As Recall Vote Nears, Alameda County DA Says She’s Faced Resistance Her Entire Term

It’s been a tough few weeks for Alameda County District Attorney Price, who faces a recall election Tuesday.

The recall has been endorsed by her longtime political opponent, former Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley, the San Francisco Chronicle and the East Bay Times. Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Dublin), who represents southeastern Alameda County, supports the recall and is threatening to sue Price for defamation after her anti-recall campaign suggested in a Facebook post that Swalwell engaged in misconduct during his time as a deputy district attorney under O’Malley.

According to a poll released last week by the Oakland Chamber of Commerce, 56% of Oakland voters support the recall. Oakland is the county’s largest city and was home to much of her base in 2022.

So far, about 16% of Alameda County voters have returned their ballots, according to Political Data, Inc. That could mean the vast majority of voters are still making up their minds.

Before Price’s inauguration in January 2023, KQED spoke to her about her vision for the office. In an Oct. 24 conversation with KQED, Price described the challenges of leading the office through a transition, responded to criticism and outlined what she will do if she defeats the recall.

The interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Making big transitions in any office is hard, especially when some of the people who are in office don’t want that change. What have you prioritized?

My first priority was to stabilize the workforce. We had to calm everybody down and make sure that we were addressing what people’s fears were, what their needs were and that they had a decent place to work. There’s a lot of trauma in the office, and it may be that it’s secondary trauma from the work that we do. So, we amplified the mental health resources. We did a lot of improvements to the physical plant and started majorly working on the technology because the office was, as my IT person says, literally in the Stone Age in terms of how they use the technology. A lot of training needed to happen and still needs to happen to get people to use the technology, and then also to be able to work more efficiently.

What are some things that you had to let go of?

There are practices in this office that I think I know are not serving this community, but it’s how we’ve always done it. This issue around arrest warrants in this county — we mail out notifications to people that they have a court date. And if they don’t come to a court date, a bench warrant may be issued, but we don’t communicate that very well. Bail is another problem in this community. We had to say, “OK, what is the long-term impact of changing money bail, and how does that interact with our other partners in the criminal justice system?” It’s been a longer discussion around how we fix money bail out in Alameda County. It’s also been a longer discussion about how we address some of the in-custody deaths at Santa Rosa County Jail. Very serious issues, but we just kind of scratched the surface. My sense is that we’ve done amazing things, but we would have been able to move faster if we did not have so much resistance both within and without.

How do you think the last two years would have been different if you hadn’t had to focus on responding to a recall effort?

I think the anxiety that people in office are feeling now would not have ever risen to this level, and it would have allowed them to be more open about the challenges that they were facing. I think that once the people who no longer wanted to be here found an opportunity and got support for having a recall, it undermined the stability of the people who were here. That they were under pressure. We have 422 employees. These folks come to work every day committed to do their job the best that they can do. And on the outside, all that they are hearing over and over again — that they’re doing a terrible job. That the DA is creating a hostile work environment. It demoralizes my team. I think that we would have been able to heal and reduce some of the anxiety that people felt about change and the transition if we had not had a lot of fomenting from the outside and people trying to destabilize the office. There’s a lot to do, and we’ve stayed focused, and we have done a lot. I don’t know that we would have done more, but I think it just would have been a lot easier for us.

Your administration has had some caustic exchanges, sometimes on social media, with the county sheriff’s office, the governor, the California Highway Patrol, and the former district attorney you replaced, Nancy O’Malley. Why do you think there have been so many disagreements between high-level officials and your administration?

Law enforcement has for decades controlled the decision-making and the conversation about what justice looks like in district attorney’s offices. In November of 2022, the voters said we want to have a different conversation. It was driven by our efforts in 2018 to show people that the district attorney’s office is an elected office, and that it belongs to this community, and that we should have a voice in determining what kind of justice we’re going to be receiving from our district attorney’s office. The conversation became more intense nationally in the George Floyd period. For the most part, law enforcement and police unions weren’t really part of that conversation. Not in Alameda County. So it was only after we won that suddenly they woke up and said, “Wait a minute, somebody else who we don’t control is now leading that conversation.” I think that that’s part of the backlash and what people have to anticipate when you have a change as dramatic as the one that we’ve had in Alameda County.

[Editor’s note: Price unsuccessfully ran against O’Malley in 2018.]

