By Alex Shultz, Politics editor, SFGATE, Updated April 12, 2023 10:41 a.m.
Column: SFGATE local editor Alex Shultz on the lack of transparency and the loaded, pro-punishment rhetoric from reporters at ABC7 and the Berkeley Scanner
In November’s Alameda County district attorney race, Pamela Price, a civil rights lawyer, defeated longtime Assistant District Attorney Terry Wiley, 53% to 47%.
Price and Wiley were competing to replace outgoing Alameda County DA Nancy O’Malley, whose 13-year tenure was typical of “tough-on-crime” Democratic Party prosecutors: She lobbied against statewide criminal justice reform ballot measures and embraced the financial support of police unions. On the campaign trail, Price, a Black woman, spoke of how her life experiences shaped her views about how a reform-minded district attorney should operate; her 10-point plan was well-known to voters. In the end, Alameda County voters decided to break with the policies of O’Malley, which would’ve largely continued under Wiley, and instead backed Price’s unapologetically progressive platform.
Barely three months into Price’s term, a handful of media members have fixated on the new DA, posturing as if they’re doing objective, community-oriented journalism — and even worse, adopting the holier-than-thou stance that their beliefs and biases aren’t shaping whom they choose to interview and how they choose to report stories. They’re using loaded, pro-punishment rhetoric about “public safety,” boldly assuming the very constituency that just elected Price would of course immediately find her policies to be out of step; they’re acting like it’s newsworthy that a selection of Alameda County prosecutors — some of whom donated to both O’Malley and Wiley — would choose to resign from office when a DA with radically different politics became their new boss; and they’re also highlighting gruesome anecdotes, thrusting vulnerable families of brutal crimes into the limelight to cynically dissuade the public from thinking critically about the larger impacts of criminal justice reform.
“It’s frustrating to watch this conversation in the media, and I equate it to climate change,” said Cristine DeBerry, founder of the progressive nonprofit Prosecutors Alliance of California. “We spent decades debating whether climate change was real or not. And finally, we’ve gotten to this place where, OK, the data is in: Climate change is real. It’s time to do the same thing in criminal justice. The data is in: [Mass incarceration] did not succeed. It is no longer up for debate. The question is how do we get to a better place? And why are we condemning the people who are trying to get us there?”
FILE: Pamela Price, the newly elected Alameda County district attorney, works with her staffer Otis Bruce in an office space in Oakland, California, on Feb. 28, 2023.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
With some exceptions, I think journalists can be effective at their jobs regardless of their political persuasions, as long as they’re transparent and show their work. I’m a leftist; my politics of course instruct my worldview. I believe journalism is supposed to be for centering the voices and stories of the most vulnerable among us. At its purest, it’s an essential tool to combat the propagandized narratives of powerful interests and institutions. It’s my opinion — bolstered by research and reporting — that reforms to the criminal justice system are broadly popular, and they’re quite effective, too.
For this reported column, I’ve weaved in the testimonies of a few former prisoners, all of whom are Black or Latino, because I believe their perspectives have too often been omitted from media coverage in favor of anonymous prosecutors with a bone to pick. You can decide for yourself how persuasive you find their anecdotes, coupled with incarceration data and my critiques of other media members’ coverage. If nothing else, you know exactly where I stand and what my aims are with this piece.
The same cannot be said for ABC7 reporter Dan Noyes, who, as far as I can tell, would bristle at the idea of publicly admitting to his political ideologies, including on issues like criminal justice. But his editorial choices, and his sources list, speak for themselves.
Noyes seems to have never reported on Price’s candidacy, or even Wiley’s candidacy, before this year. In March alone, he wrote four breathless stories about Price. The first was titled, “Judge rejects Alameda Co. DA’s plea deal for murder defendant accused of killing 3 people.” The implicit framing of the piece was that it would be out of step and absurd for Price to lower the potential sentence of a then-18-year-old implicated in a triple homicide from 75-to-life to 15 years. Reporter Emilie Raguso, who’s guilty of many of the same one-sided reporting techniques as Noyes, took a similar stance at her publication, the Berkeley Scanner, which is dedicated to writing up the grisly details of neighborhood crimes.
