is a Yale and U.C. Berkeley educated lawyer for a long time, 30 years, she ran a civil rights practice in Oakland. And in that world, she did a lot of work defending people who had experienced sexual harassment and racial discrimination.
Pamela Price [00:03:16] Certainly for communities of color. We understand how the criminal justice system has had such a devastating impact on all of our lives.
Annelise Finney [00:03:25] When she was on the campaign trail, she talked a lot about her personal story. She talked about growing up in Ohio, being a survivor of the foster care system and the Ohio juvenile justice system. She then talked about her life in Alameda County and said that she’d been a survivor of domestic abuse and as part of that, had actually been prosecuted by the Alameda County D.A.. So she represented herself as somebody who both had experience the criminal justice system, as somebody who was being prosecuted and somebody on the other side seeking justice for victims, whether that’s of sexual harassment or racial discrimination.
Pamela Price [00:03:57] Change is hard. It’s exciting. It’s a good thing for Alameda County. The reason why I ran was because I know how broken the system is.
Annelise Finney [00:04:10] So in 2022, she ran as a kind of progressive alternative to what the Alameda County D.A. had been. And she ultimately won with 53% of the vote.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:04:20] And when she won, it was kind of a big surprise, if I remember that correctly. Can you remind us what was the reaction to her win?
Annelise Finney [00:04:28] Yeah, I think a lot of people saw it as this kind of huge progressive win. It was part of this wave of progressive prosecutors across the country, also in Alameda County for a long time. There had never been somebody as head D.A. who hadn’t come from inside the office. There was this long term pattern of the incumbent deciding they were going to retire, retiring before the election, appointing somebody as their interim, and then that person ran essentially as an incumbent already. So when Pryce came into office, it represented a really big change in that office. She had things she wanted to change, like not charging young people as adults, like not charging special enhancements on crimes, which is this way to kind of lengthen a sentence later down the line when a case is at the sentencing stage in criminal court. But it was also this big change, just sort of internally and administratively in the office, but somebody coming from outside.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:05:24] And because of this change that she was promising, I do remember even early on, almost as soon as she won, people were already talking about recalling Pamela Price right? But then how did this turn and morph into an actual recall effort that qualified for the ballot?
Annelise Finney [00:05:48] Within a few months, there was this change.org Recall petition going around. It really got off the ground when two people that’s Brenda Grisham, who’s a victim’s rights advocate from East Oakland, and Carl Chan, who is a political leader in Oakland’s Chinatown, got together and started an official recall campaign.
Brenda Grisham [00:06:06] So we’re just not standing up for one community. We’re standing up for all of them with safe. It means safety for everybody. It means justice for everybody.
Annelise Finney [00:06:16] They filed their paperwork with the county in July. So that’s about six months after Price began her work. And they said her progressive policies, these ideas like, you know, like I said, cutting down on sentencing enhancements, not charging young people as adults. They said that policies like that were contributing to crime in Oakland.
Carl Chan [00:06:34] Her ideology and her way to empower the criminals, especially those who are serious killers, hurting every one of us.
Annelise Finney [00:06:45] And they had the support of some victim advocates and also victims and their families who said that, you know what, they had experience working with the DA’s office felt disrespectful. They said there was a lack of communication. They said they weren’t seeing the types of case outcomes they wanted. They also said that they felt there was a fair amount of disorganization in the office, and that’s been a theme throughout the recall panel.
Carl Chan [00:07:07] Price is incapable, incompetent, and she’s not qualified to be the district attorney.
Annelise Finney [00:07:14] So a lot of people sort of coalesced around this frustration with the DA’s office, and they ultimately were able to qualify a recall for the ballot. And that’s what we’ll be voting on this November.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:07:24] And who since has also sort of come out in support of recalling Pamela Price?
