DA Ursula Dickson Jones / Emilie Raguso - Berkeley Scanner

Louis Goodman / DA Ursula Jones Dickson / Emilie Raguso - Transcript

[00:00:03] Louis Goodman: Welcome to Love Thy Lawyer, where we talk with attorneys about their lives and careers. Today we have a very special podcast, two of my all time favorite guests, and for that matter, all time favorite people will be joining me. Alameda County District Attorney Ursula Jones Dickson, and Berkeley Scanner founder and reporter, Emilie Raguso, who is not a lawyer. I'm your host, Louis Goodman. Ursula Jones Dickson is the district attorney of Alameda County. Before this role, she served as a Deputy District attorney for 14 years, handling a wide range of criminal cases, and later served as a Superior Court Judge overseeing the juvenile dependency division.

She was appointed to the bench in 2013 and returned to the DA's office when the Alameda County Board of Supervisors selected her as District Attorney following an unprecedented recall election. Her career path includes work in teaching, insurance claims, and even sports and entertainment consulting before pursuing law on a full-time basis.

Emilie Raguso is a journalist and the founder of the Berkeley Scanner, an independent online news outlet that covers public safety in Berkeley as well as the District Attorney's office. Prior to founding the Berkeley Scanner, Emilie worked at Berkeleyside, the Albany Patch, and the Modesto Bee. She has a passion for journalism being a stickler for accuracy in her stories, as well as managing work life balance while being the founder and reporter at The Berkeley Scanner.

I've always thought of this podcast primarily as a space to talk with friends and share those conversations with a wider audience. This episode is no different. In the interest of full disclosure, I wanna let you know that in about six weeks, I'll be joining the District Attorney's Office. I'll have more to say about that in a future episode.

For today, though, I'm keeping my podcast host hat firmly in place and simply facilitating the conversation between these two remarkably accomplished individuals. Both Emilie and Ursula have been on the podcast in the past. Emilie, on the August 23rd, 2023 episode, and Ursula on the June 18th, 2025 episode.

And there we delved into their backgrounds and personal interests in some greater detail. Ursula, Emilie, welcome back to Love Thy Lawyer. 

[00:02:52] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: Thank you. 

[00:02:53] Emilie Raguso: Thanks for having us. 

[00:02:55] Louis Goodman: It is a pleasure to see both of you. Ursula, let me start with you. Where are you speaking to us from right now? 

[00:03:02] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: I'm literally in my vehicle because my life is such that I'm moving around all the time these days, so I'm in my car talking to you all near the courthouse before I go into my next meeting, but I just wanna thank you for doing these podcasts. I think there's so much bad content out there, and this is one of those shows that just as feel good you get to allow people to listen to individuals who they generally have a bunch of views about and don't know much about, and you get a chance to get to know some folks you'd like to get to know, maybe even have dinner with.

This is a good opportunity for people to get to know one another, and I don't see Emilie often, but I look forward to hearing a little more about her on this podcast as well. 

[00:03:48] Emilie Raguso: I am just gonna jump in and say I too agree about this podcast. When I'm at court, I often will see people either on the bench or just waiting for a hearing, and it has been so frequent where then it, I realize that they're in your archives or you have a new piece come out about them, and I've just been able to learn so much about the local landscape through this amazing resource you've put together.

[00:04:16] Louis Goodman: Thanks very much to both of you for your kind words. I guess I'll have to throw out all these difficult questions that I've written and come up with some new ones. I just got back from a podcasting conference and there's amazing stuff going on podcasting now where there are podcasts that are now completely AI generated and the podcast actually gets generated and put out there more quickly than one could possibly listen to it, and the content is just dreadful. But...

[00:04:45] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: Did you say dreadful? 

[00:04:47] Louis Goodman: Actually, did I say dreadful? Yes. I said dreadful. 

[00:04:50] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: Wow. 

[00:04:51] Louis Goodman: It's just completely AI generated. 

[00:04:54] Emilie Raguso: We're all real people. We're all, yeah, yeah, 

[00:04:59] Louis Goodman: Yeah. We're all real people. Ursula, so let me just get back to you for a minute. What exactly is your current title? How long have you held it, and can you briefly tell us how you got there?

[00:05:10] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: Sure. Alameda County DA. I've been in this seat now since February 18th, 2025, so I'm moving in the direction of one year. That was after the recall of the, of my predecessor, Ms. Price, and that also was after a long selection process by the Board of Supervisors. The longest interview ever for seven and a half hours. It was crazy, and a good time, by the way, but I was on the bench for 11 years before that. I served as presiding judge of juvenile during that period of time. Did a lot of work, both in juvenile justice and in dependency or CPS cases, and before that was with the DA's Office as you previously mentioned.

So what I thought, I was well suited to take on this position because I had managed an organization before as well as it had the experience in criminal law, and then also just within the community. I think juvenile law is a little different because it's collaborative. Generally speaking, and so I like that piece of juvenile and wanted to stay in that area of the law for actually 10 years because you in those areas in juvenile, you're touching criminal, you're touching family, you're touching dependence, you're touching juvenile justice, many areas of the law.

