OAKLAND — The high-profile unit created by former Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price to prosecute alleged crooked cops is undergoing a shakeup under her successor.
The Public Accountability Unit — which saw mixed results despite Price’s vows for a “reckoning” against government wrongdoing — has been “reorganized” by newly-sworn in District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson. The department, now dubbed the Public Integrity Division, is expected to more closely resemble a framework in place when Nancy O’Malley served as the county’s top prosecutor, a spokesperson for Jones Dickson suggested this week.
In an email, spokesperson Haaziq Madyun said the division would consist of four units: “Grand Jury, Officer Involved Shootings/Brady, Press Information, and Social Media/Public Relations.” Last Friday, Jones Dickson issued an internal memo outlining several staffing changes throughout the office, including the appointment of longtime prosecutor Casey Bates to lead the restructured division.
“This is the model that is closer to what existed before the change to Public Accountability and currently better serves the operational needs of the office,” Madyun wrote earlier this week.
The change drew a rebuke by Zachary Linowitz, who was the unit’s longest-tenured prosecutor before he left in February to start his own law firm. Calling the moves “outrageous” and “a blow to victims of police violence,” Linowitz chided the new district attorney for having recently “gutted” the unit and firing its supervisor, a 20-year veteran prosecutor.
“The new DA does not seem to take seriously the critical role of holding police accountable for abuses of power and taking bad cops off the street,” said Linowitz, a former Contra Costa public defender. “This is especially problematic in light of Alameda County’s ongoing history with some of its troubled police departments.”
Reached Wednesday, Jones Dickson likened the changes to “rebranding” efforts undertaken by Price in 2023, suggesting that “just as she rebranded, we’re going to do the same.”
“That’s what we had before, and a lot of the same pieces of Ms. Price’s organizational chart are very similar, under a different name,” said Jones Dickson, adding that “it doesn’t mean those things aren’t still being addressed.”
The moves represent an unceremonious end to one of Price’s hallmark initiatives. As a longtime civil rights attorney, Price campaigned heavily in 2022 on a platform of holding police officers and sheriff’s deputies to account when they ran afoul of the law.
To that end, Price formed the Public Accountability Unit and immediately tasked it with reviewing six fatal police shootings and two in-custody deaths in recent years. Her announcement came just days after a local rally concerning the 2023 beating death of Tyre Nichols by Memphis police officers, where Price proclaimed that “I refuse to be complicit in murder.”
Yet paperwork snafus — along with Price’s myriad public remarks — often hamstrung the unit’s work.
Separate judges barred Price’s office from prosecuting cases against two defendants after finding that she appeared to be biased. One case, against former Alameda County prosecutor and avowed Price critic Amilcar “Butch” Ford was ultimately dismissed by the California Attorney General’s Office. The other, against former San Leandro police officer Jason Fletcher, remains ongoing. Fletcher was charged while O’Malley was in office.
In all, Price’s Public Accountability Unit is known to have prosecuted slightly fewer than two dozen people since its inception in early 2023. Of them, the office won convictions against two defendants — the first being former Fremont City Manager Mark Danaj, who spent 44 days in jail in a fraud case that had stalled after originally being filed by O’Malley. On Feb. 18, an Oakland police officer, Nathaniel Walker III, pleaded no contest after being arrested multiple times on suspicion of drunken driving.
Price’s vows to review previous law enforcement-related deaths also bore limited fruit. Charges were filed in two of the eight cases that Price identified as being early targets of the unit.
One of those cases — which yielded charges against two Alameda County deputies in the 2021 suicide of Vinetta Martin — remains ongoing.
The other, which was centered on the 2021 death of Mario Gonzalez, ended in ignominious fashion. In October, a judge found Price’s office violated the statute of limitations against two of the three Alameda police officers charged with involuntary manslaughter in Gonzalez’s death. Prosecutors later dismissed charges against the third officer, claiming a key witness turned “hostile” against Price’s office.
Jones Dickson now must decide how to handle numerous ongoing cases. Eleven defendants — a mix of sheriff’s deputies and health care workers — were charged in the days after Price was recalled in November, in a case centered on the 2021 death of Santa Rita Jail inmate Maurice Monk. Also yet to be resolved are cases against an Oakland homicide detective accused of bribing a witness and then lying about it, as well as against an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy accused of various sex crimes with a 15-year-old boy at the Juvenile Justice Center.
The attorney for Monk’s family urged Jones Dickson not to let up on such cases.
“We can’t go back to business as usual, the way in which it was carried out under administrations prior to Price,” attorney Adante Pointer said. “Instead, we have to push forward with the idea that an officer can — and will — be prosecuted when they violate the law.”