The Bay

A spate of deadly shootings across the Bay are highlighting an ongoing surge in gun violence in the region, especially since the pandemic, which in part interrupted some of the work that had been trying to prevent gun violence. In Oakland, community groups and the city’s Department of Violence Prevention (DVP) say it's going to take creative thinking to solve this problem — and that includes inves...

The recent killing of Banko Brown by an armed Walgreens security guard has put a focus on the work of these employees. While they often take on similar roles to cops, armed security guards are not public employees but often low-paid civilians with few protections when they kill someone on the job, and they don’t get proper training on things like use of force or de-escalation either. That’s all su...

Designated “the fastest-growing sport in America” by the Sports and Fitness Industry Association in the last three years, pickleball is blowing up here in the Bay Area, too. Local enthusiasts say the sport has helped them stay active during the pandemic and find community.  Today on the Bay: a field trip to Bushrod Park, the heart of Oakland’s pickleball scene, to see what all the hype is about. ...

So much of life is online these days, but barriers to internet access remain, especially for folks who are unhoused. Resources at public libraries, like free Wi-Fi, are aiming to fill that gap. A 2022 study by the American Library Association found that 93 percent of libraries provide or plan to provide Wi-Fi 24 hours a day because of the high demand for internet. But San Francisco’s Eureka Valley...

San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood has been at the forefront of the opioid epidemic, amassing a reputation as a place of open air drug dealing, crime, and homelessness. Viral images and videos of open-air drug use have been seen around the world. Some argue publishing pictures and videos of people experiencing addiction is dehumanizing and has long-term effects that follow them for the rest o...

Caste is a hierarchical system, based on birth, that affects South Asians on the subcontinent and around the world.  Many hesitate to discuss it out in the open. But over the years, people from marginalized caste backgrounds have been speaking up — including in Silicon Valley, home to thousands of workers of South Asian descent, where allegations of caste discrimination have hung over some of the...

San Francisco is re-upping a program to make catalytic converters more traceable, in hopes of slowing down the theft of the highly sought-out car part containing highly valuable metals. The program comes months after Gov. Gavin Newsom signed two statewide laws hoping to address the problem, which has caused big headaches for car owners. When people lose their catalytic converters, they sometimes h...

Gov. Gavin Newsom has been talking a big game about CARE (Community Assistance, Recovery and Empowerment) Court, the state’s new plan for treating people with severe mental illness. CARE Court, which every county in California will have to implement by next year, focuses on steering people suffering from severe psychosis, such as schizophrenia, and addiction into treatment. It will allow first res...

In Santa Clara County, the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band is fighting for one of their most sacred sites, known as Juristac. Beginning In the late 1700s, Spanish colonizers forcibly removed the tribe from Juristac, and currently, the land is owned by a private firm that has proposed a plan to develop a mine onsite.  For the last 7 years, the tribal band, with support from many residents and local officia...

It’s a bad time to be an Oakland Athletics fan. First off, they're just having an awful season. But the A's are also the latest pro sports team to announce plans to leave Oakland. And earlier this week, the A’s made a significant step towards a future in Las Vegas, as Nevada Gov. Joe Lombardo announced a tentative agreement with the A's over public funding for a new A’s ballpark on the Las Vegas s...

Two 17-year old girls working at a Popeye’s in East Oakland have filed labor complaints, alleging harassment and potential violations of child labor law. They say they’ve witnessed violence at work and experienced harassment, and that one 13-year old employee was working longer than the legal limit for minors. At least one state agency is now investigating the complaints. For labor advocates and f...

With the end of a pandemic-era immigration policy known as Title 42, Bay Area cities and nonprofits in Santa Clara County have been preparing for the arrival of asylum seekers who’ve been waiting months, if not years, to find refuge in places like the South Bay. Title 42 left thousands of asylum-seekers on the other side of the U.S. border or back to the countries they fled. Since the Biden admini...

Cleo Moore has been waiting for justice for years. On Jan. 6, 2017, SFPD Officer Kenneth Cha shot her son, Sean Moore, outside of his home after responding to a noise complaint. Moore died in 2020 from complications related to the shooting. Moore's family saw a glimmer of hope in 2021, when then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin charged Cha with manslaughter and assault, marking the second time the c...

