I’ve referred to Rajni Mandal here several times and I gladly do so again today because he’s become an invaluable source of information for me and, thus, for you. Citizen Rajni, let me remind you, independently and indefatigably covers the meetings of the Oakland Police Commission, and reports on his findings. I find myself utterly relying on his reporting and I trust him 100%. His analyses are spot on.

The dirt bike thugs were out again yesterday afternoon, terrorizing Grand Avenue. (I keep waiting for one of them to topple over backwards and get run over by the others.) I always think, any society that can’t control this organized mayhem is on the way down.

Years ago the left came upon a useful new term: “the most vulnerable.” The use it to describe a portion of the population they purport to represent. Definitions vary, but it’s most often poor people and people of color, including Latinos. The left also sometimes includes sexual minorities, Third World inhabitants, children, drug addicts, the homeless, the mentally ill, the elderly, immigrants, and people with disabilities. Obviously, these categories can and do overlap.

This is a link to a petition started by our friend Rajni Mandal, who monitors the Oakland Police Commission. The petition demands an end to the federal Negotiated Settlement Agreement, which as most of you know has been in effect for more than twenty years. Under the NSA the Oakland Police Department has lost its independence and much of its ability to ensure our public safety, all because a certain greedhead named Robert Warshaw, who runs the NSA, keeps finding excuses to keep OPD under his heel. Of course, Warshaw’s $1 million annual salary may have something to do with that!

Under Mayor Lurie San Francisco has taken unprecedented steps to clear out encampments, arrest drug dealers, remove abandoned vehicles from the streets, and stop sideshows. Berkeley is following suit, toughening its anti-encampment policies significantly last year, although some of its new ordinances continue to be—as usual—challenged in court by pro-encampment radicals. In Fremont, as we’ve seen, the same regressive forces that have stalled encampment cleanups in other cities have been unusually aggressive. As I blogged the other day, they’ve managed to coerce Fremont into partially undoing its recently-approved encampment ban, and are actively working to scuttle the remnants of the ordinance.