From CNN, February 6:
Violent crime and other felonies fell in 2023 in America’s biggest cities. They increased in Oakland.
Robberies grew 38% last year in Oakland, according to police data. Burglaries increased 23%. Motor vehicle theft jumped 44%. Roughly one of every 30 Oakland residents had a car stolen last year, according to a San Francisco Chronicle analysis.
On Tuesday, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced he was taking action, deploying 120 California Highway Patrol officers to Oakland and the surrounding area to conduct a law enforcement surge operation. The aim: to crack down on crime, including vehicle theft, retail theft and violent crime.
“What’s happening in this beautiful city and surrounding area is alarming and unacceptable,” Newsom said in a statement.
Business owners have been pleading for help for months.
Not giving up
Nigel Jones isn’t giving up on Oakland, even after Kingston 11, his community food center for low-income families, was vandalized and its glass doors smashed.Jones immigrated to the United States from Jamaica when he was 16 and made his home in Oakland. The chef and restauranter currently owns two Jamaican restaurants, Calabash and Kingston 11. He says he is passionate about helping Oakland’s disadvantaged families....
....MUCH MORE
Previously:
"Target closes 9 stores in response to retail theft, adds locked cases at some stores" (TGT)
200 "Oakland Businesses Shut Down in Protest Against Rising Crime"
Meanwhile, In Oakland California, There Be Pirates
We didn't post on the recent closing of the city's only In-N-Out Burger but did catch the UN special rapporteur Leilani Farha a half-dozen years ago in this 2018 post on the UN official's visit, to the Bay Area:
You may have seen the story.
The UN's special rapporteur on Adequate Housing has been jet-setting around, Mexico City, Mumbai, S.F., documenting what she sees:
“In Mexico City, I visited a low-income settlement that had been moved by the city onto empty land near a railway line,” [Farha] said. “They had no running water. They stole electricity.” The camp was noisy and dangerous. She noted that the camp in Mexico is virtually identical to those she visited in Oakland, including the Wood Street and 23rd Avenue encampments....The above snip is from the East Bay Express reprinted in Curbed San Francisco.
Curbed has had one of the most impressive series on the situation of any major media.
There's the January 22 piece we used for the headline which wraps up with:
After her trip to the Bay, Farha headed out to assess conditions in LA, an errand she told the East Bay Express she dreaded after observing encampments here.
Yeah, we're no doom-loopers come-lately, no sirree. We've been trying to point out the pathologies for many years. It goes back to 2009's Our Best Short Idea--San Francisco: "The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.".
At the time Gavin Newsom was mayor of San Francisco.
The response to Covid19 didn't cause the rot, it only exposed it.