This came about because. I was concerned about the direction the county was going in. I live in Oakland, so specifically Oakland, and I was complaining about it to my husband of almost 35 years who said to me, if your mother was living, you know what she would say. And I'm like, no. And he says, she would say, just shut up and do something about it.

And so I joke and said I didn't talk to him for three days, but then during those three days I'm like, you know what? There's something to that. Like I'm gonna have to stop complaining and decide what I can do about it. And I feel like that's how I've lived my life is you just figure out what you can do to make it better and you just get after it.

And so that's how I got here. 

[00:07:09] Louis Goodman: Emilie, where are you speaking to us from right now? And can you tell us what your current title is, how long you've held it, and briefly tell us how you've gotten to where you are right now. 

[00:07:23] Emilie Raguso: Sure I'm in my rent controlled apartment in Oakland where I otherwise probably could not afford to live here and do this job.

I started The Berkeley Scanner about three and a half years ago after working at another local site for 10 years and was in local news before that. So I've just pretty much put my whole career in mostly Bay Area local news. I was in Modesto for a couple years where I was a crime reporter, which did give me a great foundation for focusing on public safety now at The Berkeley Scanner.

But I left Berkeleyside because there was a hole in the market for more robust, comprehensive public safety reporting, and it happened to coincide with this historic election of Alameda County having a new, progressive Prosecutor in Pamela Price. So that was her platform, which coincided with a spike in crime and a lot of policies that upset a lot of people.

So I started covering the DA's Office too, and now that's expanded my focus along with some more political stuff in Berkeley. 

[00:08:39] Louis Goodman: Now, as you both know, the primary focus of this podcast is on Alameda County Attorneys. Although I interviewed lawyers from all over the country and, but you know, primarily Alameda County attorneys and how the legal system in Alameda County impacts the community and the attorneys who practice here.

And Alameda County, in my view, is because of its enormous diversity in every sense of the word, a bit of a microcosm of the state, the country, and perhaps even the world. And we are in a unique position, at least to my mind, of a bit of an unsettling time for public officials and for members of the fourth Estate that cover public affairs.

Emilie, as a professional observer of the Alameda County Criminal Justice system, what's your take about what's been going on in the last few years? 

[00:09:35] Emilie Raguso: It was definitely an interesting time to be getting a crash course in the Alameda County DA's Office after Pamela Price was elected. I had been to court many times to hear Berkeley cases, but I really hadn't covered the office as a whole and the office as a whole under price's predecessor, Nancy O'Malley had a relatively low profile, which is not to say Nancy O'Malley did many things that received recognition and praise throughout the state, throughout the nation, but she was not one to be constantly getting out there and trying to hold press conferences and trying to comment on cases, and she was selective and the sort of information she shared.

So I didn't do a lot of coverage of the office. And then everything changed once Pamela Price came in because she had a very different platform and different goals, and she really wanted to get her message out there. So she was talking a lot more about specific cases, and as I mentioned, it coincided with a spike in crime that in many ways had nothing to do with her.

Although I do think the policies did affect charging in the county, which can contribute to the cycle. There have just been so many twists and turns since she was elected leading up to her recall. And I will say one thing I really wanna give credit to that period of time, give credit to for that, I wanna give that period of time some credit because it did shine a light on the DA's Office and put, made so many people wonder what is it the DA does?

And there was a lot of education around that. Some people still don't get it, and I think are believing false narratives. But I think many people came to learn and understand a lot more what is the role of the DA versus other people in the criminal justice system. So I thought that was positive. But as we know, she was recalled.

There was a lot of pushback to many of, not only, I think it was in some ways less some of her positions, but how she went about them and it did result in this historic recall election. So it's been a fascinating time. And I will say, I have to mention there was the one big conflict I had when she and her staff wouldn't let me attend a press conference, even though I am credentialed media and had every right to be there.

And there were just many comparisons to some of her tactics and responses to Trump. So that was really on the sort of on the left and that was interesting to watch and see and I'm very glad to report that sort of all of those things have been corrected under the new administration. 

[00:12:39] Louis Goodman: Well, Ursula, you are the new administration and you are at the absolute center of the storm. How do you see it and what comment do you have on Emilie's observations? 

[00:12:52] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: I think you're right, absolutely spot on about educating people about what the DA does, and I absolutely took the opportunity during the appointment process to try to do that, to try to explain that the DA is not the Public Defender.

The DA is not, the board of supervisors is not a social worker's, not a psychiatrist. I'm not a nonprofit organization, a community-based organization. And there are very specific things that the DA's Office does, and when the DA's office does not do that, things fall apart. And so there, I think for me, having the opportunity to kind of watch from the bench outside looking in what was going on in the DA's office and with criminal justice in our county was a bird's eye view, but I had some space from it, and that space was really important to be able to formulate opinions and positions on how I thought we should move forward. Not ever knowing I'd be in this position to do this.

