By Ken Epstein

District 3 Councilmember Carroll Fife, though outspent by hundreds of thousands of dollars and facing a bitter campaign of slander, misrepresentations, and physical threats, seems to have emerged with a fairly comfortable lead in her reelection bid, well ahead of her nearest competitor (44% to 30%).

In an interview with the Oakland Post Thursday, Councilmember Fife said she is hopeful that Congresswoman Barbara Lee would be willing to run for Oakland mayor if Mayor Sheng Thao is recalled.

She also explained why she thinks her campaign has done so well against extreme challenges and talked about her priorities for the coming year, especially the need to stabilize leadership in city government.

“We’re on the right path,” said Fife. “We just need to bring in the right leadership, and I’m praying that Barbara Lee will consider running for mayor. I think she has the gravitas to pull Oakland together and unite everyone in a way that none of the top potential contenders will.”

Fife explained why she feels she has been able to overcome very powerful opponents to win reelection.

“There are several thousand votes outstanding (left to be counted), but it looks pretty good,” Fife said, emphasizing the impact of the door-to-door work her supporters have done over the past four years and her close ties with her constituents.

“I attribute that to ongoing base-building and community organizing, outside of the election years,” she said.  “I have an amazing field team that was able to penetrate through the negative messaging and the narratives that these millionaires and billionaires were trying to craft.”

In addition, she said she spoke with most of her opponents, and they agreed to support each other in ranked choice voting. “I was able to coordinate with them, except for the two candidates that were perpetuating false narratives, and were part of former Mayor Libby Schaaf’s talking points,” and the doom-loop narrative trashing Oakland promoted by corporate public relations operative Sam Singer.

One of the local groups working to unseat Fife, Empower Oakland, received over $500,000 raised by crypto industry leader Jesse Pollak. The National Association of Realtors and other real estate groups also poured over $1 million into the campaign against the councilmember.

Though the billionaire and multimillionaire backers may be successful in recalling Oakland’s mayor and the Alameda County district attorney, they appear to be failing in their attempt to remake the leadership of City Hall.

“With all the money they’ve spent, they were successful with the two recalls and nothing else,” she said, explaining that corporation-backed candidates are not winning.

She noted that some local leaders are organizing to repeal ranked-choice voting in Oakland and that eliminating or preventing ranked-choice voting “is one of the (right-wing) Heritage Foundation’s flagship campaigns in cities and states across the nation.”

People “should be aware of how these Republican policies are creeping into the Bay,” she continued. Ranked-choice voting is a threat to those with money because it allows for “unlikely candidates who are not necessarily connected to wealth and or political connections,” to succeed, she said.

Oakland is poised for economic growth and is becoming a much safer city, Fife says.

At the same time, considerable economic challenges remain.

“We are dealing with some of the most challenging financial times in the history of Oakland, and I want to make sure that our infrastructure is solid. There are a lot of things to do and understanding that we’re going to need some help, and we’re not going to even have consistent leadership in the mayor’s office,” she said.

“If you want to empower Oakland, you don’t destabilize it,” Fife said. “You don’t destabilize it by creating mass hysteria in one of the largest businesses in the city, which is our city government.”

Looking at the impact of the Nov. 5 elections, she said, “I know people are feeling really dejected about some local and national races. But I think these are the opportunities for people who have big ideas and who are concerned about the beloved community to step up.

“We’ve seen how people have voiced their positions and their anxieties around our country, our city. But now is the time to organize,” Fife said.

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Special to The Post

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price announced today that her office charged three people in connection with multiple organized retail theft crimes stemming from a sophisticated criminal enterprise operating at the Oakland Coliseum Flea Market from March 26, 2023, through April 17, 2024.

The charges against Octavio Ambriz Valle, 52, Devora Ambriz Valle, 49, and Felipe Del Toro Trejo, 54, include multiple felony counts of possessing stolen property and organized retail theft in concert.

It is alleged that the trio of vendors possessed stolen property valued at $348,466 from nine different retailers, including Kohl’s, Macy’s, PetSmart, Sephora, Sunglass Hut, TJX, Target, Walgreens, and Walmart.

Last year, the District Attorney’s Office successfully competed and received a $2 million grant from the California Department of Justice to combat organized retail theft. Price added another $2 million to bolster the Organized Retail Crime Alameda (ORCA) unit which is fully operational and collaborating with numerous law enforcement agencies.

“For over a year, this enterprise supported criminal networks by requesting and buying specific products from brazen boosters who repeatedly terrorized retailers,” said Price. “I want to acknowledge our Organized Retail Crime Alameda (ORCA) Vertical Prosecution Unit for its great work and the role they played in this multi-jurisdiction investigation, which included the California Highway Patrol Golden Gate Division Organized Retail Crime Task Force, the San Mateo County Sheriff’s Office, and San Ramon Police Department.”