Annelise Finney [00:07:31] Well, as I mentioned, there are victims family members who are part of this, and that group of people has sort of continued to grow. At first it was just a smattering. And now there’s a real handful of victims advocates and victims family members who are frustrated. There’s also some elected officials who are beginning to voice support for the recall, most notably a few weeks ago, U.S. Congressman Eric Swalwell, who represents kind of the southeastern part of the county, said he supported the Price recall. And then we’re also seeing a lot of support from real estate investors. And that’s a big part of where the money for this recall has come from.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:08:08] Over the past year, D.A. Price’s office has dealt with a wave of bad press. Last fall, at a press conference, Price and some of her deputies banned a reporter from the Berkeley scanner, a website focused on crime news. There was also a dustup with Governor Gavin Newsom, who withdrew an offer to support Price’s office with drug prosecutions because of alleged dysfunction at the DA’s office. For her part, Price has said she’s received a lot of unfair media coverage and that news outlets don’t understand the role of district attorney. Then late last week, another news bombshell broke.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:08:54] Things did get even more messy, if you could imagine. Last week with these accusations of extortion against the district attorney. Can you explain what that is all about?
Annelise Finney [00:09:08] Last week, a man filed some court paperwork alleging that D.A. Price had asked him for $25,000 as a contribution to her recall campaign. When he said no. He says that she allegedly made a kind of vague threat that he’d be hearing from her office just a few weeks later. These criminal charges arrived, charging him with something that happened about a year and a half before the charges were actually filed. This man is named Mario Juarez. He’s an East bay politico. He’s been on the political scene for a long time. He donates to campaigns and he’s run for office locally. Now, like I said, all of these are allegations and the man on trial is a long time nemesis of D.A. Price. They’ve both done different things at different times to try and disadvantage each other in political campaigns. But it paints a picture of this kind of back door political dealing that really doesn’t look good for price.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:03] And how has Price responded to the extortion accusations?
Annelise Finney [00:10:08] Price’s office says they don’t comment on pending cases and they’re going to respond in court. But her campaign against the recall says Juarez just isn’t reliable. They released a very short statement that was just DA Price denies these claims. Do your own research. Mario Juarez is not a credible source.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:10:25] Who has been coming out in support of D.A. Price, basically who’s saying no to the recall.
Annelise Finney [00:10:33] There is a coalition of people who support Price. One of them is Stewart Chen. He’s the president of the Oakland Chinatown Improvement Council.
Stewart Chen [00:10:41] The false narrative because of the crime rate, they’re going to push for this recall. That’s a bunch of baloney.
Annelise Finney [00:10:51] And what he and other supporters say is that reform is hard turning around a steamship of an office takes a really long time. And Price has been in office for less than two years.
Stewart Chen [00:11:02] Did they give them enough time to do the promises they set out to the policies that they’re going to do for us? These are sour grapes, guys. We have to stand together, united, together. This is undemocratic.
Annelise Finney [00:11:17] They also say that this recall is funded by billionaires who they say are trying to change the outcome of the 2022 election. Congresswoman Barbara Lee said that she’s against recalls on principle. State Senator Nancy Skinner said essentially the same thing. She echoed Barbara Lee in a post on X. County Supervisor keith Carson has said that he also is against the recalls and supports price. And then the coalition that I mentioned that Stewart Chen is part of also includes the Oakland based Latino Task Force and a handful of other kind of church and Democratic clubs throughout Alameda County.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:11:51] How has Price herself responded to just this entire attempt to recall her just overall.
Annelise Finney [00:11:58] When DA Price defends herself against the recall she has sort of a laundry list of things she says are contributing to the recall.
Pamela Price [00:12:03] We are living in an age of the politics of exploitation, where we see people with a political agenda exploiting people’s pain, weaponizing.
Annelise Finney [00:12:14] She says people are blaming her for everything in Oakland. She says they’re coming after her because she’s a black woman. She says people are upset that she won the 2022 election fair and square.
Pamela Price [00:12:25] We are trying to interrupt the cycles of violence and victimization. It takes time. It cannot be done in a month. This system was not broken in six months. There is no way I could have fixed it in six months.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:12:47] Coming up, we’ll talk about the recall campaign against Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao and what these two elections have in common. Stay with us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:13:05] Alex Hall I want to bring you in here. Voters in Oakland will have to decide whether or not they want to recall Pamela Price. But they will also have another recall to decide on with Mayor Sheng Thao. Remind us who Sheng Thao is and who she sort of was as a candidate when she ran for mayor.
