Safety
Tuesday’s City Council took up issues including taxi medallion fees, the controversial Astro Park dog play area, and the recent shooting at February’s Art Murmur event, but all three issues were ultimately tabled.
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.
On a barren West Oakland corner, amongst homes where the windows and front yards are gated and dead-bolted protectively from the world outside, now stands a “Tree of Life” — the Attitudinal Healing Connection’s debut traveling mural project. The mural and all seven of its transportable panels were unveiled Thursday afternoon at the West Oakland Youth Center’s construction site on Market Street. Construction on the facility, currently a skeleton of drywall, scaffolding and timber, isn’t expected to be complete until…
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.
Oakland’s new city council members, who were inaugurated at a ceremony at City Hall Monday, set the stage for the elected body’s biggest policy focus of the next four years—public safety. While it’s no secret that crime is Oakland’s number one problem, with the city’s homicide rate reaching 131 on the last day of 2012, councilmembers old and new declared Monday that the council should formally proclaim that combating crime the city’s first priority. That means more than just acknowledging…
Nearly 200 people gathered at a North Oakland church Monday to remember Oakland’s homicide victims in 2012. On New Year’s Eve, the last day of the year, the number of killings had reached 131—a five-year high.
Police Chief Howard Jordan announced Thursday afternoon that Oakland is hiring police consultant William Bratton, a former Los Angeles police chief who also served as police commissioner in both New York and Boston, to combat what Jordan called an “unacceptable” crime rate under his watch. As the city’s new police consultant, Bratton is charged with helping Oakland develop programs to target gang activity, work with the community to build trust, and reduce violence, including using statistical data to prevent crimes….