Hot door knobs, swinging paint cans and pet Tarantula spiders may have defended the young Kevin McAllister against two burglars in “Home Alone,” but boobytraps may not be enough to protect your belongings during the holidays, when some kinds of crime typically increase.
Half of Tuesday’s three-hour Public Safety Committee meeting at Oakland City Hall addressed November’s fatal officer-involved shooting of an unarmed East Oakland man. Oakland Police Department Chief Anthony Batts announced he has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigations to open a federal civil-rights investigation to determine whether the OPD officers wrongly used lethal force.
On Friday, a state appeals court panel in San Francisco ruled that Oakland did not misspend millions of dollars generated from Measure Y, a 2004 police staffing parcel tax.
When voters passed Measure BB in November, Oakland residents may have thought they were helping resolve the Oakland Police Department’s funding and staffing woes. But with the new year around the corner and a city budget still in crisis, Oakland officials and residents warn that the effects of the measure’s passage are more complex than that—and could end up causing more harm than good to a city recently ranked the fifth most dangerous in the nation.
On Thursday afternoon, the announcement that court hearings regarding the proposed Fruitvale gang injunction would be delayed did not stop approximately 30 demonstrators outside the office of the Alameda County Administrator from demanding an alternative measure to reduce gang violence in their neighborhoods.
Bike bells chimed as voices shouted “Bike for justice!” on the streets of Oakland’s Fruitvale and San Antonio neighborhoods late Tuesday evening. A group of 30 community activists toured the streets—lined with taco stands, vedura y fruta mercados, liquor stores and auto body shops—calling people inside stores and at bus stops to join them in opposing what could be the city’s second gang injunction.
It’s the little things Joseph Riley remembers, like his mother’s homemade rocky road candy, when another holiday season takes the stage. The candy remains a distant taste of childhood, Riley’s more recent holiday memories are composed of long lines out a shelter door, paper plates filled with turkey and trimmings, and finally Riley returning home, wherever home is that year, alone.
Currently, the OPD has 324 officers assigned as 911 call respondents, five crime reduction teams and two traffic unit teams. But to fulfill Measure BB requirements, Batts announced that OPD is moving officers back into the 75 public safety officer (PSO) positions starting in January.
A Richmond man was shot to death Tuesday in front of a cross outside East Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church, the same day church officials announced that Allen Temple had been awarded two-year grant to combat violence in the city.
It was barely 3 p.m. at Hoover Elementary School in West Oakland, and the strawberries at the Tuesday farmers’ market were almost sold out. Hoover is just one of 25 schools part of “Oakland Fresh,” a recent OUSD effort aimed at providing fresh, locally grown organic produce for parents to purchase when they pick their students up from school.
At nighttime along Oakland’s International Boulevard, dozens of teenage girls are working the track—and there’s nothing athletic about it. “The Track” is the street nickname for the epicenter of underage prostitution in Oakland, where girls well under the age of eighteen strut down the street in platform heels and mini dresses while predatory pimps wait in cars around the corner.
Neighbors and friends of an unarmed East Oakland barber who was killed by Oakland Police Monday night reacted angrily today to the police account of the shooting. Police said the officers were responding to a domestic dispute call between Jones, who was on parole for a firearms offense, and a woman at a nearby laundromat on Bancroft Avenue.
A domestic dispute between a man and woman in East Oakland last night ended with one suspect shot and killed from service pistols fired by officers at the scene.
After an election season filled with debate over Oakland’s public safety funding woes, voters passed Measure BB Tuesday by a two-thirds majority. The measure’s approval means the city will continue collecting parking and property taxes for police, fire and violence prevention programs.
As Oakland awaits this Friday’s sentencing of Johannes Mehserle, civic leaders and residents alike are working together to keep the city’s reaction peaceful. The former BART police officer was convicted in July of involuntary manslaughter in the January, 2009, shooting death of Oscar Grant. In the wake of Grant’s death, as well as of Mehserle’s conviction this summer, protests in downtown Oakland turned violent.
Kate Hoffman spent the day as a poll worker at the Grand Lake Gardens polling station in Oakland’s Grand Lake neighborhood. As the final voters filed in Tuesday evening, Hoffman spoke about how the day went.