I agree with you that Ms. O'Malley had done many things that people who know about the DA's office and what they do we're very aware of, but she was, I don't think she was political. Like my whole goal in taking this job is to remind people this is an elected office. It should not be a political one because the DA's Office is one of the few officers that anybody in the entire county can have interaction with.

If you commit a crime, you can be charged. If you're the victim of a crime, we're helping assist you through that process. And so there is no quid pro quo with this office. There should not be. This should be the most straightforward elected position. You know what you get. There's no guessing, and that's what I'm really trying to bring back to this space, is reminding people that our job really is to keep victims at the center of everything that we do to make sure this process is fair and impartial.

The same as a judge would. Everything should be fair and impartial. And then in addition to that, making sure that we have the resources to take care of the people in our community that we're supposed to be taking care of. So I agree that this has been educational for people, this whole process about what the DA's Office does or doesn't do.

And I also believe that in a lot of ways, we're learning maybe the hard way. That we absolutely need to get back to the basics, to make sure that people know that the DA's Office is here to do the best that we possibly can to serve victims of crime, to make sure that our process is set up in such a way that defendants have a fair trial, but also that victim's rights under the California Constitution are respected.

And so all of that to say, I think that this process, the recall, allowed us the opportunity to do a reset and for people to get an opportunity to understand what the DA does and hopefully respect it as well. 

[00:16:01] Louis Goodman: Ursula, I just wanna follow up on that a little bit. Talk a little bit about Marcy's Law and the fact that it gives victims constitutional rights.

I think that we are, everyone is basically familiar with the constitutional rights that defendants have the right to remain silent, the right to an attorney, the right to a trial, right to preliminary hearing, but in California, victims have actual constitutional rights. I'm wondering if you could just talk about that a little bit, because it's something that I think most people don't really have a sense of.

[00:16:36] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: So it is true that in California specifically, the state constitution allows for enumerated rights for victims. Those rights include having the right to be informed about, for example, a court date, having the right to be heard at court dates. And a big piece of the rights is just making sure that victims know what's happening in their cases and that they have the opportunity to address their views. It doesn't mean that they get to make the call on what the offer is in a case or whether or not a case goes to trial, but they do get to know exactly what the offer is, how we're expecting this trial will go if they want to be involved with making any statements to the court or otherwise, they can do so in writing.

We have victim witness advocates who helped him through that process, and I think that for many years we've only talked about defendant's rights, which absolutely, constitutional rights attached to anybody charged with a crime and we respect them. What I don't like is the fact that nobody seems to remember or to care to even talk about the fact that victims have rights too.

And the DA's job is to respond. If you're coming into contact with the DA's office, one of two things have happened. Either you're a victim of a crime or you've been charged with a crime and nobody's happy for either of those sets of circumstances. But what you know for sure is that as far as advocates go, 'cause the DA is an advocate for the victim and an advocate for justice.

We are obligated to make sure that victims are at the center of the things that we do. We are obligated to make sure that when we're charging cases, when we are prosecuting cases, and even sometimes when we have to dismiss a case, victims are in that process. They're not always happy with what we do, but they have a right to be informed about it and to be heard, their voices to be elevated.

And Marcy's Law is important to me because I feel like we've forgotten that it exists. If I can say it a million times a day, maybe somebody will pay attention and remember that victims too are a part of this process. It's like my pet peeve when people talk about restorative justice and always ask, have you talked to the victim?

And they're like, we can use other people in this process. If you're not restoring the victim, who are you restoring? And to some extent, you're trying to restore the community, but the goal is to engage on a real base level. That the reason any of these systems exist is because somebody, something was harmed. And then we start from there. So Marcy's Law is the center of everything we're building on here at the DA's Office. 

[00:19:16] Louis Goodman: Emilie, any follow up on that? 

[00:19:18] Emilie Raguso: I was just thinking about so many things. It's been just such an interesting couple years and I was thinking about probably recently I have heard or there have been some concerns put out from people affiliated with the price campaign.

Some victims saying, oh, we haven't gotten what we wanted from this new DA's Office. But so I do wanna acknowledge that and I haven't had direct conversations with them, but it was very different under Price. It was this constant, so many victims and families unconnected coming forward saying, please, we just can't get anywhere, with, we can't get calls back and we're not getting told about court dates.

And it was really, it went on for months and months. So I really do think there's been a change from what I've seen in the posture of the office. And I also think the nature of what people, when people have been through that sort of loss, there's gonna be a lot of things that are difficult that they may not be satisfied with, and I'm sure the goal is not, people are not gonna be happy at the end of it, but I think, as the DA said, just making sure they're heard and at least get to have their say and weigh in is a big change than it had been.

[00:20:41] Louis Goodman: Yeah, I think that it's unfortunate as lawyers, as people who are connected with the court system, people generally don't go to lawyers or go to court at the best moments in their lives. And as the DA said, you come in contact with the court system, you're coming there either as a defendant or as a victim, and neither one is really a great place to be. And, and I think that's true on the civil side too. People are, don't file lawsuits when they're super happy and no one is super happy about having a lawsuit filed against them. It's, it comes with the territory of the legal system, being a lawyer.

