I’ve met quite a few Community Safety Ambassadors while making the rounds of Downtown/Uptown. Just yesterday I was chatting with one, on Broadway. He was charming as could be, a nice, polite young man, eager to help. It’s a good program for Oakland to have. But is it worth another $1 million, which the City Council just allocated when they passed their new budget on Wednesday?

For the past few days I’ve been warning that Oakland is about to get sucked into the criminality and vandalism committed by Black Bloc-type rioters that we’ve seen in LA and SF. Well, it appears that sad milestone has now begun, with the mass looting and car fire that erupted Tuesday night on International Boulevard, in the Fruitvale District.

I want to start with this video of Gov. Newsom being interviewed on Pod Save America this past Monday. Newsom’s part starts at 1:04:05, so you can skip right to it.

The connection between Oakland and the events down in Los Angeles is that the riots and protests could easily happen here. They’ve already erupted in San Francisco, and frankly I’m a little surprised that Oakland has been so quiet.

Oakland has long manufactured demagogues from the left: Carroll Fife, Pamela Price, Cat Brooks and Nikki Bas in recent years, or Desley Brooks, Angela Davis and the Black Panthers from days gone by. In a town as “progressive” and racially mixed as Oakland, this is not surprising.