If convicted and sentenced on all charges, Octavio Ambriz Valle faces a maximum sentence of nine years in County jail; Devora Ambriz Valle faces a maximum sentence of five years in County jail; and Felipe Del Toro Trejo faces a maximum sentence of three years and eight months in County jail.

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By Ken Epstein

Part One

Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price gave an exclusive in-depth interview, speaking with the Oakland Post about the continuing legacy of Jim Crow injustice that she is working to overturn and her major achievements, including:

• restoring and expanding services for victims of crime,
• finding funding for an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors and
• aggressively prosecuting corporations for toxic pollution and consumer violations.

“The legacy of Jim Crow is not just a legacy in Alameda County. It’s real. It is what is happening and how (the system is) operating, and that is what we are challenging and trying to fix every day,” said D.A. Price, speaking to the Oakland Post by telephone for over an hour last Saturday.

“Racial disparities in this county have never been effectively eliminated, and we are applying and training our lawyers on the (state’s) Racial Justice Act, and we’re implementing it in Alameda County every day,” she said.

Passed by the State Legislature, this law “is an extremely helpful tool for us to address the racial disparities that continue to exist in our system,” she said.

(The law addresses) “the racial disparities that we find in our juvenile justice system, where 86% of all felony juvenile arrests in the county are Black or Brown children.

“We trained the entire workforce on the Racial Justice Act. We are creating a data system that will allow us to look at the trends and to clearly identify where racism has infected the process. We know that where law enforcement is still engaging in racial profiling and unfair targeting and arresting, we’re trying to make sure we’re catching that.”

Many people do not know much about the magnitude of Alameda County District Attorney’s job. Her office is a sprawling organization with 10 offices serving 1.6 million people living in 14 cities and six unincorporated areas, with a budget this year of about $104 million.

Asked about her major achievements since she took office last year, she is especially proud of the expanded and renewed victims’ services division in the DA’s Office, she said.

“We have expanded and reorganized the entire claims division so that we are now expediting as much as possible the benefits that victims are entitled to. Under my predecessor, they were having to wait anywhere, sometimes as long as a year, to 400 days to get benefits.

“Claims had been denied that should not have been denied. So, we’re helping people file appeals on claims that were denied under her tenure,” D.A. Price said.

“Under my predecessor, (the victims’ service office) was staffed by people who were not trained to provide trauma-informed services to victims, and yet they were the only people that the victims were in contact with. We immediately stopped that practice,” she continued.

“We had to expand the advocate workforce to include people who speak Hmong, the indigenous language of so many people in this county who are victims of crime.”

More African Americans advocates were hired because they represent the largest percentage of crime victims and we hired a transgender advocate and advocates who speak Cantonese and Mandarin. “The predominantly Chinese American community in Oakland was not being served by advocates who speak the language,” said D Price

“We reduced the lag time from the delivery of benefits to victims from 300 to 400 days down to less than 60 days.”

She increased victim advocacy by 38%, providing critical support to over 22,500 victims, a key component of community safety.

Other major achievements:

• She recently filed 12 felony charges against a man accused of multiple armed robberies, demonstrating her seriousness about prosecuting violent crimes
• In October, a jury delivered a guilty verdict in the double murder trial of former Alameda County Sheriff’s Deputy Devin Williams, showing DA Price’s commitment to holding law enforcement accountable.
• She recently charged a man and woman in unincorporated San Leandro with murder, felony unlawful firearm activity, and felony carrying a loaded firearm in public.
• A. Price’s office was awarded a $6 million grant by the state for its CARES Navigation Center diversion program. In partnership with the UnCuffed Project at a Seventh Day Adventist Church in Oakland, the program provides resources and referrals for services to residents as an alternative to incarceration and/or prosecution for substance use and mental health-related misdemeanors.

“This is the largest grant investment in the history of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office,” said D.A. Price.

She explained that the program now has a mobile unit. “We have washers and dryers. We have a living room. We have a television. It’s a place where people can decompress, get themselves stabilized,” she said.

The project has “the ability to refer people to housing, to more long-term mental health services, to social services, and to assist them in other ways.”

• Her office joined in a $49 million statewide settlement with Kaiser Health Plan and Hospitals, resolving allegations that the healthcare provider unlawfully disposed of hazardous waste, medical waste, and protected health information. The settlement, which involved the state and a half dozen counties, resulted in Alameda County receiving $7 million for its residents.
• DA Price charged a former trucking company employee for embezzling over $4.3 million, showing her commitment to tackling white-collar crime.
• For the first time, Alameda County won a criminal grand jury indictment of a major corporation with two corporate officers that have been sources of pollution. “They had a record of settlements and pollution in this community, and they had a fire that constituted a grave danger,” she said.

Attorney Walter Riley contributed to this article.

See Part Two

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