Staying with you for a moment, Ursula, you've been in office now as DA, as you mentioned, for almost a year. You stepped down from the bench to accept this assignment. You didn't have to do that. You had a secure, very prestigious position as a judge. Any regrets or thoughts about that decision? 

[00:21:39] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: No regrets. Thoughts are just that self-care is real. I think jobs like this where you, it's personal to me that the community feels like they have an advocate. People who've been victimized, have an advocate. I just have to make sure that I'm taking care of myself as well, 'cause you're carrying people's feelings, their emotions, their pain, and sometimes their happiness if things go at least the way they want them to. I don't have any regrets 'cause I don't ever look backward and I think that the universe puts you where you're supposed to be when you're supposed to be there.

It is hilarious actually, that I even got this opportunity because I never expected it. I absolutely thought it would be important to have the voice of a judge heard. During this process, because I felt like I didn't want it to be political, I just wanted to speak to the things that I thought might be important to victims.

I had no political pull, no connections. My application was sparse because I couldn't answer a lot of questions because I was on the bench at the time, so I had no expectation of getting this appointment, and as a result of that, there's no ego with it, like I'm doing it because I think it's the right thing to do.

I stepped away from the pinnacle of my legal career getting to the bench to do this job, and I stepped away from my pension to do this job. I left it on the table 'cause it's important enough for me to do that. And so for me, this is just another way to serve the community. And I'll do it until the community says different.

[00:23:23] Louis Goodman: You were a Deputy DA before taking the bench. How does being at the top of the office look different from being a line deputy? 

[00:23:32] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: I think the biggest difference for me is that you are responsible for people in a different way, and I felt that way when I was presiding judge of the courts, but less people, of course. You're responsible for your employees, but you're also responsible for how the victims in the community are served. That's a big order to make sure that we, we're training our employees in such a way that they know what to do, how to do as it relates to victims' rights. That we're training our lawyers, we had many lawyers who were fairly young when I came on, but not so much young and years young and repetition because they went through COVID and then a period under the last administration, not as many cases were being tried. It wasn't important at the time to do that, and so now we are going back to the drawing board and teaching lawyers who would be fungible DAs, as we call them, people who should be able to do everything through felony trials because they've been here enough years, but they've not had the repetition to do that, and we're finding their deficits that we are shoring up with the training as well. But that requires patience.

[00:24:45] Louis Goodman: How many lawyers are in the office, and then how much support staff is there just to give people an idea of how big a job this really is. 

[00:24:54] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: We have over 400 employees and there are over 150, closer to 160 lawyers in that group. And so it is a large law firm, and it is one of the things that I think is of interest because if anything is important to the success of a DA's office, you need to realize that not everybody can be the DA.

It requires expertise. And I think running an office, a government office requires expertise. Knowing how to deal with the budget of this size requires expertise. Knowing how to hire lawyers and other employees requires expertise. There are all of these things that I think just having a professional District Attorney's Office makes a huge difference in how people experience our office when they have to come to it as well.

And so I'm working very hard to make sure those pieces are in place, but it is a huge operation. We have multiple offices around the county. It's not just right here at the lake. We have two in Oakland. We have one in Dublin. We have one in Fremont. We have one in San Leandro where it goes on and on. We have offices, we got the family justice center.

We're responsible for huge operation, and we are as a collective team because my command staff is awesome. Just awesome. We work really hard every day. We don't sleep much, but we work very hard every day to make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, and a lot of that is trying to put the pieces back together for things that did fall through the cracks. It's a big operation for sure. 

[00:26:33] Louis Goodman: Emilie, as a reporter, you cover the crime and the courts' beat. You've observed the courts and the District Attorney's Office for several years. I often see larger news organizations referencing your reporting. What have you seen and heard recently about what's going on? 

[00:26:51] Emilie Raguso: I do wanna say candidly, the last year I covered things very closely up through the selection of the, and appointment of the new DA.

But since then, I wasn't in court as much as I would have liked to be. And there were, there was a lot less concern in the community about how things were going, and that was a big part of it. There were just not, there wasn't the same level of anxiety about how decisions were being made, charging decisions and cases being handled and victims concerned they were not gonna get justice.

All of that, much of it, so much of it really fell away after the recall because I think that indicated that people were happy, happy with the decision the board of supervisors made, and certainly wanting to see how it would go under the new administration. But I will say many of the things the DA just mentioned are questions I think there's still probably interest in knowing how was the budget impacted under the prior administration and how are things looking now financially. The charging backlog, is it fully resolved? Is it still a work in progress of the staffing? So many people left when price was elected, and I've seen many of those faces back around the office.

