Around 4:30 a.m. on July 5, dozens of people broke through the front door of a 76 gas station mini-mart near Oakland’s international airport. For about 40 minutes, the mob casually looted tens of thousands of dollars of merchandise and stole $22,000 in cash from the ATM. The sole employee working the window ran away, called the police, and was told to file an online report. It reportedly took cops nine hours to finally arrive on the scene.
Earlier, on Juneteenth, 14 people were shot and injured in a gunfight by Lake Merritt, Oakland’s equivalent of Central Park. One of the victims was walking toward a Korean restaurant when a man strode up and shot him in the hand and in each thigh for no apparent reason. As the victim lay bleeding on the sidewalk, another stranger stole his phone.
Over a six-day period in late June and early July, thirteen elderly Asians were robbed and attacked on the street outside their senior living facility just north of Lake Merritt. The president of the building’s resident council believes the real number was more than double that when accounting for victims who did not file a police report. Then, last week, a viral video showed a man who was recently released from prison brutally beating and robbing two Asian women, one of them elderly.
Oakland has a long history of crime, but residents say there’s something sinister about this current wave. The past several months alone have been so chaotic that community organizer Seneca Scott, who has lived here for 12 years and is also a Free Press contributor, declared on X on July 7 that “Oakland has fallen.”
I’ve lived in Oakland for about six years. From my house, I can hear the sounds of screeching tires from “sideshows”—a city tradition where drivers take over intersections and perform donuts in front of cheering crowds—multiple times a day. (Sideshows, which are often preludes to crimes, preceded both the 76 robbery and the Juneteenth shootings.) Burned-out husks of stolen and abandoned cars appear like roadkill by curbsides. It’s hard to tell whether staccato claps in the distance are illegal fireworks or gunshots. All of this has gotten worse in the years I’ve been here.
“There’s this sense of lawlessness,” LeRonne Armstrong, the city’s former police chief who was fired last year by the mayor and is now running for city council, told me. “This sense of, we can do whatever, there really aren’t any consequences—almost like a video game, like Grand Theft Auto or something.”
Even the nonviolent crimes reflect that video game–like absurdity. In January, about two blocks away from the 76 station, thieves hooked an outdoor Bank of America ATM to a van, tore it from the wall, and dragged it down the street. It was the second ATM in the area to be stolen just that morning.
About three blocks away is a shuttered In-N-Out Burger. In March, the restaurant became the first the company has ever closed after customers and staff were subjected to a relentless barrage of car break-ins, thefts, and robberies. Across town, in the tony neighborhood of Rockridge, a liquor store was burglarized four times by thieves ramming cars through its glass front doors, a method that has become increasingly common in the Bay Area.
“Oakland has never been like this,” Pastor Raymond Lankford of the Voices of Hope Community Church said last fall. “People breaking into houses brazenly, beating people, beating seniors,” he told me more recently. “Society has kind of lost its grip in some ways.”
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