Free Republic

Lawsuits against BART police officers involved in the 2009 incident that left Oscar Grant shot to death will go forward after a federal appeals court declined Tuesday to grant the officers immunity as law enforcement agents. The ruling by a three-judge panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco concerned suits brought by Grant's father, who is incarcerated, and by five of his friends, who were detained with Grant at Fruitvale Station in Oakland on Jan. 1, 2009. Grant had been in a fight on a train. After then-BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle shot him in...

<p>In San Francisco, demonstrators marched through the Mission District after gathering at the 24th Street Mission BART Station. Hundreds marched down Valencia Street, chanting "Justice for Trayvon Martin."</p> <p>The crowd dispersed peacefully, and officers will "maintain a presence in the Mission District for the time being," said San Francisco police Officer Gordon Shyy, a department spokesman. Another protest was scheduled for 4 p.m. Sunday at Powell and Market streets.</p>

<p>I’m a 10-year regular at BART’s Fruitvale Station, and this morning noticed a movie poster for “Fruitvale Station” near the turnstiles inside the station — not far from the tragic events that inspired the film.</p> <p>“Fruitvale Station” was written and directed by Oakland’s Ryan Coogler, and covers the last day of Oscar Grant’s life before he was fatally shot by a BART police officer on New Year’s Day 2009. It won the Sundance Film Festival Grand Jury Prize and Audience Award, and is set for wide release this Friday.</p>

[typo is in the original article title, should read "Oakland"] No matter what the outcome, the federal court takeover of the Oakland Police Department is going to cost taxpayers millions — starting with the $270,000-plus-a-year salary for the new compliance director. That’s $13,000 more than what former Police Chief Howard Jordan was making before he jumped — or was pushed — into medical retirement this month. In addition to the $270,000 salary, compliance director Thomas Frazier will receive benefits equal to those paid to the city administrator and the police chief, including any unused vacation, sick or executive leave that...

Pope Francis named a Boston priest with longtime ties to the Bay Area as the bishop of Oakland, where the future bishop emphasized that he would lead a path more pastoral than political. Until now, Rev. Michael Barber had been the director of spiritual formation at a Boston seminary. In his first comments to diocesan staff in Oakland on Friday, Barber spoke of spending time in soup kitchens serving food, washing dishes, visiting jails and otherwise "getting my hands dirty." Barber, 58, is the first Jesuit bishop named by Francis, the first Jesuit pope. Oakland's bishop-elect said it was Francis'...

A historic fight over whether Oakland can reform its own police force began in earnest Thursday when civil rights attorneys asked a federal judge to take the unprecedented step of appointing a receiver to ensure the changes are made. The attorneys said a broken culture in the department had turned a decadelong reform effort into a "chronic failure," endangering citizens - especially minorities - and costing the city tens of millions of dollars to settle police-abuse lawsuits. The lawyers represented more than 100 people who sued the city after four officers, who called themselves the Riders, were accused in 2000...

Oakland officials say they and federal investigators have discovered a major source of disruption to the city's police radio communications system: interference from cell phone towers. Specifically, officials said, cell phone towers operated by AT&T Wireless have been interfering with the city's public safety communications frequency and causing radio failures among police and firefighters on city streets. AT&T, notified by the city of the problem last week, is cooperating and has partially disabled 16 towers. A company spokesman said the impact on customers will be minimal, affecting only those on the company's oldest phones. The towers constantly interfered with the...

Enrique Candia lives a quiet life in Oakland. When he's not working, he takes care of his ailing wife and his three grandchildren and makes sure his son is on track to finish college. Now, although he has no criminal record, the 56-year-old is facing a court battle that could take him away from his family for years. In June 2010, federal agents arrested Candia for working in the United States without proper authorization. A Mexican national who has lived in this country for almost 20 years, Candia was sent to an Immigrations and Customs Enforcement detention center. "It's the...

Downtown Oakland has no shortage of wildlife. Now it even has some of the nonhuman variety. A colony of giant, squawking, black-crowned night herons has taken up residence in the gritty urban core of Oakland, apparently thriving amid the tattoo parlors and Afghan restaurants, Occupiers and bus exhaust. "Oh my God, I saw one walking right down 14th Street. I'm like, 'What is that?' " said Jalima Morales, 26, who saw a few more of the striking blue birds as she was walking down Jackson Street recently. "Now I see them all the time. They're so loud. It sounds like...

Owners of small businesses near the center of Tuesday's noontime clash between police and protesters in downtown Oakland said they were shaken and on high alert. "If things get ugly again, I'll put up plywood," said Jean Assuncao, manager of the Pizza Man on Broadway near 14th Street, as he stood at the restaurant's locked doors to admit customers one at a time minutes after protesters had marched farther down the street and clouds of tear gas had dissipated. Next door, a man and a woman nailed boards over the front of the Broadway Beauty store. Down the block, employees...

