Safety
Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention narrowly avoided a multi-million dollar budget cut in an 11th-hour reprieve by the City Council. Because of a looming $360 million budget shortfall, the cityhad proposed cutting an estimated $5.7 million from the DVP in its 2023-2024 budget. This reduction would have forced the DVP to cut funding from several violence prevention organizations that offer community-building strategies, including juvenile justice reform, youth leadership training, legal literacy training, and voter awareness. With a unanimous vote Sept….
Shots were fired Tuesday morning on the Skyline High School campus, prompting a lockdown and leading to two arrests. No one was injured in the shooting, which happened around 11:20 a.m. Skyline will be closed Wednesday while police investigate the shooting. At a news conference Tuesday afternoon, Oakland police Capt. Jake Bassett said police recovered a handgun and other evidence on campus. He would not say where on campus the shooting occurred, how many shots were fired or if any…
Oakland Chinatown is one of the communities deeply bothered by illegal dumping, even though the city has seen a nearly six-fold increase in the quantity of trash cleared from its streets in the past seven years. Liao Shen, an employee at D&K Market in Chinatown, said the store pays about $800 a month for trash services and then has to deal with trash overflow from illegal dumpers. “It is very frequent,” said Shen. “It happens all the time.” Businesses in…
Record rainfall last winter mitigated California’s severe drought and brought a slow start to fire season. But the wet weather hasn’t reduced the threat. The heavy downpours that bombarded the Bay Area and the relatively cool weather that followed kept vegetation from drying out in the spring and early summer. But as the summer wears on, that vegetation will become fuel for fires, said Ranyee Chiang, director of the Meteorology and Measurement Division at Bay Area Air Quality Management District. …
Oakland City Council passed an ordinance Tuesday making it a crime to organize, facilitate or promote sideshows. The ordinance passed with six votes — councilmembers Kevin Jenkins and Janani Ramachandran were absent. Councilmember Noel Gallo originally proposed a stricter ordinance in December that would also have made it a crime to watch a sideshow, but that proposal was rejected and revised. The revisions remove any mention of spectators and “bystander participants.” The city has sought to deter people from participating…
After alarming videos from Oakland sideshows were posted recently on social media, the Public Safety Committee agreed Tuesday to put a proposal for stricter sideshow penalties on next Tuesday’s City Council agenda. In December, the council rejected councilmember Noel Gallo’s proposed ordinance that would penalize organizers and bystander participants in the shows. The council also rejected Gallo’s modifications to the proposal that focused on “organizers and facilitators” of sideshows. His latest proposal would make being an organizer or a facilitator…
It’s 5 a.m. and the seagulls are perched on top of Da Feng Feng Seafood in Chinatown, screeching. “They’re here for the trash,” Sakhone Lasaphangthong says, pointing with blue medical gloves to an overturned garbage can. Near the littered food scraps are a giant TV and mattress on the sidewalk. Sakhone snaps a photo that he sends to SeeClickFix, the city’s citizen reporting app for illegal dumping. Last year, he sent over 200 of those photos. As a community ambassador…
Oakland has been trying to curb sideshows for years and even celebrated a “sideshow-free” summer in 2010, but the illegal street car shows haven’t gone away, and City Council seems to be at a loss on how to restrain them. The Oakland sideshow saga witnessed a stunning escalation last month as footage of a big rig participating in an event went viral on social media. In a frenzied incident near Keller Avenue and Mountain Boulevard, the rig was caught on…
It was quiet in Oakland Chinatown at 3 a.m. on Thursday, March 23. The last two eateries on Eighth Street — Lounge Chinatown and New Gold Medal Restaurant — were wrapping up business for the day. At a quarter past 3, workers at both restaurants locked glass doors and then iron gates. At Lounge Chinatown, wooden doors added to the security. But it wasn’t enough. Ten minutes later, as the street became darker and quieter, burglars broke into the two…