Politics
After studying a recent New York Times interactive that offered readers a way to try different cuts and tax increases to decrease the national budget deficit, Oakland North decided to do the same—but on a smaller scale, focusing only on Oakland. Our interactive gives Oaklanders a way to try grappling with the city’s budget deficit themselves.
Half of Tuesday’s three-hour Public Safety Committee meeting at Oakland City Hall addressed November’s fatal officer-involved shooting of an unarmed East Oakland man. Oakland Police Department Chief Anthony Batts announced he has asked the Federal Bureau of Investigations to open a federal civil-rights investigation to determine whether the OPD officers wrongly used lethal force.
One of the City of Oakland’s goals is to become a model green city, according to its sustainability program. For the past year and a half, the city has been hashing out an Energy and Climate Action Plan (ECAP) to identify and prioritize what it can do to lower Oakland’s greenhouse gas emissions and reduce energy use.
On Friday, a state appeals court panel in San Francisco ruled that Oakland did not misspend millions of dollars generated from Measure Y, a 2004 police staffing parcel tax.
On Sunday, December 5, Oakland North reporters sat down with mayor-elect Jean Quan at World Ground Café in the Laurel district. We asked Quan about her transition into the city’s executive office, and what she’ll do at the start of her term. Click through to see the video and a transcript.
Ever since then-BART police officer Johannes Mehserle fatally shot Oscar Grant on the platform of its Fruitvale station nearly two years ago, BART—and particularly its police force—has struggled to rebuild its relationship with the communities it serves. New BART Police Chief Kenton Rainey says he’s the man for the job.
When voters passed Measure BB in November, Oakland residents may have thought they were helping resolve the Oakland Police Department’s funding and staffing woes. But with the new year around the corner and a city budget still in crisis, Oakland officials and residents warn that the effects of the measure’s passage are more complex than that—and could end up causing more harm than good to a city recently ranked the fifth most dangerous in the nation.
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.