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School Shooting in Oakland Goes Nearly Unreported
Did you hear the gun violence outrage and the saturation of media coverage, over the school shooting that occurred at the Rudsdale High School in Oakland?
Me either. I guess hurricanes are handy excuses for the media to ignore inconvenient stories. In this narrative non-conforming event, two gang members exchanged 30 rounds on the high school campus, injuring six bystanders. Here’s a link from NPR.
The victims include two students, a counselor, a security guard and two other campus employees. Two people are in critical condition, and a third is in stable condition. The others have been released from local hospitals
Happily, nobody was killed during this fiasco.
The shooting comes a little over a month after another incident at the same school in which a student was stabbed and pistol-whipped. (The Oakland Police Department declined to answer NPR’s questions about the incident or provide further information.) And it has been less than a month since a 13-year-old suffered a gunshot injury at Madison Park Academy, a nearby middle school. In that instance, the police department determined it was “not a deliberate school shooting” and that the victim was not the intended target. The San Francisco Chronicle reported a 12-year-old was subsequently arrested.
Officials told NPR there have been nine homicides across the city over the last 10 days.
Wow, enrollment in these fine institutions must be mandatory, otherwise, I couldnt imagine a responsible parent sending their children there.
But wait! There’s more!
In the most shocking twist to this story, school officials sent text messages to students and faculty suggesting that they do not cooperate with Oakland Police!
Law enforcement sources tell the I-Team, Oakland police investigators have obtained text messages from the shooting victims’ phones in which Rudsdale school officials tell them not to cooperate with police.
During a virtual news conference, the I-Team’s Dan Noyes asked Oakland Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong about that information. He answered, “Our investigation will be thorough, it will be complete and we will exhaust all options to figure out what happened on this campus. But at this time, I will not speak to any evidence that we’ve recovered at this time.”
I would suggest that the person who sent those messages should immediately be employed in the private sector and should be charged with obstruction of justice. But apparently, the school district has a history of obstructing police:
“A kid was stabbed. He was bleeding. He was pistol-whipped. A gun was discovered at school. And yet the school district did nothing about it,” said BayTech parent Mario Juarez.
Police confirmed in August, a student was stabbed and pistol-whipped at the school. And my police sources tell me that Rudsdale obstructed the investigation:
- School officials recovered the gun used in the attack.
- Kept it from police for hours, until finally turning it over in a zip lock bag.
- Sources also say the school would not let police perform follow-up interviews with students.
- School officials said, “They had it under control.”
In this case, I dont understand why the person who did this was not immediately charged with multiple offenses. Perhaps when school officials end up in lock up, they’ll start being more cooperative.
While I dont want to minimize the tragedy of the hurricane’s devastation or the importance of the media coverage. This story really needs to be a national scandal.
Published in Guns
All over the news in San Francisco. Not that anything useful will get done.
Quite clearly they do not.
Democrat officials in Oakland arresting/prosecuting Democrat school officials?
Don’t hold your breath.
Kids in Oakland schools are often kids being raised by grandparents, as dad is in prison and mom is out scoring crack.
That explains why the “responsible parents” don’t consider home schooling – those parents aren’t responsible and they aren’t around.
If the grandparents are in poor health, these kids are raising themselves.
I end up wondering why the grandparents didn’t do a better job of raising their own children.
If a family lives in gang-infested areas, the kids join the gangs.
The grandparents probably did the best they could, but if they remained in those areas, their children became preyed upon by older gang members.
The established gang members might beat up on someone’s smaller, weaker brother. Then the older kid is told, “you wanna avoid visiting Baby Bro in hospital, join our gang.”
Older Kid joins. Then after six months of hanging around in the gang, he is given an assignment where someone is killed. Older Kid is now told “Take the fall for the shooting, or Kid Brother will be next.”
BTW, the cops are often in on this. Which is how major gangs manage to move X amounts of heroin or crack or fentanyl year after year.
I’m not sure the environment is all that much of it. When I lived in Arizona, it was fairly common for people “fleeing the gangs” to come to the Phoenix area, and once there the first thing they often did was start a gang. Nobody forced them to.
So instead of defunding the police, they’ll just ignore them. Good grief.
Typical . . .
But they have a “violence interrupter” from the nonprofit “Youth Alive!” on campus to mediate. https://abc7ne
ws.com/oakland-school-shooting-gang-rudsdale-high-at/12283743/
The school administration denies it told anyone not to cooperate with the police. But, the official went on to say staff “do not obstruct police investigations,” which my lawyer mind notes is rather different from “cooperate with police investigations.” It appears from the background articles that accompany the media reporting that uniformed police (such as “resource officers”) were removed from the school some time ago, possibly at the request of teachers.
The school is apparently intended specifically to house recent immigrants, as well as students who are at risk of not graduating from regular high school, so there are a number of over 18 year olds enrolled. Which sounds to me like a volatile combination – where better for the not graduating gangbangers to recruit new gang members than among new and possibly scared immigrants.
I would guess that more than a few of the recent immigrant students did not arrive through proper legal immigration channels, so there may be some confusion about whether the police the students were instructed not to talk to were city police or whether someone meant to refer to immigration police.
Sanctuary schools are an interesting concept. Teachers’ unions do not want police officers in schools after all the last thing they need is a teacher, or any other public union employee being outed and arrested for sexually abusing students. Some administrators want them in their schools to enforce student handbook rules to include subduing a six-year-old having a temper tantrum.
It’s an interesting dilemma but I suppose students and staff being shot are acceptable collateral damage for some ephemeral common good, whatever that common good might be this week.
