Safety
There were homemade brownies and ginger cookies at the town hall meeting Wednesday, where people had gathered to meet and ask questions of Tony Smith, the new superintendent of Oakland schools. School Board Director Jody London, who baked the goodies, had set up the event and welcomed the overflowing room of parents, administrators and district employees. When Smith took the floor he said he saw his job as “the most wonderful, incredible opportunity,” and though he was honest about the…
Officers aboard a Richmond train scanned for safety violations Wednesday as police teams stood by to issue citations. Story by Mary Flynn/Oakland North.
After a recent spate of crime, Golden Gate neighbors refused to retreat into their homes, instead walking the area’s streets in a show of solidarity. But fighting a neighborhood crime problem isn’t always easy.
A small wildfire in the Oakland Hills was contained by fire crews Tuesday afternoon, when the Bay Area also got a rare tsunami advisory from the National Weather Service. But damage from the two natural not-quite-disasters is thought to be minimal.
Oakland Police announced today that they had discovered four adult marijuana plants, small bags of marijuana, and eleven firearms, including assault weapons, at an apartment on Lakeshore Avenue. Oakland police officer Deandre Vantree arrived at the residence after OPD was alerted by a phone call reporting the sound of gunfire, police spokesman Jeff Thomason told reporters this afternoon. According to Thomason, a witness outside the apartment told police that gunfire broke a second-story window around 9:30 AM. Thomason said that after…
17-year old Desiree Davis had spent her childhood excluded and taunted for never quite fitting in. “They gave her a real hard time her whole life,” said her mother, Dru Ann Davis, in an interview at her home this weekend. A Hurricane Katrina survivor, born blind in one eye, Desiree was working to find new strength and identity in Oakland before she was killed last week in a drive-by shooting. Story by S. Howard Bransford/Oakland North.
Desiree Davis, the 17 year-old Oakland Tech student killed in a drive-by shooting Monday, had been trapped with her family in Hurricane Katrina’s floodwaters before they sought safety and a new life in California. Her uncle says they tried Santa Cruz for a while, but that Oakland had felt to them more like home.
For nearly a decade, residents living near the intersection of Gaskill and 54th Streets in Northwest Oakland enjoyed a hard-won sense of calm. They’d formed a community police group, discouraged loitering and blatant drug dealing, and a diverse group of new homeowners was infusing money into this section of town, which runs along the Emeryville border. Even the owner of the neighborhood convenience store agreed to stop selling liquor in an effort to reduce crime. Yet on Tuesday, neighbors were…
As tens of thousands of children in North Oakland returned to school this week, local health officials and school districts were already bracing for the upcoming flu season, said Alameda County Public Health Department spokesperson Sherri Willis. “For the first time ever, we have two strains of flu and two vaccines to deal with. That would be a tall order even if one of those wasn’t a pandemic,” Willis said, referring to the swine flu virus, which since the school…