Crime
Twelve years ago, the arrest of four police officers known as the “Riders” who were accused of planting evidence and making false arrests, shocked Oakland residents and prompted a civil lawsuit against the city. Now, the long legal process that the case set in motion is reaching its final stages.
The Oakland Police Department is seeking information about a woman who was found clinging to rocks in the Oakland Estuary on Thursday morning and was pronounced dead later at a local hospital. According to OPD spokesperson Johnna Watson, a woman described as African American, with brown eyes and brown hair, 5-foot-7, 200 pounds and between the age of 30 and 40, was found by a security officer at the 100 block of Clay Street at 8:15 am. Police and medical…
This Thursday and Friday, Oakland police volunteers will provide a valuable service to holiday shoppers with cars parked at the West Oakland BART station from 5 pm to 9 pm. They’ll escort people from the station to their vehicles, making the task of trekking through the dark laden with holiday goodies less daunting.
CERI is a non-profit organization that provides mental health and social services to refugee and immigrant families, mostly Cambodians. All of the girls in its support group have parents who are Cambodian refugees, and they all live in high crime neighborhoods in the East Bay. Many of them know other girls—friends, former classmates—who have become involved in “the life,” a term for the underground world of prostitution.
In October, the U.S. Department of Justice announced a crackdown on medical marijuana facilities. The four U.S. Attorneys for California began sending out eviction notices to various medical marijuana dispensaries throughout the state.
The parents of Hiram Lawrence, the one-year old critically wounded in a West Oakland shooting last week, said Wednesday that their comatose son is “still fighting,” and pleaded for more time to see whether he might regain consciousness.
The Oakland Police Department welcomed ten new officers Monday morning, for the first time since the 2008 layoffs, after being awarded $10 million dollars in funding from the U.S. Department of Justice.
A man police believe was responsible for the November 10 shooting death at Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland near what was then the Occupy Oakland encampment has been arrested and charged with murder, according to a bulletin released Friday afternoon by Oakland Police Department spokesperson Cynthia Perkins.
Although tradition in some Oakland and other Bay Area African American communities calls for honoring the dead with burial funerals, cremation is gaining popularity as a simpler, less expensive alternative in financial hard times.