I’d wager that most people who follow the news think that Judge Robert Warshaw is going to lift the Negotiated Settlement Agreement (NSA) against the Oakland Police Department sometime this year. Indeed, I reported on that possibility last March. But suddenly, there’s increasing feeling that Warshaw is intent on continuing the NSA for even longer.

There is no way to end homelessness in Oakland anytime in the foreseeable future. Homelessness is a national problem. Until this is recognized, it’s pointless to talk about ending it on our own. 

Soleil Ho has been the San Francisco Chronicle’s restaurant critic since 2019. She had a hard act to follow in replacing her predecessor, Michael Bauer. I give her credit for doing a good job. She liberally expanded the traditional beat of a restaurant critic to include pop-ups, food trucks and little mom-and-pop ethnic eateries. But something she wrote yesterday bothers me.

LaMonte Ford, a homeless person who lives at the Wood Street encampment, makes a poignant plea for dignity and understanding in a lengthy op-ed piece he wrote in yesterday’s San Francisco Chronicle. He portrays the Wood Street “Commons,” as he calls it, as a charming, neighborly community, a sort of Mayberry of West Oakland that features “dinner parties and performances [and] gardens,” where happy residents “shop together, pool [our] resources and try to repurpose” thrown-away stuff they find in the streets. Wood Street dwellers, he tells us, are “artists, activists, chefs, carpenters, teachers, students, and caretakers.”

Get Boudin-ed, or Boudinized: verb; to get run out of office like Chesa Boudin

Give credit to that crusading figure from the 1970s, the Black Panther’s Angela Davis, for introducing a neologism that’s likely to quickly become relevant. Davis long ago faded from the headlines but the Oakland native is still out there, along with her fellow radicals Cat Brooks, Carroll Fife and Pamela Price, breathing new life into a Black Panther ideology that long seemed dead.