Recalled Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price Says She’s Running Again in 2026

Recalled Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price announced Thursday that she will run for the position again in 2026, just over a year after she was ousted from the office.

The progressive civil rights prosecutor was elected in 2022 after campaigning on promises to take on racial inequity in the criminal justice system. Her administration opposed cash bail and charging youths as adults, and promised to seek alternatives to incarceration.

“I come here today because I stand in the gap for vulnerable communities,” Price said, launching her campaign in Hayward. “Alameda County wants real justice that does not bend for wealth status or political connections. I will be the district attorney who puts people first. I will go after corporate criminals, and I will hold law enforcement officers accountable.”

Price was recalled by nearly 63% of voters in November 2024, amid frustration over rising crime in Oakland and other cities, and criticism from families of crime victims in the county who said her office issued overly lenient sentences.

Recall supporters alleged that she engaged in anti-Asian discrimination and extortion and raised concerns about hundreds of misdemeanor cases Price’s office failed to prosecute. Last October, charges were dismissed against two former Alameda officers who were charged in connection with the 2021 death of a man who was pinned to the ground during an attempted arrest after Price’s office missed the filing deadline.

“Pamela Price abandoned victims and betrayed families,” recall leader Brenda Grisham said in a statement Thursday. Grisham added that crime rates in the county had gone down since Price’s removal, though that reflects national trends in the last year.

“The community will never allow her back in power,” Grisham said. “My commitment has never changed, my priority has always been, and will always be, to protect the victims.”

The campaign to remove Price from office launched just seven months after she was sworn in, and was primarily funded by wealthy donors with connections to real estate and the tech industry. In particular, Philip Dreyfuss, a hedge fund partner at Farallon Capital Management, LLC, funded a group called “Reviving the Bay Area,” which donated $300,000 to the recall effort. Dreyfuss also funded the successful effort to oust Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao in the same election.

The recall garnered support from the county’s 13 law enforcement unions, the prosecutor’s association and East Bay Rep. Eric Swalwell. Price’s recall was also endorsed by the editorial boards of the East Bay Times and San Francisco Chronicle.

Throughout the effort and since her ouster, Price has called the recall a ploy by a small, wealthy group who opposed her 2022 victory.

“In 2025, we see the carnage to our federal government caused by the billionaire class at the federal level,” Price said. “In 2024 in Alameda County, we saw that same carnage, the destabilization of our justice system by a billionaire — a single billionaire — and his wannabe wealthy friends, who spent millions of dollars on a recall campaign to destabilize our justice system.”

In February, Price was replaced by a more moderate DA, Ursula Jones Dickson, a former Alameda County deputy district attorney and superior court judge. Since taking office, she has undone some of Price’s more progressive reforms, including reinstating mandatory minimum sentences for illegal gun possession, restructuring Price’s landmark Police Accountability Unit, formed to review police misconduct cases and withdrawing death row resentencing efforts for people who Price’s administration determined had received unfair sentences due to prosecutorial bias.

Price launched investigations into 35 cases after her office revealed evidence suggesting prior district attorneys had covered up a decades-long practice of excluding Black and Jewish jurors from death penalty cases.

In her announcement Thursday, Price accused Jones-Dickson of refusing to stand up to President Donald Trump and called out her decision to withdraw some of the death row resentencing motions.

While adamant in June that she wasn’t contemplating a 2026 run, Price said Thursday that she felt compelled, given the current national landscape and dissatisfaction with Alameda County’s response.

“We have a DA now who’s an appointed district attorney who stands with the billionaires, with corporate polluters, with insurance companies who cheat, with rogue police who kill, and with prosecutors motivated by their own political agenda and ambitions and not the law,” Price said.

Amid threats of escalated immigration enforcement activity in the Bay Area last month, Jones Dickson told KQED that the DA’s office would protect the rights of crime victims regardless of immigration status.

She said local law enforcement could not stop federal officials from coming into Alameda County or exercising a legal warrant, and when asked on KQED’s Political Breakdown podcast whether she would prosecute federal agents who broke the law amid immigration raids, Jones Dickson sidestepped the question, saying, “I need to know what that looks like.”

“Sometimes, we move in silence,” she continued. “There are things we can do to prepare and protect our citizens without screaming it out loud.”

Price said if reelected, she would “not hesitate to enforce the laws to protect our residents, to protect our immigrant communities.”

The former DA also vowed to refocus on her administration’s progressive reforms and work on transforming the culture of the office, which she said had been in disrepair without “real leadership” for more than 50 years.

“When we came into the office, we came in with a desire to build bridges, to create a cohesive unit,” Price said, acknowledging that her team faced opposition from many of the DA’s Office prosecutors. “We will bring in a new team, we will work with those who remain in the office. We will once again try to bring the prosecutors association into line with the modern vision of justice in this community.”

While Price’s ouster was seen as a part of a referendum on progressive prosecutors across California, following the recall of Chesa Boudin in San Francisco in 2022 and progressive DA George Gascón’s failed re-election bid in Los Angeles, she said the pendulum has swung again.

“Progressive prosecutors in the November 2025 election were elected across this country,” she said. “People recognize that the value of the policies that we espouse are for the needs of the people. What people have recognized now is that the billionaires are subverting our government.”