Save Alameda for Everyone: how a countywide grassroots petition drive put the recall of District Attorney Pamela Price on the ballot, and what Alameda County voters decided.
This site documents the effort to recall Pamela Price, the District Attorney of Alameda County, California. It was organised by Save Alameda for Everyone (SAFE): Recall DA Price, a committee of residents, small business owners, crime victims and neighbourhood groups who concluded that the county's approach to prosecution had stopped protecting the people who live here. What began as a handful of neighbours with clipboards became a countywide signature drive, a qualified ballot measure, and finally a decisive vote. Whether you followed the campaign from the first week or are only reading about it now, the pages here explain how the recall process actually works, what the volunteers did on the ground, and what happens to a county after its chief prosecutor is removed by the voters.
A recall is a blunt instrument, and nobody reaches for it lightly. The residents who launched this one pointed to a pattern rather than a single decision: charges filed below what the evidence supported, enhancements withdrawn as a matter of policy rather than case by case, plea agreements that surprised the families of victims, and a growing sense that repeat offenders faced no meaningful consequence. Business owners in Oakland, San Leandro and Hayward described break-ins that were reported, documented and then quietly closed. Families who had lost someone to violence said they learned of sentencing decisions from the news rather than from the office that was supposed to represent them.
Supporters of the recall were careful to frame the campaign as a question of performance, not of party. The committee drew signatures from lifelong Democrats, independents and Republicans alike, and its organisers repeated at every event that the recall was about whether the office was doing its job, not about ideology. Opponents argued that the campaign was an attempt to undo an election and to reverse criminal justice reforms that voters had endorsed. That disagreement ran through the whole campaign, and ultimately it was put to the county as a whole to settle.
California's recall provisions give voters a way to remove an elected official before the end of a term, but they set a deliberately high bar. For a countywide office such as District Attorney, organisers must first serve and publish a notice of intention, then collect valid signatures from a set percentage of the county's registered voters within a fixed window. In a county the size of Alameda that meant tens of thousands of verified signatures, gathered by hand, one conversation at a time. Every sheet is then checked by the Registrar of Voters against the voter file.
Several things could invalidate a signature, and the campaign spent as much effort on preventing those as on collecting names in the first place:
Because of that, volunteers routinely asked people to confirm their registration before signing rather than after. Qualifying the petition did not remove anyone from office: it only placed the question on the ballot, so that the decision belonged to the electorate rather than to the organisers.
“Save Alameda For Everyone. Stop Crime. Recall Price.” — the committee's slogan, carried on every petition table in the county
The petition drive ran on volunteers. Tables went up outside grocery stores and shopping centres in Hayward, Fremont, Castro Valley, Pleasanton, Livermore, San Leandro and across Oakland, staffed from morning until the light went. Roving teams worked farmers' markets and weekend street fairs; neighbourhood captains carried sheets to house meetings and let their block sign at the kitchen table. Weekend after weekend the same routine repeated: check the registration, explain what the petition does and does not do, answer the objection, collect the signature, move on.
The campaign published its schedule week by week, and those event listings are preserved on the Upcoming Events page — including the large Hayward signature day that became the drive's turning point. Volunteers were not paid, and the committee relied on small donations to cover printing, signage and the county's filing costs. That grassroots structure was itself part of the argument: organisers pointed to the sheer number of residents willing to spend a Saturday at a folding table as evidence that the discontent was broad rather than manufactured.
The petition qualified, and the recall question went before Alameda County on the ballot of November 5, 2024. The county voted to remove the District Attorney, with roughly 64 percent in favour — a margin wide enough that it carried nearly every part of the county, urban and suburban alike. Under county procedure the removal took effect once the results were certified, and the Board of Supervisors then took up the task of appointing a successor to serve out the remainder of the term. The recalled officeholder was not eligible for that appointment, and a regular election for the seat follows on the normal schedule.
A recall settles one question and opens several others. Prosecutors' offices do not change direction overnight; charging policies, staffing and the backlog of pending cases all carry over. Supporters treated the result as a mandate to restore prosecution of serious and repeat offences and to give victims a voice in the process; critics warned that the underlying causes of crime are not addressed by changing the person at the top. What both sides agreed on is that the county now watches the office far more closely than it did before. Questions we were asked repeatedly during and after the campaign — about the process, the committee, its funding, and what a recall does and does not accomplish — are answered on the Frequently Asked Questions page.