How did you go about rebuilding? Were people just clamoring to come back or did you have to convince them? And I think those are some of the things I think would be interesting to cover more. And the other piece of it, which maybe relates more to state law changes than anything locally was I've really seen an explosion in the mental health diversion cases, I've seen such an explosion in the mental health diversion cases because I'm looking at the hearing calendar every day looking for serious cases in Berkeley and nearby, and so I've been amazed to see how many people and how many people with kind of very serious crime allegations and charges are going for mental health diversion.

So those are some of the things I'm looking at. But DA, I don't know if you have any interest in talking at all about the budget or the charging backlog or any of those things. 

[00:29:18] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: Sure. So let's start with the charging backlog. We walked in the door knowing that the last administration at least found out that they had a backlog and that it was pretty bad.

And the expectation when we walked into the door is that they had cleared that backlog, but in fact, we found thousands and thousands more cases when we walked into the door and we were able to clear those backlogs. We were able to charge those backlogs so the lawyers were able to review those and charge 'em.

We had so many of them that it took us, we had to move staff to process them. We're still processing some of those because they sat for so long. It was like the equivalent of having, I don't know, 20 times the amount of cases that our staff would normally handle. So it took quite some time to get a handle on that, and we are making sure that we continue to review where we are to make sure we don't get back there and we have the appropriate staff and the appropriate offices and assistants.

The budget was a disaster and I'm just honest about that. We walked into the door having to find $2 million we had to pay back to the state California Department of Insurance in a budget that is extremely tight, had to tighten up a bit and to find monies all over the place to try to make sure that we could pay the state back.

In addition to that, we also, there were threats of us being sent to collections when we walked in the door for bills that had not been paid. So we had to move our way through those with monies we didn't expect to be using under our budget either. We limped into our new budget year. June 30th is the end of the budget year.

We had 97 cents 0.97 to get to July 1st, but we got there because we have some really smart people working to make sure that we're tightening the budget and also just making sure that we're aware of what we need to handle. This is a legal office. We have to be able to at least pay our bills and do the things we expect other people to do.

We walked into the space where in our consumer division, the last administration had hired law firms to do work of the DAs who were already hired. So there was a law firm hired to be involved in litigation and we had to come in and just get rid of that law firm because it didn't make sense for a law firm to be doing that work.

We don't know anything about this law firm. There were some ethical concerns about that as well. It just goes on and on. Many people in positions that were not trained to do that work. So people who were supervising but had never tried a misdemeanor case less long a felony case.

And when I came in, we moved people to those positions and to the misdemeanor positions so that they could get that training. Some people stayed to learn, some people did not wanna do that work. So it is just, it is a full on rebuild and it will take us about five years to rebuild this office. A piece of that will be the training. Another piece will be the experience, right? You train and then you get the repetition. Getting our budget together, asking for monies for things, for example, that had not been paid for before. Now we're going back to the budget table to say these are things that are import. Every murder that we try cost us between 10 and $30,000 for pathology fees, so we need that in our budget because those pathologists had not been paid appropriately and the cases weren't being tried.

We are trying to get back to the basics, the things that we know we should be doing. Having a solid, like I'm a good steward of my money and so my expectation is my office is a good steward of our, the county's money. So we're doing that work, making sure our budget is intact, our employees are trained appropriately.

We're paying our bills like we should be. We're training people. We brought a lot of lawyers back. There are more that could come back. But I, at least 11, maybe 12, that we've brought back so far, and we have a few others coming back. We have several Annuitants who are retired, who are coming back just to provide their time to get us back on our feet.

Like we, this is a, it's an effort this by the entire DA's Office community to try to get us back on our feet. For those of us who live in the county and a lot of us do who work in this office, it's important to make sure that we're not burning out the lawyers who have been working so hard and not getting a break either.

So finding a way to move them around to different positions so they can take their breath and rebuild. So they're a brunt of things that we're responsible for, to make sure things work out the way they should. But those are some of the issues, and some of that is we're just grinding too hard to talk about it, to try to keep our head above water.

[00:34:24] Louis Goodman: Emilie, what, if anything, are you hearing from your police sources about cooperation, coordination with the DA's Office? 

[00:34:34] Emilie Raguso: Officers I know would like a bit more communication about where the cases are in the process. So that seems somewhat new. And this may go back to the training issue. These are a lot of the people they're working with are newer to the office.

And in the past they might have been kept more in the loop about the steps that cases can take. So that's one thing I've heard, but I haven't heard any major concerns like we were hearing before. But just better communication about scheduling, which is always a challenge in court, a huge challenge in court in general. I know I struggle with it.

I did wanna ask one other. Question about changes, and it might fit now, it might fit later, but there had been some reporting at one point that I didn't do about some policy changes. One of the things that there was a lot of concern about when DA Price came in was the changes with enhancements and gun related things, and it is my understanding that maybe there were some changes under your administration where you reintroduced things or added some stricter potential penalties. But would you be able to talk a little more about that, particularly around guns? 

[00:35:52] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: So the biggest change, the first change was to get rid of the directives that Ms. Price had. The reason was because they really were one of the reasons we had such a huge backlog.

