Police
On a Saturday afternoon in July, 2011, Kenneth Harding Jr., 19, lay stomach down in his own blood, fighting for his life on the corner of 3rd Street and Palou Avenue in the heart of the Bay View Hunters Point neighborhood in San Francisco. Some say San Francisco police officers shot Harding after he allegedly evaded his transit fare on the T-line of San Francisco’s Muni system, and then ran from police. The San Francisco Police Department contends that Harding shot…
Oakland’s hired the crime consultants and approved the $250,000 bill, setting in motion the plan to bring in six law enforcement experts—including former Los Angeles top cop William Bratton—as the city’s latest attempt to curb its rising violent crime rate.
Nearly a week after the post-First Friday festival shooting that killed 18-year-old Kiante Campbell and wounded 3 others, event organizers say they’re waiting for a cue from the city about how to proceed. City of Oakland officials have called a meeting with the festival’s key stakeholders for Thursday to examine ways to keep future events safe. The art festival that takes over swaths of downtown Oakland on the first Friday of each month started as a humble gallery walk in…
Federal district court judge Thelton Henderson is one of the biggest names in Oakland right now, as the city waits to see who he will appoint to take over parts of the city’s police department as part of an infamous 13-year legal battle that nearly thrust the Oakland Police Department into federal control. Henderson, a federal judge in the Northern district court of California, has presided over the case for a decade, nearly since its beginning, when the city settled…
The City Council on Tuesday night voted in a slew of programs aimed at reducing violent crime in Oakland, including hiring a police consulting firm for $250,000, contracting with the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, hiring 20 civilians to assist police, and funding a third police academy in two years.
In the wake of recent mass shootings—including one in December at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, which took 26 lives, and one in late July at an Aurora, Colorado movie theater, which left 12 dead—an East Bay politician is pushing for new state restrictions on the sale of ammunition in California. The move has received widespread support from city and school officials in cities like Oakland and Richmond, which struggle with high rates of violent crime.
Police Chief Howard Jordan and Mayor Jean Quan held a press conference Monday afternoon to condemn the recent spate of violence that resulted in four homicides in Oakland last Friday.
At a press conference Wednesday morning, the Oakland Museum of California announced the theft of a historical quartz and gold-encrusted jewel box from its Gallery of California History. The burglary, which occurred early Monday, is the second the museum has recently experienced; in the early morning hours between November 12 and 13, gold nuggets were stolen from the same collection.
An open forum Monday night at Homeroom in North Oakland drew nearly a hundred concerned residents who packed into the restaurant and onto the surrounding sidewalks to discuss the Temescal area’s recent surge in crime.