Crime
On paper, Tuesday night’s city council meeting was scheduled to be a quiet evening spent tying up loose legislative ends. But the meeting that took place was anything but quiet. With yells and chants, protesters from local activist group By Any Means Necessary (BAMN) brought the meeting to a halt during the open forum segment in an effort to call attention to the recent shooting death of Derrick Jones.
At a press conference held Monday afternoon in the lobby of Oakland’s police headquarters, Deputy Chief Eric Breshears said that the Oakland Police Department is significantly understaffed, a situation he expects to worsen in the new year. The conference followed the publication of a Matier & Ross column in the San Francisco Chronicle earlier that day reporting dire staffing figures.
Each year, 24,000 novels, dictionaries and books of poetry are packaged and shipped around the country by volunteers of the Berkeley-based Prisoners Literature Project. For nearly 30 years, the volunteer-run organization has provided books to prisoners in an effort to nurture rehabilitation and encourage education among this sometimes-forgotten population of society.
On Thursday afternoon, the announcement that court hearings regarding the proposed Fruitvale gang injunction would be delayed did not stop approximately 30 demonstrators outside the office of the Alameda County Administrator from demanding an alternative measure to reduce gang violence in their neighborhoods.
Oakland police have arrested a man in conjunction with a shooting that took place last night, December 1st, near the 1500 block of Madison Street.
Bike bells chimed as voices shouted “Bike for justice!” on the streets of Oakland’s Fruitvale and San Antonio neighborhoods late Tuesday evening. A group of 30 community activists toured the streets—lined with taco stands, vedura y fruta mercados, liquor stores and auto body shops—calling people inside stores and at bus stops to join them in opposing what could be the city’s second gang injunction.
On Monday, the Congressional Quarterly (CQ) Press released its annual City Crime Rate Rankings list, which ranks cities from highest number of crimes reported to lowest. Little has changed since last year—the top five remain the same—and Oakland, California, is still one of them. The good news, sort of, is that Oakland has dropped out of third place and is now No. 5.
Currently, the OPD has 324 officers assigned as 911 call respondents, five crime reduction teams and two traffic unit teams. But to fulfill Measure BB requirements, Batts announced that OPD is moving officers back into the 75 public safety officer (PSO) positions starting in January.
A Richmond man was shot to death Tuesday in front of a cross outside East Oakland’s Allen Temple Baptist Church, the same day church officials announced that Allen Temple had been awarded two-year grant to combat violence in the city.