Alex Hall [00:13:25] Yeah. So like Price, Sheng Thao was elected in 2022. She came into office having been on the city council for four years.
Sheng Thao [00:13:33] I am a progressive. I am a progressive in the sense that I want to move the city forward for working families.
Alex Hall [00:13:38] She had a lot of backing, including financially from labor unions, and she campaigned on a platform of being kind of like a bridge builder, someone who could bring siloed groups in Oakland together to the negotiating table, business and labor unions, for example. And she also talked a lot about her personal experiences.
Sheng Thao [00:13:57] So when I ran for my city council seat. It was a lot of community who really pushed me to really run for that seat. And I’ll be very honest, you my response was, well, I don’t have any I don’t come from money and I don’t look like how politicians look.
Alex Hall [00:14:12] You know, being the daughter of Hmong refugees from Stockton, having fled an abusive relationship, you know, at one point living in her car with her infant son and sleeping on people’s couches, you know, she was really able to excel and go to community college and eventually UC Berkeley and started interning and eventually working for At-Large Council member Rebecca Kaplan. And so she you know, she talked about how that would really help her connect with middle and working class voters.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:44] As sort of similar to price actually as sort of these candidates who are bringing their personal experience into the job that they’re hoping to get. I do remember, though, Sheng Thao did not win in a landslide necessarily.
Alex Hall [00:14:58] Correct.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:14:58] What was the reaction at the time to her win?
Alex Hall [00:15:01] So Oakland uses ranked choice voting, which means that people are able to vote for their first, second, third choices when they vote, not just one candidate. And Thao actually did not receive as many first choice votes as her opponent, Loren Taylor, eventually because of ranked choice voting. She did win, but it was she won by a very slim margin, something like just under 700 votes. And on and also, you know, she came in as a progressive city council member after moderate mayor. She her opponent was a moderate. And so, you know, I think there was this expectation of like, what is she going to do?
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:15:42] So how eventually then did the effort to recall Mayor Sheng Tao come about?
Alex Hall [00:15:49] So the recall was officially launched in January and in June oust Oakland United to recall Shang. Tao said it qualified for the November ballot. The leader of the recall was Brenda Harbin-Forte who is a retired Alameda County Superior Court judge. She definitely clashed with Thao, specifically over the firing of former Oakland police chief LaRonne Armstrong. Brenda Harbin-Forte is actually no longer leading the recall effort, and she’s now running for Oakland City attorney. So now her sisters in charge, Gail Harbin.
Gail Harbin [00:16:24] And so the reason I got involved is because I saw all the harm it was doing to Oakland. Oakland looked like a ghost town.
Alex Hall [00:16:32] There were other issues that came up that Harbin-Forte and Seneca Scott, who is the campaign spokesperson for Oust, were very critical of, namely Oakland’s failure to meet the deadline to apply for a state grant that would have given Oakland millions of dollars to fight retail theft. And, you know, I just said that, you know, Thao’s leadership had created a public safety crisis that, you know, wasn’t just dangerous for residents, but it was driving businesses out of Oakland.
Seneca Scott [00:17:04] We’ve never seen anything like this in Oakland before. And people are trying to act like it’s just happening because we’ve always had it coming. None of our surrounding cities are dealing with it.
Alex Hall [00:17:13] In-n-out shut down, the Hilton Hotel shut down, and basically Thaos, as they described it, incompetence had really hurt Oakland financially and continues to.
Seneca Scott [00:17:25] This progressive movement has failed. None of their policies have worked.
Alex Hall [00:17:31] I’ve asked voters at the town halls that she’s been having, you know, how do you feel about the recall? And a lot of people are like, well, I’m upset. I’m unhappy about X, Y, Z. That’s happening in Oakland, but do I know exactly how city government works? Do I know that that is actually Mayor Thao’s fault or what choices are actually made in the room at City Hall? I don’t know. And so I’m trying to figure that out. I think for the recall, the response that I’ve received is more it doesn’t matter because she is the captain of the ship and anything that happens in Oakland is her responsibility because she is the mayor.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:18:08] Sort of a series of catalyzing events. It sounds like two. And I know another one is the FBI raid on Thao’s home. Tell me about that and what role that is sort of playing in the recall campaign now.
