Inside Oakland's descent into lawlessness amid sinister crime wave - with mob lootings, random shootings and brutal attacks on the elderly

Oakland is struggling to put a lid on its crime wave in part due to chronic police understaffing, a former chief claims.

The city has for as long as anyone can remember been plagued by crime, but reports rose sharply since the pandemic and are only inching down.

Among the incidents: a mass shooting at a Juneteenth celebration and an elderly Asian woman robbed outside her retirement village. 

'Oakland has never been like this. It used to be that you could say something to some of these kids,' local reverend Raymond Lankford said last year.

'Our women are being shot in their homes... If it's not safe in our homes, where is it safe?'

Violent crime is falling since last year's spike, but property crime like burglaries and car theft remains stubbornly high, and brazen.

Dozens of thieves looted a gas station after crashing a car through the glass doors, and ATM are routinely ripped out of walls and stolen.

A survey by the Koreatown Northgate Community Benefit District found 94 per cent of businesses were robbed and 92 per cent didn't bother to report it.

This, some prominent Oakland locals argued, is the central problem - the police can't keep up and both victims and criminals know it.

After the mass looting of the gas station, where $22,000 worth of goods was stolen, took nine hours for police to show up.

A Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice report in February found just 1.5 per cent of serious crimes were solved, including only 6.5 per cent of violent crimes.

This was despite the rest of California spending record amounts on policing and justice, and sending more accused criminals to jail than almost ever before.

By contrast, Oakland's budget only allows for 678 officers, including those off work for disability, the absolute bare minimum required by law.

This is just two-thirds of the 2.4 cops per 1,000 residents national average, and puts only 35 officers on patrol at a time in a city of 435,000. 

Emergency response times are the lowest in California, again due to understaffing, leading to victims not bothering to call it at all.

Police even struggle with understaffing in their records department, with obsolete software and a report management system not updated since 2006 leading to woefully inaccurate crimes statistics.

Former police chief LeRonne Armstrong, whom mayor Sheng Thao fired last year, blamed City Hall deliberately diverting money from police for the problem.

Thao last year put a hiring freeze on police, despite how understaffed it was and still is, and critics like Armstrong claim the council deliberately wants to reduce the role of police without sufficient replacement.

'There's this sense of lawlessness. This sense of, we can do whatever, there really aren't any consequences - almost like a video game,' he told The Free Press.

'Our leaders are tone-deaf.'

Armstrong claimed the problem was so obvious that lawbreakers were coming to the city for 'crime tourism'.

'Oakland's free-for-all is now attracting criminals from outside the city, Armstrong told me, because they know they can get away with it,' the outlet wrote.

Tim Gardner of the Oakland Report had a similar view: 'You have a police force that's incapacitated and a criminal population that's smart enough to recognize it, test it, and realize they can do anything they want.

'It's 100 per cent self-inflicted.'