The Coalition for a Better Oakland is pleased to honor Carl Chan as its 2023 Person of the Year. Mr. Chan, President of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, has dedicated his career to securing the rights and safety of the AAPI community in Oakland. In so doing, he also fights for the security of the wider community.
Mr. Chan has stood for greater police presence in Chinatown and against efforts to defund the Oakland Police Department. He has come to the defense of small mom ‘n pop landlords, many of them in the AAPI community, who have suffered under the City Council’s rent moratorium. He rallied against a bill that would have reclassified certain assaults as misdemeanors. (Mr. Chan, himself, was assaulted in Chinatown in 2021.) He has called attention to Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price’s attempts to lessen sentences on individuals accused of violent crimes, possibly even letting them off with no prison time. Carl Chan has been a steadfast champion of justice and safety in Oakland.
Last year, the Coalition for a Better Oakland recognized Vincent Ray Williams III, founder and CEO of the Urban Compassion Project, as 2022 Person of the Year.
For further information, contact the Coalition for a Better Oakland here.
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More on the danger of unrestrained Pamela Price policies
I want you to understand what Pamela Price is doing. It can’t be emphasized enough: “Alameda County district attorney Pamela Price,” the Daily Californian reported, “released a policy Wednesday directing her deputies to reduce charges to the minimum sentence and remove sentencing enhancements.”
As the Berkeley Scanner put it, “LEAKED MEMO: Barring ‘extraordinary circumstances’ and approval by District Attorney Pamela Price herself, the penalty for most crimes in Alameda County will soon be restricted to probation or the lowest-level prison term.”
Yes, you read it right: armed robbery, rape, carjacking, arson, auto theft, manslaughter, murder—Price will ask Courts to sentence these felons to “probation” or “the lowest-level prison term.”
No wonder the public is alarmed. Everyone knows it would result in a felonocracy—a state in which violent criminals run rampant, secure in the knowledge that, with Price as D.A., they can do what they want, and even if they’re arrested and convicted, the most they’ll get is a cushy probation deal, or a few months in the clink, with three square meals a day.
Price, for her part, has only one defense against the backlash she’s getting, and it’s her usual one: playing the race card. Anyone who criticizes her, or expresses concerns about her policies, is a racist, hell-bent on upholding the White supremacist doctrine of systemic racism. Price has been on a P.R. tour the last few weeks, trying to stem the mounting negative press she’s getting. Only it’s not working. Her recent media comments and YouTube video were unmitigated disasters. She came across as defensive, self-serving and dishonest.
I doubt if any of this is sinking into the general voter consciousness as yet. People, especially younger ones, don’t pay attention to the news. With their starry-eyed idealism, they still believe that Pamela Price will clean up crooked police departments, will redeem repeat offenders who are shut up against their will in nasty jails, and will bring joy and happiness to Alameda County. It’s easy to hoodwink such naïve people; Price has made a career out of it. It’s too much to hope to turn around hardcore progressive voters who are impervious to reality, but we can work at persuading voters who do read the news, who care about their homes, children, neighborhoods and jobs, who see Oakland deteriorating like road kill, and want to save their county and city.
But we can’t afford to wait until Pamela Price is up for re-election in 2026. She can do too much damage in the meantime. We’ve got to build public opinion so that we can recall Price, the sooner the better. She’ll scream from the rafters that her “social justice” approach is the only way to end crime in Alameda County. We’ll respond with two words: Chesa Boudin.
It’s ironic that Price is so committed to letting violent criminals go free while, at the same time, trying to pulverize police departments. She cannot admit that the police truly are the thin blue line that protects us from predators. She cannot admit that the greatest threat of violence comes from the Black community, because they commit the lion’s share of crimes. This isn’t just my opinion: every analysis I’ve ever seen justifies it. The FBI, the Oakland Police Department, and other law enforcement entities keep track of the racial and ethnic breakdown of major crimes, and in every case, it’s Black people who are the biggest offenders. This is a simple statement of fact: people like Pamela Price call it racism, but they’re just trying to deflect attention from the embarrassing truth. When you confront them with facts and compel them to explain them, they babble something incoherent about “root causes.” Blaming crime on root causes doesn’t work for normal people, because they know that people choose to be criminals. No one and nothing forces any person to break the law. No one and nothing compels young men to rob, steal, pillage, mug and kill. They do so of their own volition, because they like it. To blame their violence on anything other than a sociopathic absence of morality is a sin against humanity. But this is exactly where Pamela Price is coming from. Her unhealthy obsession with letting criminals off the hook is an insult to our intelligence, and we must and will resist it with everything we can.
Steve Heimoff