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There's something very very wrong with the city of Oakland. I lived there for one year, before moving to SF and while everybody told me I should constantly be w
by SeoxyS 15y ago
There's something very very wrong with the city of Oakland. I lived there for one year, before moving to SF and while everybody told me I should constantly be watching my back, I mostly ignored it and was fine. But after I moved to SF, I found myself in Oakland for a party and sure enough, with a couple friends, I got myself mugged at gunpoint by three scary-looking local gangsters.
The scary part, though, is the cops' handling of the situation. Luckily for me, I was quick enough to react and hide away my most important item, my iPhone 4. As soon as they were gone (within 30s) I called the cops, and soon thereafter we had 5 squad cars show up. They interrogated us and made us write statements, but would not send a car after the suspects, who had fled in a direction we had indicated to them. After telling us there's no chance they'd recover our stolen stuff, they took off. We asked for a ride back to the bart station, to the police station, anywhere (it was night in a shady part of Oakland. We had nothing… no money for a cab, and we sure as hell didn't want to walk alone around Oakland.) They just refused, saying they had "other shit to do" and left.
The fact that I got mugged at gunpoint in Oakland comes as no surprise to me—I shouldn't have been there in the first place. However, the police's blatant incompetence came as a terrifying shock.
- armored 15y agoTempe, AZ has an Oakland style PD I guess. After calling them and reporting an assault they asked "what do you want us to do about it?". I want you to do ... your f*ing job!
- temphn 15y agoAmidst hundreds of comments in this thread, few will explicitly point out that there are obvious differences between the demographics of SF vs. the demographics of Oakland, Hunter's Point, Camden, South Central LA, and Detroit. Most likely the police you encountered were also drawn from that different demographic.
- khsdf7 15y agoThe Oakland PD is corrupt and incompetent. This has been well-documented in the local media, and there has been at least one FBI investigation into the matter. This is part of the reason why the main red light district is in Oakland, not SF. As far as I can tell, no one has the will, political or otherwise, to take steps towards a remedy. It isn't just the police department. The state had to come in and run the schools after the school district went bankrupt. Did I mention that Ebonics as a second language originates from Oakland? When they were rolling up the 60s, a lot of the batshit insane got swept towards Oakland, and it has been festering ever since.
- rhizome 15y agoWhat's the case#?
- nekitamo 15y agoOakland cops today have the rep LA cops used to have.
- rdl 15y agoI think BART cops have that rep; Oakland PD can't hold a candle to them.
- mcrittenden 15y agoWhere did you hide your iPhone and how did you do it without them noticing? Just curious.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- patrickod 15y agoAs someone who's been mugged before the proliferation of firearms in the states really unnerves me. I got jumped in a shady area of Dublin one dark winters night, was punched repeatedly in the face, and had my bike stolen. The Gardai (Irish name for the police force) handled it very well and recovered the bike that very night. The individual was known to them and it went on the long list of offenses that this person was generating for one hell of a court date. Gun crime doesn't exist in Ireland like it seems to in the US. The idea that someone out to mug me and take my wallet would have a firearm pointed at me and not just their fists is, to me, quite scary. I don't know what the statistics are like for such crimes at gunpoint and while I write this I realise that this fear might well be the result of my limited exposure to American news outlets. I guess my question is: is it justified or is this just my lack of experience of living in the states running amok ?
- anonymoushn 15y agoThis is mostly a problem of the areas in the U.S. that attempt to ban firearms. In Texas, for instance, gun crime is much less prevalent because many more people have guns. In California, you can legally carry an unloaded weapon, but you'll get harassed by police officers who like to joke about executing civilians who choose to carry guns openly. An unloaded weapon will also help you surprisingly little if the stranger who is mugging you is pointing a loaded weapon at you. You can apply for a concealed carry permit, but you will be denied, even if you live in Oakland.
- vacri 15y agoA friend in LA told me that apparently tinted side car windows are illegal there, supposedly so an approaching cop isn't blindsided by a firearm. It just seems innately odd that firearms are legal, but tinted windows aren't in case you have one...
- tzs 15y agoI wonder if the mugger's lack of a gun is WHY you got repeatedly punched in the face? I've never mugged anyone, but I would guess that the first step is to establish control over the victim. With a gun against an unarmed victim, the mugger gets control easily. With neither armed, the mugger might need to actually attack and force submission before the victim decides if he should fight back or not.
- guelo 15y agoI have the exact same story with the cops refusing to look for the muggers who had run away a minute earlier. And I've heard plenty other outrageous stories about OPD refusing to help. They are mostly incompetent and lazy.
- hack_edu 15y agoAnd underpaid, understaffed, and spread thin patrolling East Oakland.
- dkl 15y agoUnderpaid? Really? I don't have a reference, but I saw an article a couple of years ago that with overtime it was common for Oakland officers to make more than $100k.