So there was a requirement of the last administration that anybody who wanted to charge an enhancement, so like a gun enhancement, extra time and custody for using a gun or anything of that nature. You had to run it by multiple layers of supervisors, and by the time that information would make its way to whomever was making those decisions, it would be too late.

You just either have to charge the case without it, or the answer was no, almost always. And so we got rid of that because we have experienced folks doing the charging in our office and they don't really need to come to me unless it's something more significant, like a special circumstance, life without the possibility of parole, something like that.

Otherwise, they are free to charge the cases as they see fit and as the statute provides for. So that was one thing that we changed. A second thing was as it relates to gun cases, because we have so much gun violence in Oakland, if we have a gun case that we can charge and we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

So we had to tighten up on our charging because sometimes gun cases, if you have four people in the car, it's harder to charge or to prove that case than if one person has a gun under their seat, et cetera, you catch them with a gun in hand. But if you're gonna charge those cases with the number of violent crimes involving guns in our community, my position is you can do some mandatory time on those.

That is more of a, what we consider uniform sentencing, right? So if you have a misdemeanor gun case, you can do 90 days, which by the way, in California means 45. And it doesn't mean that the court can't give you electronic monitoring. But it does mean that there is a consequence for having a gun in the community illegally.

If you have a gun legally we don't have any business in your business. But if not, then that becomes an issue. And so that was something I have been talking about since I got here. And then when we had two school shootings, two days in a row, I'm like, wait a minute. Like, kids can't go to school now like we are we really doing this all over again?

I feel like. When I found out that the kids from Skyline after the shooting at Skyline were on a field trip at Laney, when Coach Beam was murdered, then we got a whole nother issue. And for me, if you listen to the children, sometimes they lead you. And that next day they had a walkout. And I'm thinking to myself, I hear you.

I'm scared to death that when my kids go to school that this is happening. It's happening across the country, colleges, high schools, et cetera. At least we can have a response to that. And it doesn't mean you spend the rest of your life in jail or prison for having a gun, specifically a misdemeanor, but it does mean that there are some consequences for that and that there should be some uniformity to that.

And so that was another change that we've made. We are. There are many changes, but I think for me, I what coming out of the juvenile courts, what I'm asking the juvenile judges to do, if there's a murder case in juvenile, I'm asking them to look at those cases to determine whether or not those cases are young people who can be rehabilitated in the juvenile system.

Not asking that we send everybody to adult court, I want, 'cause I sat in that seat. The way the law is set up, the court is supposed to make that decision not on every case, but on murder cases. And if that is, if those are the cases we want the court to take a look at, we're asking the court to make those decisions.

And oftentimes what we do is file what we call an intent, which just means we're asking social services to give our social services probation to give us a report about is this child rehabilitate in the juvenile system? That starts that process. And so I've asked that as well on the murder cases. Not one young person has gone to adult court since I've been here in a year, but we have asked to at least have those reports done and to ask the court to be engaged in that process.

So there's several changes that have been made. Those are some of the important ones. 

[00:40:18] Emilie Raguso: Thank you. 

[00:40:20] Louis Goodman: As a general rule, I've kept politics to a minimum in this podcast, but given that we have an upcoming contested election this June and a filing deadline in March, I don't see how we can really avoid that elephant in the room.

Ursula, what's going on politically in the upcoming DA race and how did we get here? And can you talk a little bit about the recall and the results of the recall and how that may affect what the voters decide to do in June. 

[00:40:51] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: I won't talk too much about the recall other than I trust the voters of Alameda County and they've been here, done this.

I'm not gonna second guess their decisions, and my expectation is they're gonna make whatever the right decision is for the county at the time again. I think I'm the right decision for the county, otherwise I wouldn't be doing this. From a political perspective, it is a hard conversation to have with voters who ask me, what happened if we just recalled this person?

Why are they running again immediately? That's a hard question. To answer for people other than the county Charter does not bar that, and I think it's good. I think you test the limits of, you test the limits of our system. I don't think that this is a fluke. I don't think the recall's a fluke. I don't think that people who came out to vote are fickled.

I don't, I don't ignore the fact that it feels, I think, a little uncomfortable to people who came out to vote. We're doing this all over again, but I reassure them that I'm gonna do the job that a DA is supposed to do. We've been raising quite a bit of money, which is always nice, working really hard to make sure that we're solidifying our position in this space, because as a judge, not many people know you.

You do your work in your courtroom and it's giving people an opportunity to get to know me, and me to know them, but honestly, the proof is in the pudding. The product speaks for itself and within a year we've been able to stabilize the office that, in my opinion, was in freefall, and so that is a short period of time to get pretty good stabilization results.

My expectation is that only gets better, and we're gonna work to make sure that it does until we get it the way we like it, and the way we like it is attorneys who are trained the way they should be trained in a position to try cases that are difficult cases. This county has some serious and violent cases.

It's just the nature of what we deal with here. And so we need attorneys who are in a position to do that work. We need to give rest to the ones who have been doing it so that they can catch their breath and teach the younger ones. Each one teach one. And we've done that before and we continue to do it.

