Community
After Mayor Jean Quan’s first public comments Wednesday on the police raids of the Occupy Oakland encampments the day before, protesters returned to Frank Ogawa Plaza and gathered a nighttime standing-room only crowd into a “general assembly” meeting outside City Hall. A long crowd discussion led to a late–night vote urging a citywide general strike Nov. 2.
The aftermath of Tuesday’s Occupy Oakland eviction escalated into a street confrontation in the city’s downtown, with tear gas and multiple arrests. The story unfolds in this video by Dylan Bergeson and Byrhonda Lyons.
Roughly one hundred teachers, parents and children marched Wednesday afternoon in protest of the Oakland school board’s decision to close five elementary schools next year, walking from Mosswood Park to the Oakland Tech campus, where the school board meeting and scheduled vote on the closures was about to start.
On Sunday, Councilmembers Pat Kernighan (District 2) and Libby Schaaf (District 4) hosted a lecture by crime expert Franklin Zimring about New York City’s crime reduction successes and how Oakland could implement the same strategies to tackle crime.
Around 4:30 am Tuesday, police raided the Occupy Oakland camp in front of City Hall that was created on October 10 and grew in size to over 100 protesters and tents. This is a slide show of the best photographs that Oakland North reporters took throughout the course of the day as events unfolded.
Vowing to reoccupy Frank Ogawa Plaza, hundreds of Occupy Oakland protestors marched through the streets of downtown Oakland late Tuesday afternoon.
This video was shot by John Osborn of Mission Local during the initial part of the police raid on the Occupy Oakland campsite in downtown Oakland, from around 4:30 am to 6:30 am Tuesday morning.
The Oakland Unified School District spent a week in October hosting meetings at each public schools recommended for closure: Lakeview, Marshall, Maxwell Park, Lazear and Santa Fe Elementary Schools. These meetings were a chance for parents, teachers, students and concerned community members to ask questions about what their future might look like.
The Oakland Unified School District’s controversial proposal to close five elementary schools this fall, and more in coming years, follows a multi-year program of encouraging small small schools–subdividing bigger facilities into multiple smaller ones, each with fewer students and a more intimate climate. But funding and enrollment changes have pushed the district to what promises to be an emotional meeting and vote Wednesday night.