Critics have accused you of nepotism, in part because of the hiring of Antwon Cloird, with whom you have a personal relationship. They’ve also accused you of hiring unqualified employees. In response, you’ve pointed out that O’Malley hired her sister and said you are being held to a double standard. Do you think it’s unfair for the public to want those practices to stop?

I don’t know that the public is requesting that it not happen anymore. I think that the critics are political operatives and have made this a political issue. My predecessor hired far more family members than just her sister. Her predecessor hired the family members of judges in this county. That was a way of creating the kind of familial relationships between this office and the Alameda County bench that continue to exist. I have 11 employees whose parents were either judges or they worked in this office. This was a legacy office for many, many decades. The branch head of our East County Hall of Justice is Jim Meehan. His father hired him 38 years ago. So it’s not something that just recently happened. The county has never had an anti-nepotism policy. So, I think that to the extent that some people have expressed concerns about my hiring practices, I just find it interesting that no one was concerned about the hiring practices until the Black woman became the district attorney.

[Editor’s note: John J. Meehan, the father of Jim Meehan, served as Alameda County District Attorney between 1981-1994. KQED could not confirm that an additional 10 employees in the office are related to judges or have family members who are current or former employees.]

The San Francisco Chronicle reported that more than 1,000 misdemeanor crimes will go unevaluated and uncharged after your office allows the statute of limitations on them to expire. You’ve acknowledged there is a backlog and an unknown number of police reports have now passed the statute of limitations. Why should Alameda County residents who may become the victims of crime trust your office will evaluate their case?

Because that is what we do every day. We receive over 12,000 police reports from 22 different police agencies. The problem that was identified and highlighted at the Wiley W. Manuel Courthouse apparently has existed for decades, and it was only revealed to us when we began asking questions about certain cases. We started digging into it, and what I found is that a backlog of unreviewed reports had become normalized because of the workload. It was normalized for people to be overwhelmed in the work that they were doing. And they didn’t have the kind of systems in place to support them in their work. What the public should know is that now we understand what the problem is, and we’ve done a deep dive. The team that I said I would put on to this problem on Monday, Oct. 21, actually has started. We now have four and five lawyers who are going to address the backlog. My IT team successfully modified the computer system Wednesday, Oct. 23. We’ve determined it’s not a thousand cases [that passed the statute of limitations], but it appears to be under 600. We will clean this up by Dec. 31, if not sooner. We fix the problem as we find problems, as we have been doing for the past two years.

[Editor’s note: In August, the California Highway Patrol said in a statement to KQED that 72% of cases referred to the Alameda County DA since February 2024 hadn’t been acted on. Price told KQED that the CHP complaint is what tipped her off to the problem in her office’s law enforcement report review process at Wiley W. Manuel. At a press conference on Oct. 16, Price told reporters she was expanding the number of attorneys working to address the backlog and updating the office’s case management software to better track how long attorneys have to charge a case before the statute of limitations kicks in.]

Looking forward, what do you think a well-functioning criminal justice system in Alameda County would look like?

A well-running criminal justice system in Alameda County, number one, would respect the people who we impact, both victims and defendants. Victims are not well treated in this system. My office will do more to make sure we bring an online text messaging system so that people don’t show up at court and there’s no court, or they show up at court and the court date gets continued. We want to expand the number of victim-witness advocates. My goal is to have 50. We only have 33 who are hands-on, trauma-informed right now. The other 11 are claims people. So, for me, a fully functional, well-running criminal justice system would have at least 100 advocates, right?

It would have a full, robust, collaborative court program that has a full menu of options for young people ages 18 to 26. Right now, we have two, maybe 1 1/2 courts that actually address the needs or really respond to criminal activity by transitional-aged youth. We need far more than that.

The other thing that I think will reflect a fully functioning, appropriate criminal justice system for this community will be a fully functioning restorative justice process that is embedded in the DA’s office. A restorative justice process is about healing for victims. It’s not about the defendant. The defendant ultimately is going to be held accountable, whatever that looks like. But it really is an opportunity for the victims to not just be tools and witnesses and people who come to court and see something — then they have got to go out and fix their own lives. They actually get to participate in the process. And at some point, if the process is successful, they get to ask the person, “Why did you kill my loved one?” And it’s starting to happen. We’ve got one case I can’t really talk about, but it’s happening. In five years, we hope we will have a fully functioning restorative justice practice inside the DA’s office. And 10 years from now, people will look back and say, “How come they didn’t have restorative justice back then?” It will be normalized.