And I just wanna make sure that people know that you can count on us to do the right thing. That's, I don't think that go, oftentimes it goes without saying, but we have to be held to the standard. We gotta do the right thing. That means we gotta go through the motions, we have to follow the directives, we have to follow the law.

And it doesn't, like I've had this big pushback book. You've undone everything that the previous administration did? No, I didn't. I came in and looked at it all and I felt like there was a mandate by the community to do that. I don't just come in and follow what other people have done. I've never been that person.

But I do it within the realm of the law and the rules, and we do it the right way or we don't do it at all. And so for me, that's the message from this office that it's what I want people to expect from us there. You're not always gonna hear what you want from the DA's Office 'cause we can't always make it right, make people feel better.

And oftentimes. You never do. You lose a loved one. We can't fix that pain. We can help you through the process and sometimes the decision to charge or not to charge, go forward or not to go forward. Sometimes that has consequences, emotional consequences for people. But we stand up and we tell you what we see, what we believe, what's right, what's wrong, and then the cards fall where they may, because all we can do is show empathy and sympathy for people and to move forward on the cases we can prove beyond a reasonable doubt. That's our job, and I'm gonna hold the people that work with me to that standard. 

[00:44:54] Louis Goodman: Emilie, what's your take on the political situation and what are you hearing from your sources? 

[00:44:59] Emilie Raguso: I was gonna say first, you know, a year ago, it seems so long ago, but I think for me, one of the most disappointing things after the recall was hearing the political narrative that supporters of the prior DA were bringing forward, which was if you voted for the recall, you were racist, you were uninformed, you were misled. It was very minimizing and people making really bold statements in public meetings, name calling, and just there was, and we're seeing this nationally too.

We're a divided nation. We're a divided community in certain ways, and I think I talked to many people who did support the recall, who were just, they were worried about crime. They were victim families. They had whether or not you agreed what their political position or agreed what their policy interests.

I guess they were sincerely coming. They weren't just a bunch of racists. And so it was, I feel like we're not gonna move forward as a community and a county if people keep up with these narratives. And I thought, oh, the recall's gonna be a wake up call for maybe the other side too. But I guess it's just when people believe things so strongly, there's no amount of information that might change it.

So that was one thing I was thinking about, but when the DA was speaking, the other thing I was thinking about was when Pamela Price announced that she was gonna run again, I heard from so many people who are very moderate and their first response was like, is this a joke? Or what is she thinking? And will there be enough supporters?

But I agree, put it to the voters. Let's let our county, I think our county is only more informed than they were in 2022 and increasingly informed, so we'll be able to see where the chips fall. I'm really curious, and I'm sure many journalists will be watching closely, how the fundraising goes on both sides.

Who's supporting the campaigns? To what level? How does, especially the Price fundraising compared to what it was in her last campaign. Also, Ursula Jones Dickson was appointed after this rigorous process, but seeing how does that campaign go as someone who's not political, and so I think this is gonna be a really interesting time as we head toward that election.

[00:47:45] Louis Goodman: Emilie, I often ask people advice questions. So Emilie, what advice do you have for Ursula in her run this June, and what advice do you have for reporters who are covering the election? 

[00:47:59] Emilie Raguso: Well, I was going to, okay, so for reporters covering the election, I just think it's, it is really important that we all get as, as informed as we can. One of the biggest challenges in covering the former DA was that a lot of statements she made and that her supporters made were not factual. And I think the biggest pitfalls that I saw was newsrooms have been gutted. People are running around doing their best to do their jobs. So there's a lot of parroting of just points that get made in whatever press release it is.

So I think as reporters, we really need to slow down. Try to confirm things, confirm the accuracy of information, especially in political campaigns, and not just rush them out without that level of checking. So I hope we see that, 'cause I think it played a role in Pamela Price being elected, and I think as there was more scrutiny over time, definitely played a role in her being recalled.

I did have a, another thing I'm hoping to see from this DA's Office, if possible, understanding the very challenging landscape around the budget and staffing. I'd love there to be more resources and sort of public information office or unit as that is just because everyone is wearing so many hats and for a long time under Nancy O'Malley, there was one person who had that job who was also carrying cases, and so it's nothing new.

There's a lot of really important work to do. Media isn't always the top one, but I do feel when I've had questions, I get them answered, but it would be always great to see more resources in the public information unit. 

[00:49:51] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: You're right. And boy do I wish I had a budget that would allow for that. And I think that when Ms. O'Malley was in the seat, there was less press around this office. So one person could learn to do this and do it and handle some cases, but now everything's become so political that it really is an ask that like, it may be a budget ask, like it is necessary to have people who know what they're doing to try to provide information to the public.

But when we talk about resources, you're right. We're strapped and financially and just human resources, people, and I think that the best that we can possibly do is. To move toward things that I don't love, like press releases online, things that I would much rather do, press conferences, let people ask me questions, but nobody really has, I don't even think that reporters oftentimes have the patience for that. They sometimes just want it handed to them and assuming there's no agenda with it. They'll take what you give 'em. And to your point, that's the lack of research, the lack of slowdown. Let's dig in, let's do some investigative reporting.

