Politics
Members of local police accountability and activist groups say that conflicts of interest, unaccountable staff and lack of transparency prevent the Oakland Police Commission from being able to police the police.
Some Oakland experts wonder if AB 392, a new law that will limit police use of lethal force, can actually save lives.
Last Tuesday, the Oakland City Council passed a resolution to provide $1.2 million in funding for the Oakland Unified School District’s (OUSD) restorative justice program, foster youth case manager positions, and school libraries. All three programs were at risk of enacting widespread layoffs or reductions to the services they provide following the Oakland school board’s vote last month to cut about $22 million from the district’s budget. When introducing the resolution, Council President Rebecca Kaplan (at-large) highlighted how each of…
It’s Friday night at 6501 Telegraph Avenue in Oakland. A group of young people in their late twenties are standing in front of a white building. “Must be a bar,” we say to each other. Our night was supposed to start in a bar across the street, but some missing dollar bills for an entrance fee that we mistakenly assumed we could pay with a card made us leave before we’d even had a drink. So we venture over the…
A man sat on a bench in the Oakland Main Library branch on a recent overcast Monday and asked for the time. It was 5:34 p.m. “What time do they close?” he asked. The branch used to close at 5:30 p.m on Mondays—but as of April 1, it closes at 8 p.m. The man settled into the bench and said he might stick around longer. For the first time in 15 years, Oakland Public Library staffers have extended their hours…
Oakland’s Vietnamese community hopes to memorialize their homeland and attract tourists to a little enclave of businesses in East Oakland with the creation of a Business Improvement District called “Little Saigon.”
Organizers said the main objective of the event was to amplify the voices of people most affected by poverty, and to challenge the notion that the poor are to be blamed for their poverty.
While the teachers’ strike ended weeks ago, the Oakland Unified School District’s financial troubles are far from over. Less than 24 hours after the strike, on March 4, the school board narrowly voted to cut $22 million dollars from next year’s budget. The move was to keep the district from financial ruin, but school libraries are among the programs being affected by the cuts. We focused on the story of just one library at Frick Impact Academy in East Oakland…
The City of Oakland is working to provide safe sites for homeless living in their RVs and more sanitation services at encampments in an effort to help address the city’s homeless crisis.