On Saturday, at about 3:45 pm, I was walking across Grand Avenue at Webster. I had the streetlight in my favor, and I was in the crosswalk. Suddenly, I heard an enormous roar, and a mob of dirt bikers was coming at me. They blew right through the red light and came within inches of running me down. All the while, of course, they were doing wheelies and having a wonderful time.
Can we talk? These thugs are dangerous, inconsiderate morons who haven’t been raised right. You bet I’m pissed. Here’s my question: How come the Oakland Police Department never stops them?
OPD is rightfully obsessed with sideshows. But these dirt bike events clearly pose a greater risk to pedestrian safety than side shows, and they also interfere with normal, legal traffic. Anyone who’s downtown on weekend afternoons has seen them. There can be fifty or more vehicles, closing down an entire stretch of roadway and preventing innocent pedestrians, like me, from crossing the street. And they never stop for red lights. Why does OPD do nothing?
Although cops use the lame excuse that they don’t stop the hoodlums “for safety reasons,” there can be only one actual explanation: Someone has told OPD “Hands off. Don’t stop the dirt bikers.” The City Council? The Police Commission? The Chief of Police? We can only guess, but it has to be someone powerful enough to be obeyed. What is this mysterious authority’s reasoning? It’s obvious. The riders are primarily young men of color. That is the constituency Oakland favors. If you’re Carroll Fife, or Barbara Lee, or any one of those “progressives,” your attitude is, “Hey, they’re just misunderstood kids having a good time. They’ve suffered enough in their lives because of White racism, so don’t be a Grinch and take their fun away.”
Well, I’ll be the Grinch. Let them figure out other ways to have fun. Allowing them to run feral in the streets is exactly the problem in Oakland: the authorities feel sympathetic to people like that, including the criminals who shoplift from our shops, resell their stolen goods at Lake Merritt, and cause all the mayhem that has ruined Oakland. Rather than excusing them as just kids doing what kids have always done—which is a lie—why don’t our fearless leaders say, “Let’s stop these dirt bikers now, and get them into the criminal justice system, before they grow up to be violent felons.” We’re raising a generation of predators in Oakland; the authorities know it, and yet they continue to offer excuse after excuse for not doing anything about it.
By the way, earlier on the same day (Saturday) I saw another swarm of dirt bikers invade Lakeside Park. They were roaring along the paths and sidewalks and tearing up the lawns where normal people go to enjoy a warm Spring day, and then they drove the wrong way on Bellevue Avenue, the main road, on a busy day when many cars were attempting to drive through. So this problem with dirt bikers is getting worse. The more the police refuse to get involved, the more the dirt bikers know they can do anything they want.
If you really want to know what caused the conservative backlash for Trump, it’s because Americans across the land are seeing the same, or similar, things in their cities and towns: thugs running amok and getting away with it. Cops refusing to act, lenient District Attorneys refusing to indict, liberal judges letting these perps off, and “progressive” politicians saying that anyone who’s bothered by this behavior is a racist. Americans by the millions are, like me, fed up with it. We know that this toleration of deviance is devastating our country and inimical to our own personal safety and welfare. So Oakland Police Department, hear me out. You know you have no stauncher supporter in this whole damned city than me. As your ally, I’m asking you, Who told you not to interfere with the dirt bikers? Because someone did, that’s for sure. Otherwise, you’d be out there, busting them, like you should, and confiscating their vehicles.
Steve Heimoff