OAKLAND — Investigators are combing through evidence and reviewing social-media posts and surveillance-camera videos in hopes of arresting emboldened, defiant sideshow viewers who looted and burned a truck and an AC Transit bus on city streets Sunday, authorities said.
In a statement Monday, Oakland police said they had boosted staffing before the weekend in anticipation of expected sideshow activity, and saw crowds totaling a thousand people at several locations around town. Officers were also forced to respond to other calls, including three people hit in separate and unrelated shootings.
Around 8:30 p.m., police said, some sideshow viewers surrounded the truck and bus at 42nd Avenue and International Boulevard and ordered the truck’s driver out at gunpoint. Police said the truck driver was not hurt.
After some people spray-painted the truck and bus with graffiti and broke out its windows, other viewers broke into the truck and took out and looted or discarded some items, including paper products. Both vehicles were lit on fire soon after.
Oakland police said fireworks shot off and gunshots by some in the crowd delayed attempts to control traffic to allow Oakland firefighters to extinguish the flames.
“In the last of couple of years, we’re seeing a level of criminality and boldness we haven’t seen before at sideshows. We’ve never seen an AC Transit bus destroyed,” Alameda County Sheriff’s spokesman Ray Kelly said Monday afternoon.
“When the bus was on fire, we were trying to figure out where the driver and passengers were. It was a bad scene. We were taking rocks and bottles and they were shooting fireworks at us. It was just chaos.”
Investigators later found that the bus driver, unable to move because of the sideshow, had cleared her passengers off the bus and was waiting nearby when the vandalism began.
All sideshows were finished by 10 p.m., and the only reported injury came from an Alameda County sheriff’s deputy who suffered a serious knee injury during the response and received treatment at an area hospital.
A preliminary count saw officers issuing nearly 200 citations Sunday, with numerous vehicles towed and several firearms recovered. The bus loss was initially estimated at about a half-million dollars.
“The Oakland Police Department, along with our neighboring law enforcement agencies, will take a regional approach to illegal sideshow activity,” said police, who added that they plan to continue partnership with the California Highway Patrol, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office, and San Leandro, Hayward, Fremont and Alameda police departments.
Accordingly, future sideshows will be treated as large-scale mass demonstrations, with appropriate strategies and tactics as well along with significant law-enforcement agency staffing from other agencies deployed in key areas of the city, authorities said Monday.
“The Oakland Police Department is listening to the concerns of our community, and we are taking action,” Oakland police Officer Johnna Watson said Monday afternoon.
“We will continue to run day-and-night illegal sideshow details until we can deter sideshows from coming to Oakland,” Watson said.
Social–media posts captured some of the chaos from the scene Sunday night.
Contact George Kelly at 408-859-5180. Contact Harry Harris at 510-208-6443.
