Newsom Thwarts Progressive DA Pamela Price's Approach to Oakland Crime

SACRAMENTO, California — Gov. Gavin Newsom is rescinding an offer to dispatch attorneys to help prosecute drug crimes in Oakland, accusing Alameda County’s embattled progressive District Attorney Pamela Price of effectively refusing the state’s help.

“Despite our outreach, your office has yet to make use of these resources,” Newsom's Cabinet Secretary Ann Patterson wrote in a letter to Price’s office, obtained exclusively by POLITICO, informing her they would redeploy the attorneys to the California Department of Justice.

Price's representatives did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

Newsom’s reversal deals a high-profile blow to Price as she fights a recall election fueled by concerns about crime. The aggressive intervention also opens an unusually public rift between a publicly elected prosecutor and the state’s most powerful politician, underscoring how crime has become a volatile and divisive issue for California Democrats.

Anxiety about public safety has convulsed Oakland’s politics, with both Price and the city’s Mayor Sheng Thao — who was also the target of a recent FBI raid — facing recall votes in November. The city’s crime rates surged in 2023 even as they fell in other large California cities, prompting Newsom and state Attorney General Rob Bonta to offer dispatch the prosecutors and California Highway Patrol officers earlier this year to assist police.

While police statistics showed Oakland’s public safety picture was improving earlier this year, recent media reports have cast doubt on the veracity of that data. And even as crime rates remain well below historic peaks, incidents like carjackings and a shooting at a popular lake last month have fed a pervasive public perception that the East Bay city is backsliding.

Those dynamics have Price vying for her political survival less than halfway through her term — a sequence of events that echoes former San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin’s ouster in 2022.

Like Boudin, Price upset the political establishment by winning office on a vow to reduce sentencing and prosecute more police officers. And like Boudin, Price is confronting a recall campaign funded by deep-pocketed interest groups including real estate firms. She has castigated the recall as an anti-democratic project of “a handful of wealthy folks” seeking to overturn her election.

Newsom has worked to strike a balance on public safety by addressing frustration about retail crimes and drug use without reverting to what he calls overly punitive responses. He suffered an embarrassing setback last month when he failed to derail a statewide ballot initiative that would enhance criminal penalties, pulling his rival proposalat the eleventh hour.