- thaumaturgy 15y agoHighway patrol, too: http://www.chp.ca.gov/recruiting/osalary.html http://www.chp.ca.gov/recruiting/osalary.html
- ajays 15y agoWow. Earning $83,969 per year with just a HS Diploma (and CHP academy training) ain't bad at all.
- zackattack 15y agoActually I think it sucks when you consider that you're much more likely to die on the job as a CHP officer than as a programmer.
- thomasz 15y agoGranted, being a police officer is certainly a more risky profession than programming, but I'm not sure that the chance of getting killed on the job is higher for police officers than for truck or cab drivers.
- jcampbell1 15y agoMove to New York. I was smoking on my fire escape, and saw a dude break a car window and steal a shopping bag out of the back seat. I called the police, they got the description from me over the phone, and the cops showed up in a car in around 90 seconds. They then asked me to get in the car and we drove around looking for the guy, found him, and they arrested him, and returned the car owners stuff. The whole process took less than 10 minutes.
- For_Iconoclasm 15y agoI got robbed in Brooklyn the exact same way a few weeks ago, but nobody was watching over my car. :(
- Zak 15y agoWhen I had stuff (including a laptop and $800 cash) stolen out of a vehicle in NYC a year and a half ago, it took two hours to even get the police to show up. They made a decent attempt at investigating once they did, but the initial response time was appalling.
- vacri 15y agoWhen someone put a hammer through my car window in an attempt to steal it at 3am, the cops took about half an hour to respond - they know that the one place the criminal isn't is at the site of the crime. Do a drive-around first looking for suspicious activity, then move in. If there is no 'hot pursuit' or current danger, then it doesn't matter much whether they arrive there in half an hour or in four hours. The stuff is gone/damaged/whatever and the police won't gain much by interrupting their current task.
- zaidf 15y agoSecond this. I lived in frisco for a year and while it's never as bad as they make it sound, it was pretty bad looking back. There were shootings at the intersection our office was located at. Car breakins were not a big deal and just accepted. I'd see fresh pieces of glass window on my walk to work each morning. And I wasn't even living in the worst part of town aka the tenderlon. I've only moved to NYC few months ago and never felt remotely as threatened as some of my late night walks in SF. Still I keep hearing NYC has its own share of bad hoods but my guess is in proportion to its overall size, they comprise a significantly small % of area than sf.
- hack_edu 15y agoI agree, but the bigger problem with oakland is that everyone (including Oaklanders) always say "There's something very very wrong with the city of Oakland" yet no one steps up to bat. Including you and me.
- twakefield 15y agoI was blown away watching the local news the other night. A man in Oakland was in the water drowning while the Fire Department watched because they didn't have the "resources" for proper training and certification for land-based water rescues. A random woman eventually had to go out into the water to retrieve the body. This is unbelievable. http://sfist.com/2011/05/30/man_drowns_in_bay_off_alameda_beach.php http://sfist.com/2011/05/30/man_drowns_in_bay_off_alameda_be...
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- equark 15y agoThis is a perfect example of where blind training and lack of common sense kills. I had a similar experience a few years ago. I arrived a local pond and immediately saw a man slapping the water and grunting. He was just past where he could stand. My lifeguard training kicked in and I immediately realized he was drowning. I starting yelling for help and jumped in the pond to save him. Then I stopped. My training said I was never supposed to go into the water without a floatation device. Without evaluating if that made sense in this case -- the pond was perfectly flat and the guy was maybe 3 feet past where I could stand -- I jumped out of the water and tried to find a floatation device. I ended up with an inflatable couch, which was absolutely enormous and would not have helped at all. Luckily at that point another guy had heard me yelling and started swimming toward the drowning man. He got to him within a few seconds and with two strokes was back to where he could stand. Everybody was fine. Training is a blessing and a curse. There are plenty of cases where people jump in fast moving water to save somebody and die as a result. I'm sure firefighters are told endlessly about such cases: never enter a burning building, go on ice, jump in water, etc. But these dangers don't always exist or are often remote. In my case, the training taught me to recognize the signals of drowning, but also taught me not to use common sense. It turned out okay, but could very well have gone differently.
- stretchwithme 15y agoMost civil servants and people working for utilities and transportation systems (like the airlines) are going to be rule-driven people. They aren't going to be thinking outside the box or improvising. And that's to be expected. Those that do think outside the box left the box a long time ago. You're never going to convince a flight attendent that you can turn off the network and keep using your smart phone until one of the people who make the rules gets an iPhone and learns about the magical "airplane mode". And it sort of should be this way. You want these people following rules, not making them up as they go. Its really the higher ups and ultimately the citizenry that need to change the way they think.
- swah 15y agoAnd then you walked.