Who Holds the Power? A Conversation with Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price

by Tanisha Cannon, Ed.D., LSPC Managing Director

I have organized, lived, laughed, loved, and prayed with people who have been irreparably harmed by prosecutors by way of prosecutorial misconduct, over zealousness and or outright negligence. Today I sit with families who have lost decades because someone in a DA’s office decided to stack charges and call it justice. For many of us in this movement, the DA’s office is not an abstract concept. It’s intimate and personal. I don’t believe the DA’s office is where liberation lives. For us, that office was built to abduct, prosecute and enslave our people, not free them, heal them or repair our communities. Even with all of this compounded, deeply rooted trauma, I know a DA can change the trajectory of someone’s life overnight. That’s why I knocked on my first political door in 2016 to help elect Pamela Price—she was to become the first-ever Black DA in Alameda County history.

Recently I had the chance to sit down with Pamela and chat about what it felt like walking into the Alameda County District Attorney’s office after winning. She laughed and said it felt like walking into a mess.“The kitchen was so dirty,” she told me. She walked into an institution that had been operating the same way for generations: cabinets full of mess, ineffective systems stacked on top of each other, and bad practices that had been accepted as normal for decades. Prosecutors were trained to secure convictions. Policies were built around adding time to prison sentences, not giving time back or healing in any way.

When Pamela started pushing alternatives to incarceration like diversion courts and resentencing, questioning the commonplace practice of layered enhancements, and embracing restorative justice practices, the pushback inside the office was immediate and aggressive. After the lines had been clearly drawn she recalled how at one point the people working there “could not believe we were trying to do justice like that.” That sentence says a lot about how the system actually works.

We can’t talk about Pamela Price without talking about the recall, and the blatant disregard for policies and laws that were violated in the effort of the recall. Almost as soon as she took office, private interest groups started organizing against her. Big money came in and political consultants shaped the messaging. The media narrative began to shift, crime dominated the news cycle, and pretty soon, every public safety issue in Oakland was being pinned on Pamela.

Watching the coverage, I could see the difference between liberal and conservative media outlets. The media told a carefully crafted story. Some outlets repeatedly chose images of Pamela mid-speech, mouth open, face tense— depicting the stereotype of the “angry Black woman.” Meanwhile, other politicians get calm, polished headshots. Those choices matter: they shape how we perceive someone before even listening to what they are saying.

Pamela spent a lot of time trying to explain what the role of a district attorney actually is. She held town halls and community conversations because it became obvious that many people in the community didn’t really understand the power that office holds. I saw that confusion up close—my own father needed work and got recruited for the recall. He didn’t really know what the recall was about, he didn’t understand the role of the DA or how those decisions impact communities. Someone offered him a job collecting signatures and he took it. That has stayed with me, because if my own father didn’t understand what he was gathering signatures for, how many other people didn’t either?

Now to be clear, some families who supported the recall were grieving and wanted answers. Violence is real in our communities. People want safety. Those of us who are directly impacted live in the neighborhoods with the most violence. Those feelings deserve to be taken seriously, but those stories were also used politically. Victims’ experiences were pushed to the front of the recall campaign to build a narrative that Pamela alone was responsible for crime across the county. Meanwhile, the deeper structural problems in Alameda County—problems that preceded Pamela’s time as DA, and have continued after it—rarely made the headlines.

During Pamela Price’s time in office, her resentencing efforts brought people home. One of those people is my childhood friend. He went to prison at 17 years old and spent 24 years inside. Because of Pamela’s resentencing work, he came home. Today he mentors young people and tries to help them avoid the same path. What folks didn’t know is the population of folks being sentenced by Pamela has the lowest recidivism rate, so low it can hardly be calculated.

The DA’s office has caused real harm in our communities for generations. That truth hasn’t changed. But the person sitting in that seat still matters. Pamela walked into a dirty kitchen and tried to clean it while people were already demanding dinner. The recall removed her from office. But the bigger question is still sitting with us: What do we actually want from the people who hold the power to charge our communities, and how much power do they have? ✦