Featured
Oakland Mayoral Candidates Address Black Issues
The contest to become the next mayor of Oakland began to get more serious this week, as 10 candidates for the job faced some tough questions at the 100 Black Men of the Bay Area’s mayoral debate.
< p> Speaking at a packed meeting in Oakland City Hall chambers Wednesday evening, the candidates answered questions from representatives of African American organizations.
An immediate challenge confronting the candidates is to distinguish themselves from each other and from incumbent Jean Quan, who is standing on what she considers to be her accomplishments – creating affording housing, reducing violent crime and bringing economic development to the city.
City Auditor Courtney Ruby was asked a question about what she would do as mayor if there were a recurrence of a situation where Oakland’s Workforce Investment Board (WIB) administrators failed to utilize funds and therefore had to send back $650,000 to the state for job training for unemployed Oaklanders.
“This is absolutely unacceptable in our community – we need to be able to track every dollar that’s coming in,” said Ruby, who at the time did not use her elected position to investigate why the city lost the money.
“The Workforce Investment Board is a total travesty in my opinion,” said civil rights attorney Dan Siegel. “It sucks up too much of the job funds. The administration should be cut,” he said adding that anyone who gives back funds should be fired.
“It’s atrocious, but its goes beyond that. Oakland needs to get some skin in the game,” said Councilmember Libby Schaaf, pointing out that Oakland uses a significant part of its federal Workforce Investment Act funding for overhead rather than kicking in additional money for on-the-ground services.
The panel of questioners included Kimberley Mayfield Lynch of the Oakland Berkeley Chapter of Black Women Organized for Political Action (BWOPA), Merlin Edwards of the Oakland African American Chamber of Commerce, Diane Lewis of 100 Black Women, Pastor Gerald Agee of Pastors of Oakland and Paul Cobb publisher of the Post and El Mundo newspapers.
Civil rights attorney John Burris moderated the debate and asked some questions. Leaders of 100 Black Men of the Bay Area Frank Tucker and Derrick Bulls hosted the forum.
Celebrating the huge Oakland Army Base development that broke ground under her administration, Mayor Quan said, the project is reaching the city’s 50 percent local hiring goal. But finding people to fill these jobs is tough, she said, adding that she has to do outreach to churches to recruit workers.
However, according to the West Oakland Job Resource Center, there is a waiting list of construction workers seeking employment at the Army Base project.
Post publisher Cobb chimed in, saying that Quan was reluctant to advertise her message in the Black and Brown media. All the other candidates then said if they were mayor they would heartily advertise in the Black press to reach the voters who attend the city’s more than 500 Black houses of worship.
With the new development coming into the city, “we have to be sure people are not left behind,” said Quan, citing figures that place unemployment of 18-25 year olds at 35 percent in East Oakland and only 4 percent in Montclair.
Addressing the hot button issue of public safety, the candidates pledged to contribute resources to reduce recidivism and help unemployed and out-of-school youth.
Several candidates pledged to dramatically increase the number of police officers to 800 or more, though they did not say how they would pay for them.
Oakland had 654 sworn police officers as of the beginning of May, and public safety already consumes about 50 percent of the city’s annual budget. Potential new officers are currently attending a Police Academy at a cost of about $4 million.
“The minimum is 900 (officers),” said candidate Joe Tuman,
Bearing down on public safety, Port Commissioner Bryan Parker asked, “Do you feel safer than you did four years ago? People do not feel safe at home, at work and walking round in the streets. “
“We need a safe, educated, economically healthy Oakland,” he said.
Ruby ended her remarks with a call to action. “Imagine what we could do if we had City Hall on our side.”
Quan emphasized the progress that OPD has made during her administration. “Our police force is the most diverse (it has been) and more effective than it has been in more than a decade,” she said.
Candidates also opposed gentrification, comparing Oakland’s potential future to the negative example of the forcing out of African American and Latino residents of San Francisco.
The people who are forced to move out, said Tuman, are the most vulnerable residents with limited “social and economic capital.”
Siegel said he would work with organizations like Urban Strategies Council to use up to 1,200 acres of existing public land to build affordable housing for 5,000 Oakland residents. He also was interrupted with applause when he said he would help establish a minimum wage of $15 an hour and create an Oakland Bank to help with housing affordability issues.
The answer, said Parker, is training and better paying jobs for Oakland residents.
Other candidates who spoke at the forum were Jason Anderson, endorsed by the Green Party; Patrick McCullough; Sam Washington, business and technology solutions strategist; and Larry Lionel Young Jr., past candidate for City Council, District 3, and for mayor in 2010.