And it doesn't happen as often as it used to. And everybody wants the quick story 'cause they don't wanna be scooped. But if you take your time, then you can actually get a real story that people actually wanna listen to. 

[00:51:18] Louis Goodman: What advice do you have reporters who want to effectively get information out to the public when they're covering your office or your campaign, and what, what advice you would have for a reporter trying to get information from the DA's Office?

[00:51:34] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: I think in my head, or maybe in my heart, maybe not in my head, in my heart, I think I love the way Emilie reports on stories because she generally comes to it with the blank slate and then fill her cup. Right. What I found of recent is there's already a narrative and then people come to you and ask you questions about a narrative of information they've gotten from someplace else, and it's almost as if they formulated an opinion.

I don't think that serves the public. Because I think the public really, we need to be more curious. We need not to be the ignorant electorate, right? We need to make sure that we are being educated about what our options are for candidates and what people really stand for. And so my advice would be to Emilie's point, slow down, do the research, ask the questions, engage in a conversation instead of gotcha media 'cause it never really gets anybody anywhere. People who wanna hear what they want to hear are gonna hear what they wanna hear unless you give them something different, or at least a narrative that is real with questions and answers. And so that would be my advice to reporters and as it relates to information about the campaign, look at what we're doing, look at what the office is doing under the direction of this person who's running for this office, and think about where we were two years ago.

That should speak volumes and if it doesn't, you need to listen harder, look more closely right there. There's information out there, but really just look at where we were and where we are, and just a matter of two years, that year of the recall and this year of us being in office. And I dare you to say that it's not better. 

[00:53:29] Louis Goodman: Ursula, how do we get in touch with the campaign? If somebody wants to look at your campaign information, what's the website that we can go to on that? 

[00:53:39] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: So it really is Ursula Jones Dickson for DA 2026, Google me and you'll be able to pull up information about the campaign there and just Google my name as well. It should come up with my name and reminding people.

It's D-I-C-K-S-O-N, not D-I-X-O-N. If you're looking for me. 

[00:53:58] Louis Goodman: And Emilie, what's the best way to get in touch with you and the Scanner? 

[00:54:03] Emilie Raguso: You can just go to Berkeley Scanner.com and find all my contact info. 

[00:54:08] Louis Goodman: Okay. Ursula, is there anything at all that you wanted to add that we haven't discussed? Anything that you wanted to put here for right now?

[00:54:17] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: Just that, just know that we're gonna create a professional District Attorney's Office that does the work that the community requires us to do, to take care of victims' rights and to make sure our process is fair and impartial. It's gonna take us time to build. We need the time to stabilize, but we're well on our way and we'll continue to do that work.

And I'm here to do it into perpetuity. I'm not here as a placeholder. This is going to be my job into perpetuity until I decide to step away and retire, and I'm young yet, so I'm not ready to do that. 

[00:54:55] Louis Goodman: Emilie, anything that you wanted to bring up or discuss that we haven't touched on? 

[00:55:00] Emilie Raguso: It is really hard to cover a campaign like this, an election like this, because you have one candidate who can say a lot of things about the campaign in the DA's Office, and then you have the sitting DA who, where do we go for those answers? As some of them things get raised about what the office is doing? Can the office respond? Not really, 'cause it's an election question. So I think reporters are in a kind of bind and getting good information out there because sort of the DA's office all the time in general with cases has its hand tied behind its back in terms of public communications because the process is sacrosanct over getting information out.

And so I think it's similar to a campaign in that way, I guess. But it'll just be interesting to see how all of us navigated and make sure we're informed. 

[00:55:56] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: I do think that there's social media information out there and not my favorite way to get news, but clearly other folks favorite ways to get news and I think that you can always reach out to the campaign with questions.

Even reporters can reach out to the campaign with questions about interviews, et cetera, information. So feel free to do that through the website and I will make sure I answer. 

[00:56:21] Louis Goodman: Ursula Jones Dickson, Emilie Raguso. Thanks to both of you so much for joining me again on the Love Thy Lawyer podcast. It's been a pleasure to speak with both of you.

[00:56:33] DA Ursula Jones Dickson: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you both. 

[00:56:36] Emilie Raguso: Thank you both. I really enjoyed it. 

[00:56:37]Louis Goodman: That's it for today's episode of Love Thy Lawyer. If you enjoyed listening, please share it with a friend and follow the podcast. If you have comments or suggestions, send me an email. Take a look at our website at lovethylawyer.com, where you can find all of our episodes, transcripts, photographs and information.

Thanks to my guests, and to Joel Katz for music, Bryan Matheson for technical support, Paul Robert for social media and Tracy Harvey. I'm Louis Goodman.

[00:57:15] Louis Goodman: Well, I just have a technical thing here. Can you guys hear me okay? You can. Okay, we'll cut that out. Uh.