Oakland Focus News | Oakland News Online Blog

A lot of catching up to do on San Francisco News, so lets get started.  There's yet another protest planned to disrupt the evening commute, this one set for 5 PM outside of Civic Center BART Station in San Francisco.  The group Anonymous has reportedly said it would have a protest each week, and to point not just to the shut down of cell phone service that got Anonymous so riled up (this blogger too), but the recent police action that took the life of Charles Blair Hill in July.  On the matter of BART protests, I had a long talk with a good friend of mine who's become a fixture in Bay Area Law Enforcement (and I will not name).  His take was predictably, well, him, but representative of how some of his collegues think.  "BART has handled this poorly," he said. "What they should do, it turn us (police) lose and arrest people who protest down there.  If they get out of line, and don't follow orders, that's it.  Billy club them."  He and I totally d...

My celebration of the suddenly free "Oakland Tribune" from the hands of the Bay Area New Group, or BANG, both ruffled feathers and gained supporters. One email I received went something like this: I just read your blog about the Tribune. I was all set to dis-agree with Yipee. However, if the OAKLAND TRIBUNE can be resurrected on line I am enthused. Newspapers are what in my lifetime, helped give a city identity. In my opinion, the fact local media is SF centric has exaggerated the negatives of Oakland, but there has not been a positive voice out there. I have long promoted the idea of the A's the Warriors, the Raider's and possibly Cal going partners on a sports and news station that is Oakland centric....Let me know how I might be a help in this. The others I will not bother with, except to say that no one, least of all me, celebrates anyone losing a job. But my issue in all this is that we're in a time of digital media, yet what I see are media people consi...

When I got the news that the Oakland Tribune was no more, I could not understand why the reaction expressed above just came out, as "Yipee," but it did. Spontaneously. Then I had to admit that it was because, from my perspective, the real Oakland Tribune died a long time ago. It passed on the moment we lost people like Chauncey Bailey, my friend who was always on top of what was going on in the Oakland flatlands, and who was wrongly, awfully, gunned down . The Oakland Tribune passed when my good friends Monte Poole and Dave Newhouse's work started showing up in the Mercury News. It was no more when legendary Columnist Peggy Stinnett, who really took time to sit down over lunch with me and just talk about Oakland, passed away. Really miss her, I do. The Oakland Tribune was gone when it left the Tribune Tower at 13th and Broadway in Downtown Oakland. The Oakland Tribune I knew had a "pro-Oakland" sprit. It was the paper that was brought back t...

The Oakland murder of 3-year-old Oaklander Carlos Nava sparked an outpouring of emotion appropriate to the tragedy ( Take guns off Oakand's streets! ). But only to a certain point. There are graphic videos of the scene just after he was hit by a stray bullet allegedly produced by 26-year old Lawrence Curtis Denard (who did not enter a plea in court). Oakland videos that have not seen the light of media coverage, even by blogs - until now. For that, you can credit Oaklander Max Allstadt for doing what he does best: righteously bugging the crap out of people he thinks can make a difference if they take action. This blogger's going to skip what would be an off-the-track explanation of how that happened, and just say "Max. You are correct." At first, I objected to his plea because I felt it was sensationalizing a tragedy. But then, I realized I was going against my own belief that digital media is a mirror of our times, and to not show something is to deny other...

UPDATE: Chief Pete Sarna quit before he could be fired. According to Matier and Ross in the San Francisco Chronicle , Oakland, California School Police Chief Pete Sarna went out on a charity golf tournament, and, well this is how Matier and Ross explain it : The district is looking into accusations that the chief, who is white, let loose July 18 with a half-hour tirade loaded with racist epithets against his two sergeants and a police driver - who apparently was called to the event at the Sequoyah Country Club in Oakland so no one would be driving drunk. Sarna allegedly told the African American sergeant, who lives in Orinda, that "the only good n- is a dead n- and they should hang you in the town square to prevent any other n- from coming in the area." That's racist. Pure and simple. Racist. (As a note, we're talking about the Oakland Public School's Police Chief, not the Oakland Police. But to someone like Oakland Tribune Photographer Jane Tyska, tha...

As the San Francisco Bay Area talks about the economy, jobs, and spending, or more to the point wasteful spending, here we have the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, the MTC, in the Oakland office that's just a brisk 70-foot walk from Lake Merritt BART, moving out of that cool building on 8th and Oak Street, and spending, according to Oakland Local , $150 Million to build a new place - in San Francisco. Oh, and a place that's so far from BART, compared to its current home, the Metropolitan Transportation Commission might as well change its name to the Boonies Transportation Commission. What does the MTC have against Oakland? Drive-by shootings and robberies happen in San Francisco, too. You just don't read about them because the local media's brainwashed against reporting them. There is much to like about Oakland, not to mention the fact its more racially diverse than San Francisco, and finally has a decent set of restaurants and bars to frequent. A...

Yesterday's action where the San Francisco-Oakland Bay Area Rapid System took the step of interrupting or blocking cell phone service has increased from the first blog post on this, the one in this space, charging that BART's act was not legal, to a much Twitter-tweeted matter where BART's action was consistently said not to be legal. While BART charges that the action was legal, but has not given concrete evidence to support the claim as of this writing (and this blogger has called BART), a look at recent Federal Communications Commission (FCC) actions shows that BART's response to the feared protest was not illegal. According to sources, BART's complaint about what this blogger installed rests on the idea that it did not use a cell phone jamming device, but simply turned off the cell phone antenna system serving certain San Francisco BART stations. That was not my point. My point is that, according to a number of online sources, BART's attempt to int...