Crime

Buddha of Oakland

When Dan Stevenson placed a stone Buddha across the street from his house in Oakland’s Eastlake neighborhood, it was out of desperation. “The corner was constantly being filled up with mattress and couches and junk and there was some drug usage, a lot of graffiti, people just standing around doing nothing—just depressing,” said Stevenson.  Stevenson and his wife, Lu, say they are not religious at all, but believe in the power of positive and negative energy, and so decided to…

BART system delayed as police investigate gun report

BART commuters experienced a system-wide delay Thursday morning as the BART Police Department investigated a report of a man with a gun possibly boarding a train. BART spokesperson Alicia Trost said a rider called shortly before 8 a.m., reporting possibly having seen a man with a gun outside the Richmond BART station. The rider thought the man might have gotten on a train at the station. Trost said BART police calculated which train he would have boarded, based on the…

Oakland gets funding to hire 15 new police officers

Oakland has received a $1.87 million grant from the Department of Justice to fund the hiring of 15 new police officers over the next three years. With these officers, the department will be on course to reach its highest level of officer staffing since 2010.

Oaklanders surrender heaps of drugs to feds in Drug Take-Back Day

The sidewalk at Telegraph and 27th Avenue was lined with signs reading, “Got Drugs?” and, “¿Tiene drogas?” The bilingual placards marked the site of the nation’s ninth National Prescription Drug Take-Back Day, where the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration and the Alameda County District Attorney’s office worked with Oakland and three other Alameda County cities on Saturday to take possession of old, unused and unwanted drugs until the DEA could destroy them. Nationally, drug take-backs have collected and destroyed about 4.1…

Oakland to participate in national program to curb violence

In dual news conferences in Oakland and Washington D.C., Congresswoman Barbara Lee and U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder announced Tuesday that Oakland and Richmond have been named by the Justice Department as part of a new national program that Holder called an “all-hands approach to curbing endemic violence” in five U.S. communities with high violent crimes rates. “If we want to reduce violence in our East Bay communities, we must work together,” Lee (D-Oakland) told reporters Tuesday morning, alongside other…