The Oakland teacher’s strike ended on Monday, when the teachers union reached a tentative agreement with the district. Classes were canceled for tens of thousands of students for seven days. The deal not only includes pay raises for teachers and other school staff, but also so-called “common good” proposals that address broader community needs, like support for unhoused families and improvements t...

Child care is too expensive and inaccessible for kids and families. That’s why in 2018, San Francisco voters approved Baby Prop. C, a tax on commercial landlords that would be used to expand access to child care, particularly for lower-and middle-income families, and to help pay early educators a living wage. After being held up in court battles spearheaded by taxpayer and business groups, money f...

In late April, a 24-year old transgender Black man named Banko Brown was shot and killed by an armed Walgreens security guard on San Francisco’s Market Street for allegedly shoplifting. The guard was held for a few days but has since been released. And now, community members and the Board of Supervisors are pressuring District Attorney Brooke Jenkins to release the video footage of the shooting. J...

For the last 100 years, the Hetch Hetchy reservoir in Yosemite has supplied millions of Bay Area residents with some of the cleanest water in the country. A feat of human engineering, Hetch Hetchy has both an impressive and tainted history; its construction came at both an environmental and human cost to the indigenous people of the area. Now, climate change is making it harder to manage the reser...

The federal COVID emergency will officially end on Thursday. But for those living with long COVID, the end of the pandemic couldn’t feel farther from reality.  Dubbed by some as a “mass disabling event,” long COVID has left millions of Americans unable to work and stuck navigating the system of disability benefits in order to survive. Doctors and researchers have yet to pin down the exact cause of...

On Thursday morning, nearly 3,000 educators and staff at the Oakland Unified School District went on strike in a push for higher wages and better resources. The union and the district have not had an active contract since the last one expired in October. This marks the third walkout this year and the second official strike since 2019. Guest: Erin Baldassari, KQED reporter Episode transcript This e...

San José Mayor Matt Mahan has been pushing to build more emergency interim housing as a cost-effective approach to get unhoused residents off the streets more quickly. It’s intended to be a temporary step toward more permanent housing. But one big roadblock to building it? Local housed residents, who say they want to see solutions to homelessness...just not in their own backyards. Guest: Guy Marzo...

BART Board Director Lateefah Simon is running to replace East Bay Rep. Barbara Lee in Congress, who herself is running to replace Sen. Dianne Feinstein. On KQED’S Political Breakdown podcast, Simon talks with Scott Shafer and Marisa Lagos about growing up with a single mom in San Francisco’s Western Addition, her early work with Kamala Harris, facing threats in office, and her run for Congress. Ep...

Alameda County’s eviction moratorium helped keep hundreds, potentially thousands of people housed during the pandemic. But after increased pressure from local landlords who face hundreds of thousands of dollars in unpaid rent, as well as the deaths of two tenant-friendly members of the Alameda County Board of Supervisors, the county has decided to officially end the eviction moratorium at midnight...

Eastwind Books, one of the nation’s first Asian American bookstores, has closed its doors after more than four decades in business. The store has been run by Harvey and Beatrice Dong, two activists who were part of civil rights movements in the Bay Area in the 1960s, including the fights over ethnic studies and evictions at the International Hotel in San Francisco. Now in their seventies, Harvey a...

There were more than 2,700 incidents of antisemitic harassment, vandalism, and assault in 2021, the highest count since the Anti-Defamation League’s Center for Extremism began tracking these incidents four decades ago.  In October, a group called the Goyim Defense League hung a banner off I-405 in Los Angeles that read “Kanye Was Right About the Jews.” Although this happened in southern California...

To commemorate National Poetry Month, producer Maria Esquinca talks to Bay Area-based poet Antmen Pimentel Mendoza about his Chapbook collection, “My Boyfriend Apocalypse.” He talks about surviving the apocalypse, queer love, and finding play in poetry.  You can listen to Antmen Pimentel Mendoza read live on Tuesday, April 25, at 7 p.m. at Fabulosa Books in San Francisco. You can find him on Twitt...