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These Maps Show Where Once-Supportive Voters Turned Against Pamela Price in Recall Election

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Demonstrators holding signs rally in front of a courthouse.
Demonstrators gather during a Pamela Price recall campaign kickoff rally in Oakland on June 8, 2024. (Gina Castro/KQED)

Pamela Price reluctantly stepped down as Alameda County’s district attorney earlier this month after an overwhelming majority of frustrated voters ousted her in November’s historic recall election.

Under the county Board of Supervisors’ recently determined schedule, those interested in the two-year position have until the first week of January to apply. The board will then select a replacement to start in early February and serve until voters select a new DA in 2026 to finish out the remainder of Price’s term, ending in 2028.

For those considering the county’s top prosecutor gig, Price’s rapid downfall will likely serve as a cautionary tale.

Support for the progressive prosecutor plummeted in her less than two years in office, from 53% in 2022 — when she defeated DA veteran Terry Wiley — to just 37% this year.


And while the recall campaign against Price was heavily funded by wealthy white and Asian donors, her support fell most sharply among voters in many of the county’s lowest-income, predominantly Black and Latino communities, where crime rates are often disproportionately high.

That dramatic shift is particularly evident in flatland communities in Oakland, San Leandro and Hayward. In one precinct along Oakland’s crime-plagued Hegenberger commercial corridor, Price’s support plunged by 41 percentage points — from 77% in 2022 to 36% this year.


Like many of her neighbors, Hayward resident Patricia Harris voted for Price in 2022, swayed by her campaign pledge to reduce sentences for some nonviolent offenders – particularly those convicted as juveniles.

“Over-incarceration is a real thing,” Harris said. “So, for that reason, what she was saying was appealing.”

But she soon lost faith in the DA after Price reopened the case of the man who shot and killed Harris’ son, Jarin Purvis, three years earlier.

In June 2023, just six months into her tenure, Price reduced the man’s sentence from murder to involuntary manslaughter, concluding that the shooting was “clearly a mistake.”

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“I have no idea why she felt the need to get involved,” said Harris, noting that the assailant ended up serving less than three years in county jail. “And she has refused to meet with us to even explain her decisions.”

Harris said that’s when she got involved in the recall campaign.

“It’s for these other families not to have to experience what we experienced. For criminals to be justly tried and convicted and not let off,” she said.

While Harris’ tragic experience is hardly typical, the outcome of the recall suggests that her frustrations with Price were widely shared among the county’s electorate.

Many voters blamed Price’s lenient sentencing policies for the county’s rise in violent crime in 2023 — even as her defenders argued that she hadn’t been in office long enough to influence those rates one way or the other and that crime has since fallen.

“It was just too many people getting off on plea deals. And it’s not fair to the victims, to their families and just to the county,” Harris said. “It becomes a safety issue when you have someone go out and murder someone, and she lets them out, and then they go kill someone else, or it’s just free reign.”

Harris said the recall wasn’t a backlash against progressive criminal justice policies as much as “Pamela Price policies.”

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“The law is the law, and she changed it however she saw fit,” Harris said.

Price’s replacement, she added, would be wise to learn from her mistakes.

“Because just like she was recalled for her actions, they can be recalled for theirs.”

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