By Tanya Dennis

Victims’ rights are also a priority for Ursula Jones Dickson

“I don’t like it when people say ‘my office.’ It doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the people.”

That philosophy is at the heart of Ursula Jones Dickson’s approach to leading the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office. Asked whether one person can rebuild an office that has experienced years of change, disruption and a massive backlog of cases, she said the answer is ‘yes,’ but only with time, focus and a willingness to change priorities.

“One person can affect policy that changes the office,” Jones Dickson said.

For her, one of the most urgent priorities is gun violence, an issue she says has deeply affected Black communities for generations.

“Gun violence has always been a concern in the Black community,” she said. “We all have a visceral reaction to a helicopter because it often means there has been a chase or gun violence.”

Jones Dickson said gun violence is personal to her because it has hurt both her and her community. “I take it personally,” she said.

She worries that America, and particularly its young people, are becoming desensitized to violence. School shootings and repeated lockdowns are leaving children with experiences previous generations never imagined.

“We can’t act like this isn’t affecting our children,” she said. “When schools become places where shootings take place, they are affected in a different way.”

She believes the community has become dangerously accustomed to guns and violence.

“We have to stop normalizing guns,” she said. “We have so many guns and so many people with guns.”

Perhaps one of the most disturbing changes she sees is the way ordinary disagreements can now become deadly.

“Nobody fights anymore,” she said. “They kill.”

Jones Dickson said the question communities must ask themselves is: “When gun violence becomes a part of the community, how many vigils and how many marches can we stand?”

At the same time, she is determined that victims’ voices will not be lost in the criminal justice system.

“I sit with victims on a regular basis,” she said. “There isn’t a week that goes by that I don’t sit down with a victim’s family and hear them ask why a case has not been charged.”

Victims often need far more than updates about a court case. They need assistance navigating the criminal justice system, counseling, burial assistance and, sometimes, simply someone to sit with them during one of the most painful moments of their lives.

“Victims’ rights have been pushed aside,” Jones Dickson said. “What I want to leave to this office is that victims’ voices will be heard. I don’t care whose toes I step on. Victims will be heard.”

The challenge, however, is enormous. Her legacy is to help victims feel seen and protected.

The office is working through a significant backlog of serious cases while trying to rebuild an experienced, well-trained staff. Jones Dickson said years of disruption, including the impact of COVID and frequent leadership changes, left attorneys needing additional training and contributed to delays.

“There have been three district attorneys in four years,” she said. “Every district attorney wants to build their own culture.”

Her goal is to create a stable office with skilled prosecutors who understand their responsibilities and can move cases through the courts. She emphasized that the work is not simply about winning cases.

“It is our job to prove a case beyond a reasonable doubt,” she said. “Just because law enforcement brings us a case doesn’t mean we can prove it.”

Jones Dickson also believes rebuilding public safety requires rebuilding relationships between law enforcement and the community.

Residents have told her they sometimes see police cars drive through their neighborhoods without officers getting out and speaking to residents.

“When police are in neighborhoods and stop and talk to kids, there is a connection,” she said. “We need more community-based relationships.”

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By Krista Chan, Special to The Post

The legacy of lynchings and racial terror in the American South continues in 2026 in a spate of suspicious deaths of young African Americans across the region. Local authorities have perpetually underinvestigated and even covered up these cases.

The most prominent recent case is that of Nolan Wells, an 18-year-old Black man whose body was found on July 6 on Horn Island, off the Mississippi Gulf Coast, after a Fourth of July trip with three white friends.

The NAACP announced its formal involvement in the case on Aug. 17, joining the legal team representing Wells’ family alongside prominent civil rights attorney Ben Crump.

The family has raised questions about discrepancies in accounts of Wells’ final hours, including why his phone was found with one of the friends rather than with his body. An independent autopsy commissioned by the family found that his “manner of death remained undetermined.”

In what was likely a retaliatory act for speaking up about her son’s death, Wells’ mother, Christine Wonsley, faced anonymous attacks on her nursing license.

In a recent vigil commemorating Wells’ 19th birthday, Rev. Dr. Jamal Harrison Bryant said, “To go from Medgar Evers to Emmett Till, to Nolan Wells, the blood stops here. We came tonight to stop a blood cycle. We are tired of all of these innocent Black bodies being killed.”

In the notorious 1955 case of 14-year-old Emmett Till, Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam were acquitted by an all-white jury after torturing and murdering Till for allegedly whistling at a white woman in a Mississippi grocery store. While Till’s death is well-known for having galvanized the Civil Rights movement, thousands of lynchings of African Americans have gone unreported.

According to the Equal Justice Institute (EJI), 4,084 lynchings of African Americans occurred in the 12 Southern states from 1877 to 1950, and not a single white person was convicted of murder during this period.

The Congressional Black Caucus has also thrown its weight behind the Wells family, sending a letter to U.S. Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel, urging the Department of Justice (DOJ) to launch an independent federal review of the case. This request faces the challenge of a hostile environment towards racial justice at the DOJ.

Under the Trump administration’s attacks on Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI), the DOJ has focused primarily on litigating employers for hiring underrepresented minorities.

Though Nolan Wells’ case has reached headlines today, the deaths of other young African Americans across the South remain under-reported and under-investigated.  Crump is simultaneously handling a portfolio of other cases involving the deaths of young Black men, namely Daniel Erving and Tyler Smith – 18-year-old Black men who died within three months of each other.

Erving of Sachse, Texas, died on April 14 at Lake Ray Hubbard after jumping from a railroad bridge with friends. His body was recovered four days later, and his death was ruled an accidental drowning—a finding his mother disputes. “The autopsy report shows my son had an unobstructed airway, so my son did not drown,” Tameca Erving said. In July, two individuals were arrested and charged with tampering with physical evidence after allegedly discarding Erving’s clothing and cell phone.

Smith of Lexington, Kentucky, died on July 4 after what police described as an accidental self-inflicted gunshot wound. His family has strongly disputed that account. According to a Lexington Police Department citation, the firearm officers recovered did not match the shell casing found at the scene.

A 20-year-old man has been charged with tampering with physical evidence in connection with the shooting. “For 17 days, my sons and I worked tirelessly investigating everything on our own. The police department gave us nothing, absolutely nothing,” Smith’s grandmother said.

Crump has framed all three cases as part of a troubling pattern requiring national attention.

Earlier this month, Tasia Fortune, a 29-year-old Black woman and mother of four, was found hanging from a tree in the backyard of a vacant home in Jackson, Mississippi, on Aug. 3. Her mother, Christy Spivey, has insisted that her daughter did not take her own life.

The county where Fortune’s body was found was the site of 11 known lynchings between 1895 and 1908, and nearby Hinds County saw 34 lynchings between 1835 and 1934. Unfortunately, this terror cannot be relegated to the history books as Fortune’s case follows two other incidents of African Americans being found hanging from trees in Mississippi within a year.

In September 2025, Demartravion “Trey” Reed was found hanging from a tree at Delta State University in Cleveland, Mississippi. On the same day, Cory Zukatis was found hanging from a tree in Vicksburg, Mississippi. Both deaths were ruled as suicides by local authorities.

As of this publication, Fortune’s case is still under investigation by local authorities, and the DOJ and FBI have remained silent about Wells’ case.

Krista Chan is a civic tech professional and Chinese medicine student in Oakland. She writes and organizes around issues of global peace and racial justice.

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