I was walking back from the gym yesterday along Grand Avenue, approaching the big intersection at Harrison Street, when I saw this guy whom I’ve seen before, in the same general area. He was dressed in rags, wandering in and out of traffic in the middle of Grand Avenue, totally tweaked, gesturing wildly, ranting and cursing. When cars stopped at the light, he would walk up to them, bang on the windows; drivers were trying to avoid hitting him.
At one point he went to a garbage can and emptied it, throwing everything on the sidewalk and at passing cars. Then he took the metal garbage can itself and hurled it at cars (fortunately it didn’t hit anything). And I filmed all this on my phone. Then he crossed the street and wandered into the parking lot of the Marqueta Building, on the corner of Grand and Harrison. Fortunately, they have a security guard, and he made the guy leave.
But he went right back onto Grand Avenue and resumed his thing. I thought to myself, “You know, I can just walk home. None of my business, don’t get involved. Just another day in Oakland.” But the guy was either going to get run over, or he was going to cause a collision, or both. Plus, the garbage all over the place offended me: some city employee is going to have to clean it up. I was wearing my white “#SAFEOAKLAND” t-shirt, which our former OPD chief LeRonne Armstrong had given me at a peace demonstration he organized before Sheng Thao fired him for no good reason. That shirt inspires me, and so I made the decision to call 9-1-1.
I would have called MACRO but I don’t know how to since they’re totally unorganized. It took about 7 minutes to get an OPD dispatcher to talk to, and then another ten minutes for a couple cop cars to arrive. As I approached, the security guard was talking to the cops. He told them how the guy had thrown the garbage can at cars. We all stood around (2 cops, the security guy, an office worker and me) while the cop explained that there was nothing they could do, since the guy wasn’t doing anything illegal at that moment. “If we physically interfere with him,” the cop added, “it could lead to a violent confrontation,” which, of course, the cops are desperate to avoid, because there would be at least a 50% chance of them being put on administrative leave and/or sued by John Burris and then, God forbid, being in Pamela Price’s clutches.
Of course the crazy guy was no longer doing anything wrong—not while the cops were watching him. He was waiting for them to leave. Never mind that there were at least two eyewitnesses to the guy’s criminal behavior, not to mention video (mine) and the evidence of the garbage can in the middle of Grand Avenue, with trash strewn all over the place. The cops did nothing but watch the guy, staying about 30 yards away. After the guy turned a corner and disappeared, I got bored and went home.
My presumption is that eventually the cops also left, and as soon as they did, the guy resumed his aberrant and dangerous behavior. Like I said, I’ve seen him do it before; I have no doubt I’ll see him doing it again.
Look, this system is totally broken. Why couldn’t the cops throw him in the back of a police car and get him off the streets? If he resisted arrest, tase him and cuff him. But no. The new normal is to shrug our shoulders and let the freak continue his mayhem. We’ve given up on the rule of law. We’ve given up on public safety. Why? Because the wokes have made it so hard for cops to do their jobs that cops understandably no longer want to do their jobs. Well, they want to…but they don’t dare. Pamela Price would throw the book at them. Meanwhile, the crazy guy is still out there, and so are dozens, maybe hundreds just like him, all over Oakland, and we’re not allowed to do a damned thing about it. It’s sad, it’s sick and it sucks.
Steve Heimoff