Free Republic

Armed robbers terrorized Oakland restaurants and small businesses in three separate crime sprees over the past year. The first wave targeted Asian eateries and struck during the 2007 holiday season. The second arrived last spring and was more indiscriminate. The third struck in July and August. All three made newspaper headlines and led television newscasts, shining a spotlight on the city's out-of-control crime problem and the Oakland Police Department's apparent inability to cope with it. In fact, the department's public response to the takeover robberies was both odd and illuminating. The department's mantra for dealing with the city's crime spike...

OAKLAND — Former employees and supporters of the defunct Your Black Muslim Bakery have scheduled a rally for Aug. 2 — the one-year anniversary of journalist Chauncey Bailey's killing — to call for an investigation into the business's demise. "This is the anniversary of the closing of the bakery and the event is about getting to the truth, getting to justice and making sure that whoever is guilty of any crime be brought before the bar of justice, because right now the truth is not being told," said rally organizer Henry Clark. The date was chosen to commemorate "police attacking...

Your Black Muslim Bakery leader Yusuf Bey IV promised the man accused of killing an Oakland journalist that he could avoid prison time if he would just "be a good soldier" and falsely confess to the shotgun slaying, the suspect's attorney said Monday. Bey told Devaughndre Broussard, who worked as a handyman at the bakery, that the Black Muslim institution's future was at stake in the investigation into the Aug. 2 killing of Chauncey Bailey, said attorney LeRue Grim. Bey said that the black-empowerment organization had taken care of Broussard, given him a job and helped the 19-year-old become a...

Oakland police put the main suspect in the killing of a journalist investigating Your Black Muslim Bakery in an interrogation room with the bakery's leader after the two were arrested, then left them alone and didn't record the conversation, sources close to the case said Friday. The suspect, bakery handyman Devaughndre Broussard, promptly confessed to police after the late-night session Aug. 3 with the bakery's leader, Yusuf Bey IV, said two law enforcement sources, speaking on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter. An attorney for Broussard, 19, called the police tactic highly unusual and said that...

OAKLAND -- The man charged with murdering Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey was ordered by an associate at Your Black Muslim Bakery to "take the fall" and confess to the killing, the suspect's attorney said today. Devaughndre Broussard, 19, a handyman at the bakery, was "ordered by someone" to tell Oakland police he had shot Bailey to death on a downtown street corner Aug. 2, said his attorney, LeRue Grim. Speaking outside Alameda County Superior Court in Oakland after Broussard made a brief appearance before a judge, Grim would not identify the individual he said had pressured his client to...