Both Noyes’ and Raguso’s reporting on the triple-homicide case has relied on the disgust of Alameda County Judge Mark McCannon, who denied Price’s 15-year plea deal. Since McCannon’s move, Price has announced that she’s moving to disqualify him from overseeing her cases. Noyes called Price’s decision an “extraordinary action,” but Price’s predecessor, O’Malley, took the same action with a judge less than a year ago.
What neither Noyes nor Raguso bothered mentioning in their coverage is that O’Malley’s office left this triple-homicide case floundering for years, dating back to 2015, because there are questions about whether the evidence would sustain a conviction. And McCannon is not some apolitical figure. In fact, he was an Alameda County deputy district attorney for 16 years under Tom Orloff and then, yes, O’Malley. He even donated to O’Malley’s campaign in 2009. He’s an elected official and someone who was once deeply involved in the office Price is attempting to reform.
What’s more, neither Noyes nor Raguso noted that recidivism rates for prisoners with longer-term sentences are much lower compared with the rest of the prison population or how expensive it is to keep people in prison indefinitely.
Robert Hernandez and his wife Gina can attest to how spending 15 years in prison feels. Robert was released just a few months ago after serving 16 years. His original sentence, for severely injuring someone in a bar fight, was actually 27 years, because it was his second “strike” under California’s three-strikes law and because he had a “gang enhancement” tacked on. Gang enhancements can add lots of time to a prison sentence, and according to DeBerry, 98% of the cases where gang enhancements are applied involve Black or Latino people. Hernandez got out early only because O’Malley lessened his sentence on her way out the door. He’s now in his late 50s; his son, who was 5 years old when Hernandez went to prison, is now 21.
“After 10, 15 years, you for sure paid for your crimes,” Hernandez, who just found a job and is learning how to use a smartphone, told me. “Most of those people are really old. If you ever go to San Quentin and see the people, you will realize, man, this is crazy. Some people deserve to be in there, don’t get me wrong. But there’s a lot of people that got caught up in the system. So, so, so many people that are just broken down and hurt and trying to find a way out. Now they got the DA that’s willing to give them a chance, at least hear them.”
Gina Hernandez is of course grateful that her husband was resentenced by O’Malley, but she still voted for Price over Wiley, a decision she doesn’t regret in the slightest. “We have been impacted by those [sentencing] choices, where people just want to say, well, this group is hopeless; there’s no worth to their life. And that’s not the case,” she said.
Compare the Hernandez family’s measured explanation of the carceral system with how Raguso originally reported on Price’s potential plan to shorten a swath of prison sentences and focus on promising rehabilitation outcomes. “While criminal justice reforms remain critically important across the state and nation,” she wrote, “numerous people from the DA’s office have told the Berkeley Scanner that this approach is not the right way forward.” For the rest of the piece, anytime a statistic or data point about reform policies started to read as sensible, Raguso made sure to drop in a quote from an anonymous dissenter at the DA’s office.
It’s not just anonymous dissenters — Raguso and Noyes both rushed to interview Charly Weissenbach, a prosecutor who comically told the Berkeley Scanner she’s “not comfortable in the spotlight,” as she sat down for feature profiles and on-camera interviews about her very public resignation. I spent about three minutes looking Weissenbach up; she has a 2018 Facebook profile photo calling for the reelection of O’Malley, and she donated $2,074.58 to Wiley’s campaign. Why is it newsworthy that she doesn’t want to work for the DA who convincingly beat her preferred candidate?
While Raguso and Noyes have relied on angry prosecutors to make their points, Noyes separately has a penchant for dramatically inserting himself into his “investigative” reporting adventures. On ABC7 segments and on Twitter, Noyes has theatrically spoken of trying and failing to corner Price for an interview. His on-the-ground sleuthing resulted in other disgruntled employees feeding him drivel like how Price took the “extraordinary” step of closing her offices for a day for team-building exercises. As part of what he called an “EXCLUSIVE” report, Noyes discovered that Price asked staffers to bring pens and paper and crayons to an off-site retreat. (He did not reveal the colors of the crayons.)
