Within the first five minutes of a raucous community safety meeting Tuesday night in North Oakland, residents vented frustrations and fear over a recent crime spike — and their perception that city leaders are doing little to address it.
Over the two hours that followed, a crowd of roughly 200 gathered at Oakland Technical High School confronted a panel of city officials, the interaction ranging from volcanic heckling to stunned silence. A woman stood and delivered a wrenching personal story about being beaten in front of her house. The owner of a pizzeria said his employees had been held up at gunpoint four times in six years. One person called the city a “failed progressive utopia.”
Others described deteriorating street conditions and predicted that businesses would leave — what some might call a San Francisco “doom loop” that had migrated across the bridge.
The meeting, organized by City Council Member Dan Kalb, mounted pressure on political leaders and loudly made clear that crime is among the rawest topics in Oakland.
In North Oakland, eyes have turned to College Avenue, the shopping corridor in the Rockridge neighborhood that has become a new epicenter for burglaries and robberies.
During a recent press conference at Oakland City Hall, Police Chief Darren Allison conveyed the scale of the crime wave: Citywide, residents witnessed 100 robberies in a single week, and 50 in a tumultuous 72-hour period.
