EXCLUSIVE — Judge Ursula Jones Dickson, Alameda County’s newest district attorney, lives in Oakland, California. Her 90-year-old father does not. He says it has too much crime and doesn’t feel safe. 

“He’s scared to move to Oakland,” Dickson told the Washington Examiner. “There is no way that my own father should be frightened to live in my home in Oakland, but he just doesn’t feel that level of comfort.” 

He’s not the only one.

The county, which has about 1.6 million residents, stretches from the San Francisco Bay in the west to the East Bay Hills and includes 14 incorporated cities. Oakland is the county seat.

Recalling Pamela Price

In November, frustrated residents recalled Alameda’s then-District Attorney Pamela Price, one of the country’s most progressive prosecutors. Price was bankrolled by liberal megadonor George Soros. Under her watch, thousands of cases were dropped after her office missed filing deadlines. There were countless others it simply chose not to proceed with. Then came the widespread complaints that the district attorney’s office shut its doors to victims, refused to hear their concerns, or didn’t keep them updated on case development. Her office was repeatedly accused of prioritizing the rights of criminals in the name of reform.  

When Price, a former defense attorney, was elected to the post, she had never prosecuted a case. She touted criminal justice reforms and a “new era at the DA’s office.” 

She stripped sentencing enhancements, a tool prosecutors use to increase the penalty for a crime by adding time to a base sentence. She also sought to resentence felons facing long prison terms, end the practice of charging minors as adults, and crack down on police misconduct.

With so many soft-on-crime measures in place, Oakland and its surrounding areas started to turn into a land of lawlessness where victims were often revictimized by those paid to keep them safe. 

Price’s recall was a huge blow to the type of criminal justice reform she championed and sent a strong message that the community wasn’t going to put up with prosecutors who turned a blind eye to them.

Edward Escobar, founder of Coalition for Community Engagement, backed the recall against Price. He called her version of criminal justice reform “defective” and “dysfunctional.” He also accused her of “guinea pigging the people as a social experiment.” 

“She says, ‘Oh, the perpetrators are victims, too.’ I’m sorry, but you don’t say that to the real victims of crime,” he told the Washington Examiner. “I agree with her that criminals are the victims of the social economic injustice that has occurred, but that’s not her job.”

Escobar said he is optimistic Dickson can do better than her predecessor but noted she is running on borrowed time.

Remaking the district attorney’s office and ‘rebuilding trust’

Dickson was among 15 candidates in the running to be Alameda’s top officer, though she was uniquely qualified. She worked as a deputy district attorney in the county for 15 years before spending the next dozen as a superior court judge. She was appointed in 2013 by then-Gov. Jerry Brown, a Democrat, and was reelected in 2016 and 2022. 

Dickson was supposed to start her new job on Feb. 4 but told the Washington Examiner it had to be pushed back until at least Feb. 18 so a replacement could be found for her on the bench. 

“I’ve never left a job without two weeks’ notice,” she said. 

Joking aside, Dickson is acutely aware that she has an uphill battle ahead. Not only does she have to change dramatically the way the office is run but she also has to make it right with residents who have been burned by the former district attorney and her policies. 

“When you have an administration that was really not interested in convicting anybody, and some within the system that didn’t want to charge anyone with enhancements, didn’t want to move forward in many of the cases at resentencing, and people would be sentenced and resentenced immediately without telling the victim, it’s a problem — but those things are a no-brainer to me,” she said. “You talk to the victim. You engage people.”

Dickson said she is committed to “rebuilding trust” within the office and community as well as fostering a “positive and collaborative relationship with law enforcement and the courts.”

Being a successful district attorney will require her office to stay true to its purpose, she said. 

“The DA needs to do the DA’s job, but what I can’t do is everybody else’s job,” she said. “I can’t be a social worker. I can’t be the public defender. I think of the criminal justice system like a three-legged stool. You have the prosecution and the victims. You have defense attorneys and defendants. And then you have the courts. When the DA and the public defender are doing the same job, the three-legged stool loses a leg. It falls over. That is how I saw this system under Ms. Price.”

‘Do we have enough skill?’

One of the first items on her lengthy to-do list is to evaluate her staff. 

There are about 148 prosecutors in Alameda County, and the day Dickson spoke to the Washington Examiner, she had picked up a stack of employee files to go over. 

“We have enough people, but the question becomes, do we have enough skill?” she said. “I know there are lawyers there who have never done criminal law.”

Price created an office that was heavy on diversity but lacked fungibility, something Dickson believes is key to running a smooth operation. To that effort, she is planning to bring in retired lawyers “to help train the new ones to get them up and running to be better prepared.” 

“You have to be ready and prepared and trained to try a case,” she said. “You have to have a staff that can make good in whatever direction you are moving in. So, the first step is, ‘OK, can I see everybody’s resume?’”

Prioritizing victims

Another priority is to have an all-hands meeting about the level of contact her office has with victims. 

“That wasn’t even a question when I was a deputy DA. You were required to reach out to your victims,” she said. “We never even discussed it. It was always a part of what we do as a DA. And I am hearing victims say, ‘We can’t get a phone call. We can’t get a meeting with our DA.’ That culture will start to change very quickly. So, you’re going to start having to hold people accountable very quickly, and you have to train people to know this is how you try a case.”

Dickson also wants to rebuild the victim-witness assistance program and strengthen collaborative courts, which combine judicial supervision with rehabilitation services that are monitored and focused on reducing recidivism. 

Elderly and babies are ‘off limits’

One of the disturbing problems plaguing Oakland, which also hits close to home for Dickson, is crime against the elderly. Last year, 13 residents at one senior housing complex in the city had been violently attacked in a week. 

“It was happening every hour on the hour,” Marie Taylor, president of the Westlake Christian Terrace resident council, told ABC7 News at the time. 

More than 50 senior citizens gathered together to advocate themselves because no one else had. The Oakland police noted a spike in robberies but were unable to cite a reason for the increase.

Calls to the district attorney’s office were not returned. 

“Our elderly are off limits, our babies are off limits, meaning if those crimes are happening, we can’t continue to excuse it,” Dickson said. “You’ve got to draw some lines in the sand. That doesn’t mean you want people to go to prison for the rest of their lives, but it should not be ‘harm, sure, but no foul’ anymore.”