Safety
Listen to how Oakland residents spent a day surveying conditions of the city’s parks and other recreational areas, many of which have fallen into disarray.
Today would have been Nicholas Rotolo’s 24th birthday. Rotolo, a Berkeley High School student and club hockey player, stood a brawny 6’2″ tall, weighed 220 pounds, and had no apparent health issues. But on February 5, 2004, the 17-year-old suddenly collapsed on the rink at Sharks Ice in San Jose while competing in an exhibition for his San Jose Junior Sharks team.
Members of the Survivors Network of those Abused by Priests (SNAP), a national support group for victims of sexual abuse by religious authority figures, came together Tuesday outside the Cathedral of Christ the Light in support of a newly filed sexual battery and negligence lawsuit against Father Stephen Kiesle and the Diocese of Oakland.
Laughter, prayer, song and tears marked Saturday night’s third annual PURPLE Fundraising Gala for the families and friends of those who have lost their lives to violence. The event, organized by the Oakland-based advocacy group 1,000 Mothers to Prevent Violence, recognized two Oakland police investigators and a retired schoolteacher for having gone “beyond the call of duty to bring healing to surviving families.”
McCullum Youth Court, a student-run justice system in Oakland for first-time middle and high school-age offenders, turns 17 this Friday. That makes it older than many of the young people who serve as its lawyers, bailiffs, and clerks. But instead of a birthday party, Youth Court organizers are scrambling to invite as many people as possible to a different type of event—a fundraiser.
Police chief Anthony Batts did his best to positively portray the state of the city’s law enforcement capacity in a presentation of the Oakland Police Department’s strategic plan at Tuesday night’s city council meeting, but it was a difficult task.
With a rash of non-violent crimes occurring shortly after the layoff of 80 Oakland police officers—and after the police department changed its strategy for handling non-emergency crimes—some Upper Rockridge and Montclair residents have been calling another city’s police department for help: Piedmont’s.
While the rest of the country memorialized the September 11 attacks and debated one Florida pastor’s threats to publicly burn the Quran, Joe Weston, owner of Temescal’s Heartwalker Studio, sought to create peace in his own small way. At sundown on the eve of the 9th anniversary of September 11, a diverse group of Oaklanders joined together to say their ecumenical prayers for peace, and they didn’t stop until the next day.
At a Monday morning press conference, 12 community activists from anti-violence, religious and crime prevention groups backed Council Member and mayoral candidate Jean Quan in promoting Measure BB, a public safety measure that will appear on the November city ballot.