Anderson was warmly received over his plans on how to purchase and preserve historic housing in the Black community, such as the Marcus Garvey Building
Publisher Cobb said, “Based upon the candidates’ answers at this debate, I’d estimate that the attendees’ ranked choices would be Siegel, Parker and Schaaf. But Anderson is coming on strong.”
Activism
‘Jim Crow Was and Remains Real in Alameda County (and) It Is What We Are Challenging and Trying to Fix Every Day,’ Says D.A. Pamela Price
“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.
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.
Activism
‘Criminal Justice Reform Is the Signature Civil Rights Issue of Our Time,’ says D.A. Pamela Price
Speaking about the destructive impact of mass incarceration, Price asked people to consider “how many children have incarcerated parents, where the practice has always been to isolate and eliminate connections between people who are incarcerated and their children and their families and the community. So, when we bring people home, they have no more connection.”
“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and practices of the 1950s, our country is not going to move forward,” she said.
By Ken Epstein
Part Two
District Attorney Pamela Price, facing a recall that began before she took office in January 2023, explained in an exclusive interview with the Oakland Post how she came to dedicate her life to transforming a deeply flawed criminal justice system into one that provides equal justice and public safety for all and ends mass incarceration for African Americans and other working-class people.
She summarized her life experiences as someone who was “traumatized and radicalized” by Dr. King’s murder, joining the Civil Rights Movement full force, getting arrested when she was 13 years old in a civil rights demonstration, being tracked into the juvenile justice and the foster care systems, and making it as a foster kid from the streets of Cincinnati to Yale College.”
“I understand a lot of things about struggle, about sacrifice, about trauma and fortunately survived all of that, and as a survivor learned some important lessons, and I brought all of that with me into the law and have been able to become a civil rights attorney in Alameda County,” she said.
“That’s been the joy of my life; I’ve lived every lawyer’s dream,” she said.
“Years ago, when I first decided to run for district attorney, I realized that mass incarceration was so destabilizing to our communities,” she said.
She saw that the “criminal justice system has so many impacts on our community, the safety of our community, the stability of our community, the growth of our community, the direction of our community.”
“As long as our criminal justice system is stuck in the mentality and the practices of the 1950s … our society is going to be mired in discord, and we will not have social justice, racial justice, economic justice, none of the things that actually make our communities worth living in.”
Speaking about the destructive impact of mass incarceration, Price asked people to consider “how many children have incarcerated parents, where the practice has always been to isolate and eliminate connections between people who are incarcerated and their children and their families and the community. So, when we bring people home, they have no more connection.”
It is crucial to address the needs of “young people in the juvenile justice system when they are more likely and able to be rehabilitated and redirected,” she said. Young people are much more able to be rehabilitated before the age of 18, really before the age of 26, and before they end up in an adult prison.
D.A. Price’s predecessor, Nancy O’ Malley, joined the D.A.’s office in 1984, where she remained for 39 years. She was promoted to a leadership position after just six years in the office during the era of mass incarceration when there was an explosion of prison construction in California.
“Prosecutors like my predecessor were the ones who filled (those prisons) up. She became a leader in the office around 1990. And what is very important for the public to know is that prior to becoming the district attorney in 2009, she was the chief assistant district attorney for 10 years under Tom Orloff.
“O’Malley worked very closely, hand-in-hand with him for the period of time that included the illegal conduct or the unconstitutional exclusion of Jewish people and Black people from death penalty juries.”
Commenting on the recall campaign against her, she said that had not a handful of multimillionaires and billionaires “put millions of dollars into this, we would not be having this recall. It is not a grassroots movement. It’s a platinum movement.”
“People have no idea what the vision is for the next district attorney, or where the office will go if I am, in fact, recalled, she continued. “I’m just running against a billionaire,” who does not show his face in public, she said.
If they successfully paint Oakland as a failed city, then hedge fund billionaires and real estate developers can come in and buy up the property cheap, she said.
Though D.A. Price has been bombarded by a massive tsunami of lies, slanders, and misrepresentation, she remains strong and positive because she is a woman of faith, she said.
“I’ve been saved and guided by (a) higher power since I was 13 years old. So, I’m not a new person to faith, and I’m grounded in that,” she said.
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of October 30 – November 5, 2024
To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.
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Alameda County5 days ago
Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price Announces $7.5 Million Settlement Agreement with Walmart
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Oakland Post: Week of October 9 – 15, 2024
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