More vigilantes? A shooting yesterday afternoon in the Loin may have been an attempt to clean up the neighborhood. At around noon yesterday, authorities found a man with non-life threatening wounds after hearing reports of one shot being fired. The shooter was arrested a few hours later, after what the report called an "intense" building search. Witnesses say the shooter was acting as an armed vigilante of some sort, but the cops won't comment about that. The shooter may also have shot someone on Sunday; the cops are investigating that too. more ›

[sorry we're late today!] more ›

Your Black Muslim Bakery update: the business is being liquidated in an involuntary bankruptcy proceeding (they have almost $1 million in debt) after a number of unnamed potential buyers dropped out, and the 19-year-old arrested for shooting journalist Chauncey Bailey now says (video clip) he was beaten and coerced into a false confession to the murder. The Oakland PD homicide officer assigned to the case says that's false and they have a taped confession where alleged shooter Devaundre Broussard calmly and openly discussing the facts of the case. Meanwhile, Rep. Barbara Lee is now saying she regrets having supported Your Black Muslim Bakery in the past. more ›

Authorities are worried that the violent weekend is a harbinger for a bad July 4th. With 12 people dead (two more people were shot after the articles about 10 people killed went up), and half of those killings in Oakland, the Oakland PD is going to be upping patrols this Wednesday. more ›

Yuck. A SFPD cop was arrested for soliciting a 14-year-old prostitute in Oakland. The cop's a motorcycle squad supervisor and is a 37-year veteran of the force. The 14-year-old said it was her first time on the streets, the cop was apparently cooperative when the Oakland PD caught the two of them in his car, and told the Oakland officers that he thought the girl was 18. more ›

of joining the group. Within an hour! more ›

The Oakland PD has arrested a man for the shooting of Antar Bey, the 20-year-old leader of a Black Muslim organization in Oakland. The police had been working to rule out any possible assassination attempts, in light of the fact that after the death of its founder and Antar Bey's father, Yusuf Bey, two other members of the Black Muslim group had been shot under mysterious circumstances in the last two years. The president and CEO of Your Black Muslim Bakery was found in a shallow grave in the Oakland hills in 2004, and Bey's adopted brother was wounded by a gunman outside his house just this June. Antar Bey's killing appears to be just a random carjacking, and unrelated to any political strife in the organization. Well, in lighter news, a guy in Blackhawk (near Danville) was driving along and thought he hit a deer. He pulled over to see what happened. No deer..... -- until a second car drove by, and hit the deer a second time. The deer went flying -- and hit the first driver. First man broke his ankle. Cops are still looking for the second driver. Deer was pronounced dead on the scene. And in the wake of the Yes on I vote in SF (disapproving of military recruiting in schools), Bill O'Reilly's called for terrorists to destroy Coit Tower. Why call for terrorists to do it when we can use budget cuts to do the same thing? Mayor Gav brushed it off, saying, "remember that guy wanted to have me arrested last year?" (for the gay marriages). And after the jump, a recap of all the blotter pictures since June. Previous updates here and here. more ›

The Daly City vice squad's running sting operations targeting immigrant-owned stores, where sales clerks who don't speak English have been selling beer to underage kids. The Daly City police department is unsympathetic to the clerks' claims (through interpreters) that they don't know how to read the IDs they're produced, saying that the clerks should have been instructed that you can't sell to anyone with the "I'm Not 21" red stripe running down the side of their license. To be fair, the cops had sent all the local stores a notice saying that they were going to be sending underage decoys in to try to buy beer. Weird. A foot-high pile of feathers was found scattered over the block of 2nd Avenue and Clement. Authorities are baffled. They got one of those street sweepers to wet down the feathers so they could sweep 'em up. The other day, Matt Drudge released footage that he claimed was from an Oakland sideshow, where a woman was reputedly beaten to death for talking to the police. The Oakland Tribune has since figured out that the footage is actually from a 2002 DVD called, "World's Wildest Street Fights Vol. 1." The Oakland PD remains interested in hearing if anyone has any information about the footage, but Drudge is now no longer returning phone calls. more ›