Alex Hall [00:18:24] So the FBI executed search warrants on Mayor Thao’s home, but also on the homes of members of the Duong family who own California Waste Solutions, which is the recycling provider for the city of Oakland. The FBI has not said a single word publicly about what they were looking for, about what they are investigating. Thao has said that she’s innocent. She’s not been charged with a crime, and it’s really unclear at this point what’s going to happen with that.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:18:52] But obviously, I have to imagine for supporters of the recall is sort of just another thing that’s raising eyebrows and maybe adds just like another reason to move forward with recalling her.
Alex Hall [00:19:07] 100%.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:19:13] And then who is coming out in support of Mayor Sheng Tao?
Alex Hall [00:19:16] So that’s an interesting question. I think that Thao was a little silent on the recall for most of this year. It seemed at that point that her strategy was really to show up to her job. She was hosting these town halls throughout Oakland and showing up alongside the city’s new police chief, the fire chief, and basically just saying, like, we’re here for you. We’re doing what we can. We hear you. We know that there are serious problems in Oakland. And, you know.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:19:47] We’re working here.
Alex Hall [00:19:48] We’re working here.
Sheng Thao [00:19:51] It’s a warm day today. We are out here because we know how important this fight is.
Alex Hall [00:19:55] And then it wasn’t maybe less than two weeks ago that Oaklanders defending democracy Tao’s anti recall committee hired a spokesperson, held a press conference and actually came out and said, here we are, we are launching a campaign to fight this recall.
Igor Tregub [00:20:11] Mayor Thao has been a champion for housing, justice, transportation, justice, climate justice…
Alex Hall [00:20:19] The people who has come out in defense of Sheng Thao is Igor Tregub, who is a Berkeley City Council member and also the chair of the Alameda County Democratic Party.
Igor Tregub [00:20:30] Our Alameda County Democratic Party stands in solidarity with Mayor Thao and against this wasteful recall.
Alex Hall [00:20:43] Jean Quan has been really present and visible and vocal about how she experienced when she was mayor, an attempt to recall her. And so she has really been strongly supporting Mayor Thao.
Jean Quan [00:20:57] We have to stop this trend. So whether you love Sheng or not, you have to give her a fair chance to do good work. And she’s done some very good work for you.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:21:11] I mean, how has Mayor Thao herself responded to this campaign to recall her?
Alex Hall [00:21:16] The mayor has really stressed that a lot of the problems that Oakland is facing, she inherited them as mayor and that the recall would essentially take Oakland backwards.
Sheng Thao [00:21:27] We met them head on, applied the solutions and the data shows the data shows that we are on the right track. Yeah.
Alex Hall [00:21:36] And she’s also really strongly emphasized that crime is down.
Sheng Thao [00:21:40] We are on track this year for less than 100 homicides in Oakland, California.
Alex Hall [00:21:46] Another thing that she talks a lot about is Philip Dreyfuss, the hedge fund manager who has footed a lot of the bill for the recall campaign.
Sheng Thao [00:21:56] Now, let’s be clear about this recall. It got started shortly after I was sworn into office just about a year ago. The recall is funded by one hedge fund manager who doesn’t live in Oakland.
Alex Hall [00:22:11] Calling him, you know, a Piedmont billionaire. You know, he’s this guy who doesn’t even live here. Speculation about his motives being some nefarious plot. You know, he doesn’t care about Oakland and Oakland isn’t for sale. And to be clear, Dreyfuss has not spoken publicly. I mean, trust me, we would have talked to him if he was willing to. He has not said anything about why he has been funding the recalls. And you know, we love to know. Philip, please call us.
Ericka Cruz Guevarra [00:22:47] Annelise, kind of coming back to you and bringing you back in here. What is the crossover that you see between these two recalls? Like how should voters, I guess, make sense of these concurrent recall efforts?
