Just six months into Alameda District Attorney’s tenure, group launches effort to recall Pamela Price

OAKLAND — Six months after Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price was sworn in, becoming the first Black woman and progressive reformer to hold that role, an effort is underway to remove her from the office.

A recall committee calling itself “Save Alameda for Everyone (Safe): Recall Pamela Price” filed paperwork with the county’s elections office on Tuesday, signaling its intent to begin fundraising in an attempt to oust the longtime civil rights attorney-turned-top prosecutor.

It comes a little more than a year after San Francisco voters booted their own reform-minded district attorney, Chesa Boudin — whose recall made national headlines as a potential bellwether for voters’ appetite for criminal justice reform. Some of Boudin’s staff later migrated across the San Francisco Bay to work for Price, who has drawn controversy especially for sentencing practices that critics view as too lenient.

The committee’s formation happened just as Price faced a new controversy. Late Tuesday, she issued a strongly-worded statement defending her chief assistant district attorney, Otis Bruce Jr., following the revelation that an independent investigation had concluded he manipulated and intimidated other prosecutors in Marin County while fostering a misogynist culture and a “quid-pro-quo” system of favoritism there. Bruce was the second-ranked prosecutor in Marin before joining Price’s transition team.

While Price did not specifically address the report’s findings, she took direct aim at Marin County officials for seeking to “impeach his character and publicly humiliate this dedicated public servant.” In doing so, she cast as “false” a blistering, 55-page report commissioned by North Bay leaders — and obtained by the Marin Independent Journal — that concluded Bruce violated 17 personnel regulations.

Neither Price or a spokesperson for the Alameda County DA’s Office immediately responded to requests for comment on the recall effort from this news organization.

The recall group’s treasurer and assistant treasurer are listed as two political law attorneys with a Los Angeles-based firm. Its principal officer, Brenda Grisham, is an East Bay resident who became prominent in local politics after her son was gunned down in Oakland in 2010. She declined to comment when reached by this newspaper Wednesday, as did another member of the group, Chinatown leader Carl Chan.

Recall organizers can expect a difficult — and costly — effort to even get a ballot before voters seeking to kick Price out of office, Bay Area political observers say. This week’s filing merely allows the organizers to begin raising money for the effort. They still must file additional paperwork requiring 250 signatures from Alameda County voters before they can begin the official signature-gathering phase of the recall effort, and other hurdles lay ahead.

While Alameda County’s elections office has not yet determined how many signatures a Price recall would require, recent California’s rules on recall elections say signatures from 10 percent of a county’s registered voter base is needed, which in Alameda County would be roughly 93,000. But because of possible duplicates and invalid signatures the safer number needed to qualify is much higher, as much as 140,000, experts say. And it’s costly.

The current logistical costs of gathering those signatures equate to about $8 to $10 a signature — meaning any campaign to even place the question on a ballot could reach $1 million, Oakland political consultant Jim Ross estimated. In other words, if the recall effort was akin to running a race, this week’s development amounted to simply “tying the shoes to start that process,” said Ross, of the Telegraph consultancy firm.

“It’s not a done deal,” said Jason McDaniel, associate professor of political science at San Francisco State University. “It’s certainly not guaranteed. And it’s going to take serious organizing and serous money to make that happen.”

“But if it does get qualified on the ballot,” he added, “any elected official is in trouble at that point.” That’s because “even though there’s a strong progressive electorate here, there’s no guarantee that these kinds of policies and approaches to law enforcement and prosecution are going to be popular with voters.”

Price won her election handily in November 2022, beating longtime prosecutor Terry Wiley in an effort to replace outgoing Alameda County DA Nancy O’Malley by flipping precincts that previously went to O’Malley and dominating in Oakland and Berkeley.

Price’s platform includes a moratorium on filings that would send murderers to life in prison without the possibility of parole or the death penalty, halting virtually all cases where juveniles are charged in adult court, urging prosecutors to seek probation over jail or prison time, and generally emphasizing alternatives to incarceration. Price has also advocated against the use of gang charges, arguing they are disproportionally used against non-white people.

Her justice reform efforts have been met with resistance and controversies. Dozens of prosecutors from her office have quit or being placed on leave, some writing and leaking resignations letters that offered pointed criticisms of Price, who brushed off concerns over office turnover in an interview.

“I want to hire prosecutors who want to save lives and not destroy them,” she said. “That’s the theme of what we’re looking for.”

Two protests have been held outside the Rene C. Davidson courthouse, prompting Price’s supporters to hold a demonstration in support of her. In addition, her efforts to offer a 15-year prison term to an Oakland man accused of three murders were balked at by political opponents and an Alameda County judge, who refused to let the plea deal go through until a prosecutor returned months later and said two of the murder charges had been impugned by an uncooperative witness.

In April, the National Asian Pacific Islander Prosecutors Association demanded an apology from Price after she penned a letter “To the Chinese Communities” intending to assuage concerns over how the prosecution of alleged gang members who shot and killed a 1-year-old boy in a freeway shooting would be handled.