Crime
Oaksterdam University, a center that offers training for workers in the marijuana industry, and several of the organization’s related buildings were raided Monday morning by federal agents. According to Dale Sky Jones, Oaksterdam University’s executive chancellor, federal agents raided five Oaksterdam-related locations around 8 am, including the home of founder Richard Lee and the organization’s downtown dispensary, storage unit, school, and the former site of the Blue Sky coffee shop, the last four of which are located on Broadway in…
On March 5, the highest-ranking woman in San Jose’s fire department, Teresa Deloach-Reed, replaced Oakland’s interim fire chief, Mark Hoffman. She became the first black woman to lead a major fire department in the United States. Oakland’s Fire Department ratio for women to men is more than three times the national average.
A discussion about Measure Y funds developed into a debate about Mayor Jean Quan’s “100 block” public safety plan at the Oakland City Council meeting Tuesday night.
In 2011, there were 103 reported homicides in Oakland. Most of the victims were young black males who were killed with firearms in East and West Oakland. This is a continuation of a pattern in Oakland that has been the case for years and is closely tied to the economic and social realities of young people living in the city’s poorest areas.
Howard Jordan, a longtime Oakland police officer, and former San Jose assistant fire chief Teresa Jordan, were officially named to the top posts in their departments at a ceremony at the city hall rotunda building on Thursday.
As the number of homeless and illegal boat dwellers has increased, they say, so has a chronic wave of thefts that has kept marinas on both sides of the Oakland estuary under siege. Meanwhile, they complain, the illegal estuary dwellers are causing a host of environmental problems by disposing of sewage in the water or abandoning their boats, which can leach toxic substances as they disintegrate.
Twenty-five years ago, Norma Rodriguez went to a training session for the Child Assault Prevention Training Center. When she agreed to participate in the session, she didn’t realize that two weeks of learning how to prevent and recognize child abuse would change her life. She didn’t know that intense training would soon become her career.
The Oakland Police Department has released surveillance photos from an incident early Friday morning in which a man wearing a ski mask entered the CVS drugstore at 51st Street and Broadway and demanded to speak to the manager.
A SWAT team is preparing to search inside the CVS drugstore at Pleasant Valley Avenue and Broadway in the hunt for a suspect who attempted to rob the store early Friday morning.