Alan Wang and his wife typically go for walks after dinner in their Oakland Hills neighborhood in Oakland, California.
On Monday, his wife went alone — and was attacked.
A man carrying what looked like a sword approached her, yelling, “Hey, I need to ask you a question.”
She backed up, but the man followed.
“He was truly just trying to hit her, and he ended up hitting her three or four times,” Wang told CBS News Bay Area.
Then, when Wang’s wife was just a few hundred feet from the safety of her own house, she walked past a car with two people inside. A young man jumped out of the car and brutally attacked her.
“That’s when the neighbor saw from the top what was going on and started screaming, and she came down to help my wife, and then the kid ran back down the street into the car, and they sped down,” Wang said.
By the time the police arrived, there was no trace of the men.
The brutal beating of Wang’s wife wasn’t an isolated incident.
Two months ago, his mother was assaulted by strangers in the middle of the road in Oakland.
“A car had stopped her on the street while she was walking,” he said. “One kid got out and started pushing her around, trying to find money. He didn’t find anything. The other driver came out and said, ‘Did you find anything?’ He said no, and then they beat her.”
Wang, along with so many others, is fed up with the violence and outright lawlessness that has become all too familiar in Oakland these days.
Last week, Run Hua Kuang, a 33-year-old father of two, was napping at his home in the East Oakland housing projects when he was shot in the head by a stray bullet. The bullet went through the wall, penetrated the headboard, and went through Kuang’s head before coming out of his left eye.
Kuang spent seven hours in surgery and is now on life support in the intensive care unit.
Crime-ridden Oakland has gone from bad to worse in the past two years. Trust has plummeted as a skeptical public has demanded transparency from the police and elected leaders, but they have not gotten it.
At any given time, the city has just 35 police officers on patrol, which comes out to one officer for every 12,500 citizens. Oakland has around 435,000 residents.
In February, Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA) deployed 120 California Highway Patrol officers to Oakland. Last month, he quadrupled the number of shifts CHP officers conducted, with the goal of targeting organized crime, carjackings, sideshows, and other criminal activity over the next four months.
Newsom slammed the Oakland Police Department’s outdated policies and urged Oakland officials in a letter to allow police to engage in more vehicle pursuits, arguing that the limitations placed on officers contribute to public safety challenges in the city.
In the letter, the governor wrote that CHP “observed suspects attempting to escape arrest by using the same routes, concluding that they knew where OPD would discontinue a pursuit” because of the pursuit policy. In comparison, CHP’s pursuit of suspects, with the help of air support, caught suspects in each of the six chases that state officers initiated.
The increased CHP presence in the East Bay has resulted in the recovery of more than 1,142 stolen cars, the seizure of 55 firearms, and the arrests of 562 suspects, according to the governor’s office.
Another point of contention is the crime statistics themselves, which the public and even the police say are outdated and unreliable.
“Oakland’s elected officials cherry-pick incomplete data that suit their political objectives, and much of the public accepts their spin at face value,” said Tim Gardner, a biomedical engineer who cofounded the Oakland Report, which provides critical analysis of governance. “If the electeds did take a deep look, they’d find that the data were full of issues that could impair correct interpretation because data gathering, management, and curation are difficult and systemically underfunded. Instead, they base public safety policy on political expediency, which in recent years has disrupted and dismantled the resources needed for fair and just policing.”
ODP’s crime reporting system is more than 20 years old.
It’s so outdated that “employees use Microsoft Word, save files on desktop folders, and share them by mail,” Gardner said
The system that’s supposed to automatically transfer crime reporting data to the state for its yearly crime compilation is also broken.
“The state recently released 2023 data showing 11,169 aggravated assaults in Oakland — a 3.4-fold increase over 2022. But OPD’s own report shows about 3,500 aggravated assaults in 2023,” Gardner said. “The state data are flawed because of an unresolved bug in transmission discovered [earlier this year].”
The police also say they are at their wit’s end and have pinned much of the blame on the city’s embattled mayor, Sheng Thao.
On Tuesday, Oakland’s police union took the unusual step of demanding Thao resign immediately.
A scathing four-page letter from the union blamed her for rising crime rates, failed programs, and gross mismanagement. It also said the board supported a recall election against her.
“To protect the safety of Oakland residents and businesses, the Oakland Police Officers Association executive board Monday voted unanimously to seek your resignation,” said the letter, which was signed by Sgt. Huy Nguyen as president and Sgt. Tim Dolan as vice president.
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“Oakland’s hard-working, dedicated, and brave police officers put their lives on the line every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. But your policies, and those of the council majority, continue to whittle away at police officers’ ability to protect Oakland from violent crimes, murders, shootings, carjackings, burglaries, robberies, sideshows, and the mayhem that Oakland experiences daily,” the letter continued.
Thao, whose house was raided by the FBI in June, has refused to step down, but the drumbeat of those who want her to resign has only gotten louder.