The disgraced former Alameda County district attorney Pamela Price is not free to retire in peace in the aftermath of her recall. It appears that the Bay Area Democrat may be facing prosecution — and this turn of events should surprise no one.
Price was one of the Soros DA’s in San Francisco Bay Area elected in November 2022 in a closely contested ranked choice race. The flamboyant attorney inherited the Alameda County, the region encompassing Berkeley, Oakland and several surrounding towns, already spiraling into criminal anarchy and immediately attracted the ire of the locals eager to return to normality.
Price entered the DA office as a former community activist and a defense attorney, with loads of political aspirations but no prosecutorial experience. She would find it challenging to successfully try criminals if she wanted to — and it’s a hard-working if.
I don’t want to credit Price with single-handedly creating the wave of criminality that engulfed the city of Oakland — Oakland Police Department is chronically understaffed and the now recalled Mayor Sheng Thao was useless. But without a functioning district attorney, cops and city officials would be unable to return the historically rapturous city to the relative normalcy it experienced following Jerry Brown’s tenure as a mayor in the early aughts.
Shortly after Price was sworn in, an anarchist was killed in a robbery attempt — a sign of things to come. Even with the city hall cooking crime statistics, recorded violent crime rose. Businesses — most famously the In-n-Out in the prime location near the airport — poured out of the city. Corporations headquartered in the downtown area warned their employees to forgo lunchtime strolls around Lake Merrit to avoid mugging. Drivers began running red lights because stopping at an intersection means risking thieves braking the windows to steal bags from passenger seats. That’s if there is a traffic light, that is — for instance, the city permanently disabled one next to the sprawling East 12th homeless encampment because the junkies were scrapping the copper wire. The racially mixed municipality exploded with hate — Asian elders have been attacked on a regular basis and a giant Chabad menorah was torn up and thrown into the lake.
Unfortunately for Oaklanders, the progressive DA movement is grounded in ideology alone. When in 2019 the son of Weather Underground terrorists Chesa Boudin was running for district attorney of San Francisco, he explained the strategy of his movement:
And I think that in running and winning this race, I can be part of a broader national moment that is really testing the boundaries of what’s possible through that office, which for far too long has been abandoned to the most reactionary conservative forces in our society.
Boudin was among the first social justice DA’s to win an election, but in the few years that passed, the public learned that when they prevail, Soros prosecutors would use discretion allowed by the office to pursue political ends, like going after class and race enemies or their partisan adversaries instead of doing what the public expects the to do — or bringing criminals to justice. Because San Francisco is really just a sleepy provincial town, Boudin’s ambition was limited to trifles like suing the startup DoorDash for classifying delivery workers as independent contractors. But in the bigger and more violent New York City, Soros DA Alvin Bragg commanded national media attention when he filed a frivolous charges against the Good Samaritan Daniel Penny. Bragg also got to prosecute president Donald Trump — the highest profile case of all.
The progressive decarceration agenda is deeply unpopular with the public. The campaign to recall Chesa Boudin, for instance, began the year he was sworn in and successfully culminated in the 2022. Other Soros DA’s might have been more difficult to recall due to signature requirements to get the process going, yet nevertheless in LA, George Gascon was easily voted out during the regular election this November. Inspired by the San Francisco experience, the campaign to recall Price was launched a few months after she assumed office. In a recent interview, Price blamed everyone from the profit-driven media to Republicans for her recall, but the deep blue urban California rejected her by landslide.
As it turned out, lackluster prosecution was not the end of Price’s possible wrongdoings. On top of being anarchic, the city of Oakland is corrupt. Months before her recall, Mayor Thao found herself under the FBI investigation for campaign finance violations. Local businessman and political gadfly Mario Juarez was fingered in the same probe for laundering campaign donations to Thao. Juarez is facing unrelated charges pertaining to a $4-million scam and 50K of bounced checks.
Although the two appear to have a history of adversarial relations — Juarez once set up a Price recall website — he claimed that the former district attorney approached him with the proposition to wave his bounced check felony in exchange for a $25,000 donation to her campaign to fight the recall. About this the Bay Area publication SFist mused:
It may beggar logic that a DA would ask someone for a $25,000 check while simultaneously prosecuting that very person for $50,000 in bounced checks.
In November, the public defender Jennie Otis accused Price of filing punitive charges against her client because Otis refused to contribute to her anti-recall campaign. The DA, the defense attorney maintains, then augmented murder charges with felony gun possession although she is in theory ideologically opposed to sentence enhancements. On the 12th of December, a judge granted Otis a subpoena to go through Price’s phone records to prove her extortion claim:
A lawyer who has accused former District Attorney Pamela Price of political extortion will likely soon have access to written communications exposing how Price handled day-to-day business as Alameda County’s top prosecutor.In a court hearing Friday, the Alameda County Public Defender’s Office revealed plans to file a subpoena for Price’s personal phone records, as it attempts to prove that Price imposed sentencing enhancements against a client whose attorney refused to work against Price’s recall. Judge Thomas Reardon indicated he would grant the subpoena and expects it be complied with by the year’s end.The controversy centers on the murder conviction of a man named Jamal Thomas, who was found guilty of fatally shooting his former neighbor following a lengthy campaign of harassment, vandalism and threats. After the conviction, Thomas’ trial lawyer filed a sworn declaration accusing Price of using her position as a political cudgel.Voters later booted Price from office in an unprecedented recall election on Nov. 5. Her last day on the job was Dec. 5.The following day, Kathleen Guneratne, an assistant public defender, aired her intention to file the subpoena during a court hearing. The subpoena is only expected to target communications that Price had related to her job as district attorney, as well as the murder case against Thomas.Price will be expected to comply with the subpoena by Dec. 30, Reardon said in court Friday. The DA’s office and Price did not immediately respond to requests for comment Wednesday.
Corruption runs deep in Oakland, so why should it be surprising that a progressive district attorney allegedly is behaving duplicitously? Sure, over her lifetime Price crafted an image of a strong woman fighting for justice — and some voters bought into it. But if, as Boudin explained, the goal of the movement is to “test[…] the boundaries of what’s possible” there is nothing to prevent somebody like her from exploring if extortion, too, lies within that boundary. After all, it’s all for a good cause — she would be able to stay in power to keep criminals out of jail and maybe even sue a few corporations.
When elected officials no longer feel obligated to uphold constitutional order by following accepted rules but are instead guided by their own sense of morality, whether it’s dictated by amorphous doctrine of social justice or some other principle, expect arbitrary decisions and personal enrichment schemes.
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