A female Oakland police officer who was involved in a major collision in her vehicle in East Oakland Saturday night was shot at by a male suspect while still stuck in the vehicle. The incident happened around 9:30 p.m. at the intersection of 73rd Avenue and Holly Street in East Oakland, as CBS 5 reports, and the officer was ambushed by an armed African American male in his 30's. Luckily, she was not struck by his gunfire, and was soon transported to Highland Hospital to be treated for her collision injuries.
KRON 4 puts the location of the shooting at the 1900 block of 73rd Avenue and Weld Avenue. It remains unclear whether she was pinned inside the vehicle at the time of the shooting or not.
In a show of support for the officer, Mayor Libby Schaaf and other city leaders visited her in the hospital, where she was reportedly alert and conscious.
The suspect remains at large.
Meanwhile, the Chronicle just published a piece about how high tensions are running between cops and citizens, particularly in the East Bay. The piece cites the reports of a man with a rifle on the pedestrian bridge over I-80 last week in Berkeley that set off a major manhunt, which came close on the heels of the ambush that killed three police officers in Baton Rouge.
Berkeley officer G.Y. Brown who's spent 27 years on the force tells the paper "It's absolutely gotten worse" since Ferguson, in terms of racial tensions on the streets. Brown, who is African American, says that she often gets taunted by protesters who say "You’re not really black," and "You’re token" because she's in uniform.
Sgt. Chris Stines of Berkeley, who is white, tells the paper that what really scared him recently was an incident in which police responded to a report of a man with a loaded semi-automatic rifle, which he refused to put down. The guy ended up surrendering without incident, but he said they had a difficult time clearing the crowd away for safety "because everyone had their phones out and insisted on staying to film everything."
