Pamela Price, you might have heard, has instructed her deputy District Attorneys to avoid using so-called “enhancements” in charging criminals.
Her reason? “The application of enhancements and allegations is tied to gross racial disparities in Alameda County.” For instance, “70.7% of the people sentenced to Life Without Parole (LWOP) from Alameda County are Black. Black people make up only 9.9% of Alameda’s population.”
Criminal apologists, like Price, Carroll Fife and Cat Brooks, love to point out statistics like these to prove their contention that “structural racism” is the reason why so many Black people are arrested and imprisoned. But this is a deliberate lie. In advancing it, they fail to point out the obvious truth: There are so many Black people in jail because most serious crime in Oakland and Alameda County is committed by Black people. Duh. It has nothing to do with “racism.” It has everything to do with illegal, sociopathic behavior.
But Madame District Attorney serves her racial comrades, not everybody in Alameda County. She fancies herself here to free Black people from the bondage of white supremacy, not to uphold the law and keep the citizens safe from predators. Her war on enhancements is proof of that.
A criminal enhancement is an additional charge, over and above the immediate cause of arrest, by which the criminal will receive a longer prison sentence if convicted. Let’s say you’re accused of robbery: you punched a little old lady in the head and stole her purse. So robbery is the first count against you. But now, let’s say you also pistol-whipped her with a gun. That constitutes an enhancement. Now, let’s say the cops find out that you have a long history of gangbanging. That could constitute yet another enhancement. If you’re convicted of all three counts, you’ll get a much longer prison term than if you’d only been convicted of the simple count of robbery.
The reason DAs like to be able to use enhancements is simple: enhancements make it easier to reach plea deals with criminals. The DA can tell the defendant that, if he’ll accept a negotiated plea deal (say, the first two counts, of robbery and using a gun), the DA will drop the third charge, of habitual gang activity. In many cases, these negotiations work quite well: the criminal’s defense attorney will advise him to accept the plea deal, instead of risking a jury trial on all three counts. This not only makes it easier and less complicated to get the criminal where he belongs—behind bars; it’s far less costly and time-consuming to the county since it avoids an actual trial.
In fact, avoiding trial is a major argument in favor of enhancements. There are nowhere near enough courtrooms and judges to bring to trial every indicted criminal. The system would collapse were District Attorneys to try to do that. Enhancements, then, are a way to limit the number of trials, while still assuring that justice will be served. If Assistant District Attorneys are stripped of the ability to bring enhancement charges against criminals, they’re put into the position of seeing violent criminals get off free, or sentenced to short prison terms, instead of having to suffer the full consequences of their actions.
This is a main reason why so many Assistant District Attorneys have quit their jobs working for Pamela Price. They didn’t become law enforcement officers in order to enable a race-motivated District Attorney to go soft on criminals, especially Black criminals. This is infuriating to those prosecutors who truly wish to keep us safe. They see exactly what Pamela Price is doing, and they know how harmful and dangerous it is.
That’s why this struggle over enhancements is so important. Pamela Price doesn’t like them because they most often are imposed on Black criminals—the class she feels determined to protect. If Price has her way, we’re going to have a lot more nasty, violent predators out there in the streets.
Steve Heimoff