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Since the start of Price recall in the first week of October, the leaders of the recall group, SAFE, are confident that they will gather more than 73,195 signatures to get the recall on the ballot by the end of November. The minimum signatures representing 15% of the entire vote cast for the last gubernatorial election are not due until mid-March, and it is a major hurdle in the process of having the recall placed on the ballot for the November General Election. Without saying, this is an astonishing feat considering the county comprises a large geography and diverse population.
Pamela Price, a civil rights attorney, won the seat of Alamed County DA over Terry Wiley, the county's chief deputy DA, in the November 2022 election. She ran with a progressive platform of eliminating racialy inequity in the criminal legal system and providing alternative to incaceration focused on healing.
Within 3 mongths into her term, her critics started to blame sky rocket increase in crime on her office's practice of not seeking maximum possible punishment for criminal defendants while removing 4 seasoned prosecutors and 2 police inspectors for political reasons. Recent hiring of her boyfriend as Senior Program Specialist with no prior experience and not disclosing their relationship, has brought questions about her workplace ethics. Antwon Cloird joined her team with a based salary of $115,502.
Despite public pressure to change her criminal prosecution practice, she has refused to diverge from her own mandate of decriminalization and take the responsibility for a 30% or more surge in violent and non-violent crimes in Oakland. To her the recall effort is lead by election deniers and run by outside special-interest groups supported by the right-wing agenda.
Save Alameda for Everyone (SAFE), the Price recall committee has raised over $240,000 from individual and corporate sources so far. A second recall committee, "Reviving the Bay Area", has additional funded SAFE over $385,000. The principal members of the committee are Brenda Grisham, Philip Dreyfuss and Carl Chan. Brenda's 17-year-old son was shot and killed in East Oakland outside their home in 2010.
Carl Chan, President of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, was assaulted in 2021 by anti-Asian hate felon. Philip Dreyfuss is a hedge fund investor at the SF-based Farallon Capital Management. He resigned from SAFE and established the "Reviving the Bay Area" committee.
Meanwhile, Price has raised about $15,000 to defeat the recall effort. Clearly, the sentiment is against Price and the momentum is growing to gather 100,000 signatures to ensure the recall will be a success. Recall organizers are being helped with hundreds of people from all over California volunteering to gather signatures, some came far away as San Diego and Sacramento. If successfully being removed in 2024 by the will of the people, Price can take into comfort that she will be one of the two DA's ousted from their seats by recall in the last 2 years. Remember San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin anyone?
