A protest held Monday, April 10 in front of the Alameda County Courthouse in Oakland, California, demanded that Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Price decide the charges against three individuals in the shooting death of Jasper Wu. Wu was 23 months old when the car he was riding in with his parents was caught between two gangs exchanging gunfire in November 2021.
Although nowhere near the notoriety level of former San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin or current Los Angeles DA George Gascón, Price is cut from the same progressive cloth. In early March 2023, Price circulated proposed guidelines that would eliminate enhancements to criminal charges, meaning that in a criminal charge, the DA office would not add additional elements such as gang membership or whether the accused used a gun during the act to the original complaint.
The enhancements question comes into play in the Wu case as Price’s predecessor included gun charges and gang conspiracy enhancements that Price’s proposed guidelines would remove. Wu’s parents have met with Price, and are unconvinced that Price will properly prosecute the case:
When ABC7 News anchor Dion Lim sat down with An Wu and her husband one month ago, they expressed concerns over Price’s new guidelines, outlined in an internal district attorney’s office email not allowing prosecutors to “file or require defendants’ plea to sentencing enhancements.”
Those worries were made tenfold this week after Price met with the Wu family on Tuesday afternoon.
An Wu spoke through an interpreter who said, “She still worries it won’t be the full extent of sentencing.” And continued to say, “I cannot stop worrying about the possibility of her (Price) not pursuing the maximum penalty to the three suspects and bringing justice.”
Price’s relationship with the media and the AAPI community has been noticeably prickly.
Lim also obtained a series of emails, which Price sent to members of the Asian American community and county supervisors. In one, she claims “certain vocal members of the local Chinese community and media including reporter Dion Lim… misled the public.”
In another email one week later, Price addresses “Chinese communities” calling many “misinformed” and blamed for “spreading misinformation.”
It’s something that did not sit well with An Wu. “I don’t think we are, or the Chinese Community… we were not misinformed.”
Price routinely avoids requests for media interviews, instead preferring to make unchallenged statements via Twitter.
A statement from Alameda County District Attorney Pamela Y. Price on the Jasper Wu case. pic.twitter.com/MWkXwLikGj
— AlCo DA's Office (@AlamedaCountyDA) April 6, 2023
Her statement is astonishing.
Let’s talk about the Jasper Wu case.
Anytime a family loses a child or a loved one, it is a huge and terrible tragedy. Nothing will be able to take away that horrible pain.
I met with Jasper Wu’s family this week and told them those words. There’s nothing that our justice system can do that will relieve or remove the pain of losing their child. Nothing.
Now while I can’t talk about the details of this case, I want to clear the record. I assured the parents of Jasper Wu that the men we believe are responsible for his death are charged with very serious crimes, and they will be held accountable.
We have not made any decisions about what charges to pursue or what not to pursue. We are still reviewing the case.
While we cannot ever make amends for the death of their child, what we can do is make sure that this does not happen to another family like this. Unfortunately, tragedies like this have happened far too often on Bay Area highways. In 2022 alone, shots were fired on the highway 154 times across the Bay Area.
This particular tragedy is being used by people with a political agenda to divide our diverse community. The kind of racist messages that my office has received and directed at me personally is unprecedented.
Our diversity is our strength. Those who claim that race has somehow influenced the prosecution of this case are wrong, and they are making a painful situation more painful for the family and our community.
I have dedicated my life to advancing the values of Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Those values do not include racism. My office is committed to doing our part to administer justice with a vivid understanding of the need to root out racism in our criminal justice system.
It does take some serious chutzpah (or profane variation thereof) to make a toddler’s murder all about you, but Price has managed.
This barely-disguised hostility toward the AAPI community is nothing new. It is emblematic of a mindset where, for example, in school the goal is not the reality of equality through education but the myth of equity through eradicating what is earned through hard work, replacing it with the soft bigotry of low expectations invariably leading to a hard landing from high places unachieved by accomplishment. In today’s America, when it comes to race relations, yellow is the new white.
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