OK, I’m old, which means I have recollections from decades ago, which may or may not be perfectly accurate. But, my recollection from the 1970s and 1980s was that uniformed police “school resource officers” were introduced to schools (especially urban schools) at the behest of teachers because teachers were being assaulted with some frequency by students. So I found it a bit odd in 2020-ish for teachers now to oppose having police officers on campus. How confident are the teachers that students won’t resume assaulting teachers? [I do not support placing full time school resource officers in schools that do not have a notable on-campus crime problem, as I think it contributes to a fortification fear mentality that I consider unhealthy, but that’s a discussion for farther down the road.]
This was a “mostly peaceful” shootout.
How long do you suppose before a violence interrupter gets greased?
If you have a good school resource officer, they form relationships with the students and often get a heads up on who is fighting who, where and when. If you have a more rigid officer, kids won’t be as open about what is going on. I have worked with both, until the admin decided the officer shouldn’t be in the building and he spent his time in his patrol car in the school parking lot. Obviously the officer who can work with the kids is preferable.
None of my schools had a “resource officer” until high school. Somebody did try to shake me down once in the men’s room when I was a freshman.
Once.
I suppose that, once you’ve promised the kids you’ll conspire with them to keep secrets from their parents about their gender delusions, it’s a fairly easy step to convince them to keep secrets from the police as well.
This school – and many others – are infected with this notion of “restorative justice.” They feel that disciplinary actions in high school that involve the po-po will feed the “school to prison” pipeline.
I’m so glad I left Oakland two years ago. It’s a lost cause.
It often seems like the civil rights generation, which was so determined to make the country live up to its stated ideals, did a poor job raising their own kids. It’s showing up now with the utter degradation that’s occurring in many of their grandkids’ generation.
Kids in Oakland schools are often kids being raised by grandparents, as dad is in prison and mom is out scoring crack.
That explains why the “responsible parents” don’t consider home schooling – those parents aren’t responsible and they aren’t around.
If the grandparents are in poor health, these kids are raising themselves.
I end up wondering why the grandparents didn’t do a better job of raising their own children.
Old Phil, I would not have survived ten minutes of life in an inner city.
Most likely neither would you.
The problems that African Americans faced in the “hoods” where the poorer among them were most easily able to find housing were overwhelming.
For a historical perspective on this, I’d love to recommend the film about life in the ghetto that I watched in the 1980’s or so. It was a vividly painful and accurate account of what was like to be a poor black living on the margins.
But alas, I can no longer find it in any movie data base. It was, IIRC, made in the 1970’s. (I think the word “Fort” was in the title – which these days only brings up Indian-Cowboy Movies.)
The reason it has been pushed to the side is that it was not an upbeat movie. No “To Sir With Love” kinda fuzzy reminder that African American males can be teachers working with troubled youth for the good of society.
Instead what the movie portrayed was the day to day details of the lives of a young couple hampered at every turn by the type of frustration where if your 400 bucks of rent money is stolen, you are out on the street.
However a more recent arrival in the informational world was the New York Times’ best selling novelist Elizabeth George’s 2016 effort. At that time, she went against her lit agent and publisher’s advice and devoted a long time to putting together her evaluation of life on the fringes of society.
1 of 2
2 of 2
So in George’s novel, her research brought about the critically acclaimed book depicting one child’s decision to join a gang. The only reason he did this was to avoid having his developmentally disturbed younger brother being assaulted by sadistic thugs on a daily basis. The book’s title is “What Came Before He Shot Her.”
Few of us from middle class backgrounds can even envision the type of lives that people in the ghetto have been handed. For instance: None of the problems I had at times when living on a sometimes borderline income ever had me lying awake at night thinking my child might be told to “join our group or your mom loses her legs.”
We all think that if we had been in such horrendous circumstances, where sending our child to the local school will come with a mandated joining of a gang, our natural tendency to virtue would be this sacred protective bubble installed by God, ensuring that our little ones would never join a gang. If we doubt that such a bubble exists, we can always say “Look at Diana Ross. Her life was no picnic but she made it out of there!”
Such is our need to protect ourselves from harsh realities. Most of us are just that naive.
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Could you be thinking of “Fort Apache, The Bronx?” It’s the only “fort” title that quickly comes to mind.
Meanwhile, if that’s not it, if you can remember even one person who was in it, looking up their bio might find it easier than anything else.
It’s not just in “the hood.” That’s my point.
That is it! Thank you!
I thought maybe it had “Bronx” in the title, but dismissed it because the one and only person I now know in NYC lives in the Bronx. (Although her little neighborhood is quite gentrified, and her major complaint is about the ridiculous COV restrictions the Dems keep imposing on the city residents.)
Maybe there’s not much coverage because a school shooting in which no one dies is not a big story. It’s a local story.
Depends. Let’s see, it’s a five-hour flight…
I don;t watch the news anymore, but I seem to hear about it every time a white guy owns a gun.
I was specifically talking about the era of the grandparents. At the time of the early Civil Rights movement – circa the 1960’s.
I was doing that in order to address further the statement put forth by “OldPhil” @OldPhil @oldphil
But alas, even he disputed my statements by moving the situation into a more modern era.
I sure doubt that.
How many white guys own guns? Millions and millions, I would think. Have you heard about every one?
Based on the crime statistics I’ve seen over the past couple of years, there seem to be upwards of 20,000 homicides every year in this country, about 60 per day. How many of those do you hear about? Hardly any, I would guess.