Traffic on southbound 880 was backed up for five hours yesterday after a CHP officer shot and killed a delusional man in Fremont. The 30-something year old man was being taken to the hospital by his parents because of his suicidal behavior, when he jumped out of the moving car and rolled into a ditch on the side of the road. His parents pulled over and were attempting to coax him back in the car when the CHP officer showed up. The man, who weighed about 230 pounds, then began grunting at and lunging at the officer, who first pepper-sprayed him, then shot him when he didn't stop. Traffic backed up for 10 miles, all the way to San Leandro. More anarchist fallout -- SF police chief Heather Fong is personally reviewing all the 911 and radio tapes from last month's Black Block G8 protest fiasco, where a cop ended up with a fractured skull. The tapes show a number of frantic Mission residents reporting rocks being thrown into cars and a dispatcher that kept getting 22nd and 25th Street mixed up. Poor Officer Shields -- the tapes show that he was so overwhelmed and alone, he had to call in his own broken skull to HQ. And eeps, the Oakland PD is investigating a mysterious kidnapping, attack, and sexual assault on an Oakland girl, who was left for dead on a cul de sac in a Hayward neighborhood. The 16-year-old girl, who was drifting in and out of consciousness, reported that she had been stabbed in the heart. more ›

Anarchist update! So Officer Peter Shields, the cop whose head got smashed in lieu of the state's, has been discharged from the hospital, with seven stitches. Our boy Gavvy has announced a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest, and the police officers' union will kick in another $5000. So it turns out Shields and his partner were accidentally left alone to deal with the 30 breakoff yayhoos on 23rd Street because of problems with the SFPD police radio, so they had no backup when the anarchists tried to set their car on fire. The police union has also lodged a complaint that they were told not to take any action against the protestors, even though cops saw a number of them in the act of vandalizing stores. The National Lawyers' Guild, representing the anarchists, has now moved from police brutality arguments to mistaken identity ones, and the DA gets the case today. And in Oakland, one very persistent bank robber has finally been caught, after robbing the same bank five times. Each time, he'd bring a note, take the money, and then walk to nearby Summit Hospital to change clothes. Before this, he robbed the same bank in San Francisco five times too. "He was a creature of habit," the Oakland PD said. "He had a penchant for doing the same bank over and over." more ›

75 Oakland PD officers were called in to assist a party on a Blue and Gold Ferry that got a little out of control on Sunday. The boat made an emergency docking to break up the several fights that had broken out among the 650+ passengers, and to get medical attention for another passenger that had passed out. UC Berkeley has confirmed that its chapter of the Kappa Alpha Psi frat was involved and is investigating. A previous Kappa Alpha Psi party in 2000 led to a riot on Telegraph Avenue of overflow attendees denied entry. Also on Sunday, a sewer exploded in San Jose. Four manhole covers blew off after someone put something explosive into the system. Beans, beans, the magical fruit. more ›

The hard-bitten prose of the Tenderloin Dashiell Hammett returns with an update of the SFPD Northern District crime blotter (mirrored on sfwall.net). A highlight: man walking around trying all the door handles on cars, with his ding-dong hanging out. As our laconic narrator tells us,

One might call this brand of incident a crossover crime. If the suspect fails at one, he may succeed at another. We're being factitious here of course. Suffice it to say that the man was using his hands when he tried to open the car doors.

You know how on Murder She Wrote, you were always like, why does anyone ever invite Jessica Fletcher anywhere, because someone always gets murdered when she's around? Well, Jessica Fletcher must be in San Francisco, because there's been four separate murders this week. On Thursday, two people were killed in the Alamo Square area (one at McAllister and Lyon, and another at Eddy and Scott), and over the weekend, two people were killed in the Potrero Hill area (one at 20th and Tennessee, another at 22nd and Vermont). In our own Casuistry incident, three teens in Pleasanton have been arrested for murdering a cat and hanging its body from a noose over a train trestle for passersby to see. Who comes up with ideas like this? And Oakland's going with humili-tainment as its latest get-tough-on-prostitution tactic. The Oakland PD will be installing cameras in areas known for prostitution and johns who are arrested for solicitation may have their pictures put up on billboards and bus stops. Dang! Adding insult to injury, they'll also take your car ("Come to Oakland in a Porsche, leave on AC Transit"), so there's that additional risk of waiting for a bus stop that has your picture on it. Oakland's not messing around. more ›