They weren't seeking sunken treasure, but that's what some sixth-graders from St. Paul's Episcopal School found Thursday submerged in a few feet of water in Oakland's Lake Merritt. A student was scooping up trash with a long net from the shore near Grand and Harrison streets when she spotted two bags about the size of reusable grocery totes sitting in about 2 feet of water, said Richard Bailey, executive director of the Lake Merritt Institute. The bags were heavy and she couldn't scoop them up, Bailey said, so he waded out in hip boots and pulled them to shore. The...

After the Iraq war broke out, Ghazwan Al-Sharif went to work translating for the U.S. military - a job that paid well but subjected his family to repeated violence, including a brutal attack on his sister. Scared for his life, Al-Sharif accepted the government's offer to come to America as a refugee, one of thousands relocated to this country since the war began. In June 2008, he moved in with two other Iraqi refugees, sharing a two-bedroom apartment in Oakland's Fruitvale neighborhood - a situation arranged by the nonprofit International Rescue Committee. It wasn't long before Al-Sharif said he learned...

For all their whining about the "police state" and the city's failure to respect their "First Amendment rights," Occupy Oakland activists have managed to flout the law with regular impunity. Somehow demonstrators have managed to turn Frank Ogawa Plaza into a tent stew and shut down parts of the city in a so-called general strike Nov. 2, and still they think they're victims who have been deprived of their free speech rights. But if they want to see what it's really like to fight City Hall, they should talk to Walter Hoye. Hoye's offense was to walk up to people...

When you hear about the actions of Oakland's modern-day pimps, it makes you wonder how prostitution was ever referred to as "the gentleman's game." There is nothing gentlemanly about it, and it's definitely no game. It's a dark and increasingly violent underworld that lures underage girls from the city's middle and high schools. In an informal survey taken last fall by the East Bay Asian Youth Center, more than 500 residents, most of them Asian or Latino immigrants, cited prostitution - and the attempted recruitment of their daughters - as the area's No. 1 crime problem Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2011/03/31/BAN41IMJ49.DTL#ixzz1IU5PEADM

(11-05) 19:18 PDT OAKLAND -- A couple of hundred protesters angered by the two-year sentence handed down for former BART police Officer Johannes Mehserle surged into the streets of downtown Oakland tonight, marching past Lake Merritt and smashing car windows as police stood by in case severe violence breaks out. The crowd started walking south on 14th Street at about 6:25 p.m. Several in the crowd said they were headed to the Fruitvale BART station, which is about three miles from City Hall. The station is where Mehserle shot Oscar Grant, an unarmed train rider, early Jan. 1, 2009. At...

Despite last-minute pleas from historians, Union Pacific has demolished the 1874 train shop in West Oakland that was among the last relics of the transcontinental railroad. The three-story building, visible from BART and Interstate 880, met the wrecking ball Oct. 1 at 5 a.m., according to Union Pacific spokeswoman Raquel Espinoza. By Sunday, the site - where thousands of locomotives and train cars had undergone repairs for 128 years - was nothing but a vacant lot littered with a few bricks, witnesses said. Read more: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/08/BAS41FPBKA.DTL&tsp=1#ixzz11qklvvQY

Over the howls of historians, Union Pacific plans to demolish an 1874 cavernous brick warehouse in West Oakland that is one of the last remnants of the transcontinental railroad. Designed for train repair, the towering structure was erected on the heels of the transcontinental railroad's arrival in Oakland, in the days when West Oakland was a national industrial center. "It tells the story of when railroads were the pioneer industry in California, and this was the center of it," said architect Randy Ruiz, one of 30 visitors Union Pacific allowed to tour the building recently. "It represents that can-do American...

Although Allen Temple Baptist Church in East Oakland is no stranger to large crowds and public attention, the promise of a guest sermon Sunday morning by the popular and controversial Reverend Jeremiah Wright ensured that there wouldn't be an empty seat in the house. Wright, the former senior pastor of Chicago's Trinity United Church and a friend of Allen Temple's pastor emeritus J. Alfred Smith, Sr., has preached to the Allen Temple congregation several times since the 1980s. But this Sunday's sermon was his first at Allen Temple since the 2008 presidential campaign, during which a frenzy of negative media...

Janelle La Chaux paid a visit to Oakland police headquarters Friday to fill out a crime report. She believed her former roommate on 31st Street had stolen her 22-inch flat-screen and she wanted to document the theft. "I could have called them when I was at the place where it happened, but I just decided to come down here because I don't want to wait," La Chaux, 30, said as she filled out a form in the lobby. "Sometimes I call them and it just takes a long, long time to come." Nowadays, police may not come at all. On...

I missed out on the spree looting of Footlocker and other businesses in Oakland after the Johannes Mehserle verdict. But about 200 other people seemed to be having a great time burning and smashing. Out-of-town agitators, officials said, in kind a weird throwback to establishment terminology about protests in the 60's. Only "The Man" in Oakland these days is Mayor Ron Dellums and no one can ever find him. Also a cop (ex-cop, Mehserle) is going to jail in this case, so there are all sorts of interesting twists here. One of them is another group activity, rather different from...