Ursula Jones Dickson became the 31st District Attorney of Alameda County on February 18, 2025, appointed by the Alameda County Board of Supervisors after voters recalled her predecessor, Pamela Price, by a margin of nearly 63 percent in November 2024. Jones Dickson was selected from a group of 15 applicants, bringing with her more than two decades of experience in the county’s own legal system.

In a recent conversation with Diya TV’s Ravi Kapur on “The Public Interest,” Dickson recounted the changes she implemented upon taking the helm. Chief among her early reforms was eliminating charging directives put in place by the previous administration that required prosecutors to navigate multiple layers of supervisory approval before filing charges. Dickson says those directives created a serious bottleneck and a backlog of thousands of cases, many of which had not been touched in years.

“There were charging directives in place that kind of created this bottleneck that created a backlog of thousands of cases,” Dickson said. “We’ve gotten rid of that directive so that lawyers can charge — the ones who have the experience to do so.”

With those directives removed, experienced prosecutors can now file charges directly. The office is actively working through the inherited backlog, and Dickson said her team continues to uncover cases that sat idle throughout the prior administration. “We continue to find cases that have sat for years and have not been touched during the last administration,” she said. “That is again thousands of cases.”

Beyond case management, Dickson described a culture of fear that had taken hold among prosecutors under Price. Attorneys felt the office existed not to serve victims but to assist those charged with crimes, and that doing their jobs aggressively could invite backlash.

“They were scared to do their jobs because there was this vibe around — we’re only there to assist people who are charged with crimes, not the victims of crime,” Dickson said. “So now we are kind of building that morale back in the office.”

That cultural shift came at a staffing cost. Years of low morale drove experienced attorneys out, taking institutional knowledge with them. Dickson said her office has rehired 13 to 14 of those former prosecutors and is continuing to rebuild. “We lost a lot of our institutional knowledge — people left the office,” she said. “We’ve hired 13 or 14 of those people back, still trying to build the foundation.”

A training gap compounds the challenge. Younger lawyers who came up during the COVID era had fewer opportunities for courtroom repetition, and the prior administration’s reluctance to take cases to trial made that gap worse. “We lost about five years of repetition for our lawyers,” Dickson said.

Her term as appointed DA runs through 2026, when an election will be held to fill the remainder of the term ending in 2028. Price and attorney Gopal Krishnan are challenging her for the post.

Despite the scope of the problems, Dickson said her office is not deterred. “There are many challenges that we’re experiencing, but we’re up to the challenge.”