I’d never heard of Ursula Jones Dickson before the Alameda County Board of Supervisors chose her to be our new D.A. Probably, you never heard of her either. She’s been a sitting judge, and like most judges has kept a low profile.
The conventional wisdom among politicos is that Dickson was a dark horse. The media’s favored candidate, Venus Johnson, was said to be a shoo-in, but in the end, it was Dickson whom the supes picked. (Nikki Bas, by the way, was a Johnson supporter. It makes me wonder if Bas’s heavy-handed moves to take over the Board of Supervisors resulted in a backlash against her by her fellow Board members.)
From what I can tell, Dickson is a moderate Democrat who seems more or less in the mold of Nancy O’Malley, who was D.A. before Pamela Price. That is to say, while Dickson is a Black woman who can be expected to have a certain sympathy with the “root causes” of crime theory that we voters have so thoroughly repudiated, she is in no way as radical or ideological as Price. Already, Dickson is stressing the ways she’s different from Price. For instance, she says one of her first goals will be to “make sure we tamp down all of this political rhetoric about this office. This office was never this political, it should never be."
This is reassuring. Dickson actually went as far as to state "[Price] was more of an activist than a district attorney,” which is in line with Recall supporters who charged Price with being a second defense lawyer instead of a prosecutor. Then Dickson said something that we’re going to have to hold her to: "Although I respect [Price's] convictions, they're not mine. I'm here to do a job, and as a judge, you have to be fair and impartial. You have to make sure you keep the law first, and this is a victim-centered process. It will be under my office going forward."
In another interview, Dickson observed that “maybe a third of our lawyers” at ACDA’s office “were hired by Ms. Price,” a statement whose meaning we can only infer. It seems to suggest that Dickson understands that those lawyers are not necessarily beholden to the law, but to the outdated racist ideology promulgated by Pamela Price since her Black Liberation heyday in the 1970s. It is an ideology, we can only hope, that Dickson will stamp out in the DA’s office.
But it’s this statement by Dickson that really gives me hope. “I do think that people are a little tired of nothing happening." By “nothing,” she means, of course, the same feral thugs going through the revolving door of the criminal justice system, only to end up free on the street again, where they will reoffend and reoffend until we summon up the moral courage to stop them.
I don’t think that Dickson is made in the same mold as Brooke Jenkins, San Francisco’s crime-fighting DA. Dickson seems to lack Jenkins’ sense of outrage at criminals and crime. At the same time, I think Dickson is a work-in-progress. She now has a brand new job in which her true values are going to ripen and surface. Can she protect us from crime? Will she have to guts to stand up to the union-wokester complex that is still trying to kill what’s left of Oakland and Alameda County? I’m willing to give Ursula Dickson a chance.
Steve Heimoff