So the San Francisco Chronicle conducted this big poll, which they’ve been splashing across the front page last week and again today. And guess what they found? San Franciscans are pissed off about pretty much everything: Homelessness. The Board of Supervisors. The Mayor. Crime. Housing prices. The School Board. Trash.

KTVU News aired a feature last night on Caltrans’ clearance of the Wood Street homeless slum. Naturally, they interviewed homeless people who have been evicted. There was one woman in particular who grabbed my heart. She was Black, middle-aged but looked old, with the worry lines of care etched into her face, and as she told her story of no place to go, her eyes filled with tears.

I have mixed feelings about the City Council’s decision to put a ballot proposition in the November election that would allow non-citizen parents of school children to vote for members of the school board.

The core problem of policing in Oakland, as in some other cities, is a lack of trust between the Black community and cops. We hear this over and over again from critics such as Carroll Fife and Cat Brooks. Black people, they say, don’t trust the police, and that trust will never be established until OPD reforms itself, or is forced into reform according to conditions set down by police critics including Fife and Brooks.

I have mixed feelings about the American Civil Liberties Union and their stance on surveillance technology. On the one hand, the ACLU has contributed invaluably to the struggles for women’s rights, gay rights and other human rights. On the other hand, their adamant opposition to surveillance seems misguided, and colored by a certain anti-police bias that runs through the ACLU’s history.