GETTING TO KNOW
Board President
Dorian Peters Tell us about yourself. I am an attorney and a police officer. I work for the City of El Cerrito as a Detective assigned to the Investigation Bureau of the Police Department. Prior to my police work, I worked as a criminal attorney for about 10 years, both as a prosecutor and a criminal defense attorney. I am a State Bar certified specialist in criminal law. I have been an involved member of the Contra Costa County Bar Association since 2012. I was born and raised mostly in Berkeley, but I moved from place to place as a young person, never staying in one place for more than a couple of years. I have lived in every city along the BART red line (Emeryville, Oakland, Berkeley, Albany, El Cerrito, and Richmond). I attended Berkeley High School, which I enjoyed despite mostly neglecting to do my schoolwork. I worked on the school newspaper, the Berkeley High Jacket, where I wrote for and edited the news section of the paper. This experience helped me learn to take great pride in my work. It was one thing for a homework assignment to have a typo because only 4
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the teacher saw it. But articles with my byline that all my friends and peers were reading had to be perfect. Working on my school paper also taught me the power of the pen. Twenty years ago, our school paper published a story where we revealed that a large Berkeley landlord was bringing women from overseas to Berkeley and forcing them into indentured servitude. That landlord was charged by the U.S. Attorney’s Office and sentenced to 8 years in prison. Our high school paper won the Society of Professional Journalists “Journalist of the Year” award – becoming the first non-professional winner of the award. I attended the University of California, Berkeley where I double majored in Political Science and Mass Communications. Between my sophomore and junior year, I spent a summer at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana to conduct academic research on international terrorism. Between my junior and senior years, I spent the summer living in Washington DC, where I worked for Congresswoman Barbara Lee as a congressional intern.
Why did you attend law school and become an attorney? When I was growing up, my mother struggled. Although she has never practiced law, she attended and graduated from Berkeley Law. I saw my mother advocate for us in numerous situations, especially in landlord-tenant issues. Her legal knowledge allowed her to push back against people who had more power and more money. In several cases, her knowledge literally kept a roof over our heads. I began to see knowing the law as knowing the rules of a game. How do you win the game if you do not know the rules? It became crystal clear that people who knew the law would be able to achieve better outcomes than people who did not, even in similar situations. While at Berkeley High School, I took an American Government class that had a Street Law component. Street Law was a program where a law student from Berkeley Law taught students the basic of law as it might apply to them. Is it against the law to cut school? (yes) Do I have to stop when the police try to talk to me? (it depends) Is it illegal to download MP3 files using Napster? (yes)
