Crime
With a price tag of at least $100,000 and the lead investigator having previous ties to Oakland, some critics are wondering whether the city’s newly-formed independent investigation team will be effective in figuring out just what happened between police and Occupy Oakland protesters.
When Roger Kiel allowed his daughter Shanice, 19, to attend a tattoo party in San Leandro this October, he did not expect the early morning call telling him that his daughter had been killed after two gunmen opened fire on her vehicle. Three of the six passengers were killed, including Shanice, who died almost instantly from a gunshot wound to the heart. One suspect has yet to be identified but the other gunman was arrested in Oakland days after the shooting….
Nearly two months after the first major confrontation between police and Occupy Oakland protesters, when downtown Oakland was blanketed with tear gas, city officials have commissioned an independent team of law enforcement experts to investigate how police handled their interactions with protesters.
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.