Public Policy
Oakland’s six-month program to provide fundamental public services and housing resources at its first sanctioned homeless encampment is two-thirds complete. Yet with less than two months to go, the city is still left with lots of work to reach its goal.
Evangelina Sanchez came to the United States when she was seven years old. Now she’s a student at California State East Bay, thanks to Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA). DACA is just one of Obama’s orders that President Donald Trump has threatened to overturn before taking office. That threat alone has changed things for Sanchez’s family.
UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital awarded grant for sickle cell initiative.
Despite the gloomy weather, tens of thousands gathered at Madison Park near downtown Oakland on Saturday to participate in one of the three branches of Women’s March Bay Area, a demonstration to support women and human rights. The three Bay Area marches—in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose—are among the more than 600 locally-organized “sister marches” of the Women’s March on Washington, which is now expected to draw as many as half a million participants. The marches are nonpartisan and…
After a day of marches, public speeches and rallies, as night fell and the rain came down, demonstrators gathered once again in downtown Oakland to march in protest of Donald Trump’s inauguration. Earlier in the day, a small group had gathered in front of the Ronald V. Dellums Federal building, and several marches and student gatherings had convened near Frank Ozawa Plaza, where people recited poetry and passed a microphone around to let people express their concerns about the new administration….
Around noontime, as the newly-sworn in President Donald Trump prepared to join the parade that would take him to the White House, a crowd gathered in Frank Ogawa Plaza outside of Oakland City Hall to protest his inauguration. The protest was the second one held downtown on Friday, following a small gathering outside the Ronald V. Dellums Federal Building early in the morning. Afterward, demonstrators had migrated over to the plaza, where groups set up tents, handed out literature and offered…
Two of the Bay Area’s top lawyers often find themselves on opposite sides of high profile police misconduct cases. One is a plaintiff lawyer who often sues police departments, another defends officers in and out of court. Here’s a story of their battle told through a few cases.
Dani Geen was 18 when she was in a severe accident: the car spun violently and was smashed on all four sides. The force of the seatbelt broke all of Geen’s ribs and caused internal abscesses. She came to in an ambulance, panicking from pain and shock, and felt the sharp stab of a needle—the injection of a tranquilizer. Her recovery in the hospital and at home was bolstered by Norco and Percocet, to which she built up a hefty…
For Carmen Garcia, the end of a prison sentence was the beginning of a new set of problems.
“The biggest obstacle for me was continuing to stay in school, because the halfway house wanted me to get a job right away, a full-time job,” she said. “And I remember a case manager said to me, ‘You need to take this job, whatever job they offer you, because now you have a criminal record and you’re not going to be able to get another job. Don’t worry about education, because that’s not going to help you.’”