Noyes has the ideal mentor for these self-absorbed shenanigans in his colleague, Dion Lim, who perfected the routine of chasing around a progressive DA (in her case, Chesa Boudin). Lim has waded into Price’s tenure as well, recently interviewing the family of Jasper Wu, a 23-month-old who was killed by gunfire on Interstate 880 in Oakland. Lim explained in her report that Wu’s alleged killers might — keyword might — receive a lesser sentence because Price is against sentencing enhancements; one of Wu’s parents responded by telling Lim that they do not “believe in second chances” and they disagreed with the idea of eliminating those enhancements.
It is not my place to weigh in on how Wu’s parents feel here. What I will say is this: Lim framed the potential removal of sentencing enhancements as obviously morally reprehensible, and used a distraught family as a prop and proof that her stance is unimpeachable. I find that despicable. In the past week, Lim went back to Wu’s parents for more gut-wrenching quotes, and her reporting seems to have compelled a small protest against Price at the Alameda County courthouse, even though — again — Price hasn’t announced any final decisions about the case.
According to Dorsey Nunn, a criminal justice reform organizer who spoke to SFGATE about his advocacy work and his own time in prison, some media members “only bring up those frightening stories when they haven’t gotten any real evidence that actually the crime rates went up or down,” he said. “I think that they would prefer to rest on the notion that if you punish somebody, it’s going to actually produce some real dramatic change, a drop in crime that’s going to make people feel safer. When you run out of those stale arguments, they’re going to start talking about, ‘I need a sense of closure.’ But in order for you to have closure, should we as a society be practicing brutal revenge?”
Lance Wilson, a communications assistant at the progressive comms firm The Worker Agency, was in prison for four years, from 2017 until 2021, on a drug conspiracy charge. He would’ve been released in 2020 had he not had a gun enhancement added to his case (he said the gun was found at the home he was arrested at, but it wasn’t his gun). As a result, he was stuck in prison at the height of the pandemic, when he and almost every person he knew caught the coronavirus. “It could have been a death sentence for me,” he said, “all because of this hideous, sneaky thing that prosecutors use to try to just tack more time onto your sentence.”
Wilson told me that certain media members’ ideologically motivated critiques of Price have made him sick to his stomach. “Nobody wants to give you a second chance,” he said. Nunn expressed something similar during our conversation. “At what point will they see me as having integrity, or see people like me as having integrity, and [having] something wonderful that they could add to society?” he asked.
I can’t answer that question for the media members discussed above. All I can do is reiterate that they’re doing a disservice to the public. Already, Noyes is touting a Change.org petition to kick out Price. The Change.org petition carries no official weight, but it’s not hard to read the tea leaves here: An actual recall effort coaxed by the press looks increasingly inevitable.
Price might turn out to be an abject disaster for any number of reasons, but there’s nothing tangible to base that on yet. You don’t have to be a supporter of criminal justice reform to acknowledge the scary implications of already knowing, after barely three months, that a politician who won their race fair and square, who hasn’t even fully instituted their suggested policies yet, seems to be on a collision course for a media-backed recall.
Sure, some of you will read this column, and you’ll call me biased, a left-wing advocate, whatever else. What you can’t accuse me of is not being upfront, of not showing my work. I told you how I was going to write up this story, my thought process behind my sourcing list, and I tried to contextualize my reporting, too.
The journalists who are ideologically opposed to progressive district attorneys? There’s no transparency to be had. They’ll continue releasing selective tidbits about high-profile cases, ignoring inconvenient truths about those cases and the criminal justice system at large, and then they’ll anoint themselves martyrs when they’re critiqued for their nakedly pro-incarceration framing.
Their routine is tiring. No need to overthink it: Pamela Price is a progressive district attorney, and some media members don’t like that. Those media members have responded with fear-mongering over following the facts. Worst of all, what they’re doing may very well work.