As Oakland police grapple with rising burglaries, robberies and carjackings on land, residents on the water say they’re getting little help and are left on their own to chase out intruders.
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Alameda maintains a part-time maritime unit to patrol the waterways, though its officers are assigned to other duties. Oakland has one full-time maritime patrol officer, Kaleo Albino, who said he’s observed thefts spiking in the estuary over the past six weeks and has organized night patrols to help quell it. However, he’s had to contend with limited staffing and the vastness of a bay “where it’s easy to hide” and quickly dismantle a boat engine, he said.
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Now, the harbors are losing business, with slips left vacant as people become reluctant to store boats at known burglary hot spots. Encampments sprawl along the shoreline, consisting of battered dinghies, inflatable rafts, and even a former U.S. Navy vessel that appeared to house several people before it sank in December. DeLong and others say they’ve become desperate.
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Marina residents believe the “pirates” live in the half-dozen encampments scattered along the estuary, or on “anchor-out” vessels that are illegally moored on the water, though there is no hard evidence that homeless people are perpetrators. Albino surmised that one or two of roughly two dozen people living in unpermitted aquatic dwellings are committing crimes. Nonetheless, reports have surfaced in recent weeks of thieves raiding yacht clubs, sailing centers and marinas throughout the estuary, pilfering boats and stripping out the motors or painting the hulls silver to disguise them.
Last week thieves struck the Outboard Motor Shop, a repair facility near the Park Street Bridge. Under cover of night, owner Craig Jacobsen said, they loaded stolen life rafts, tool bags and other goods onto a 15-foot section of dock before towing the whole structure to an encampment at Oakland’s Union Point Park.
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Last week the commission held a hearing at its San Francisco chambers to discuss the waterfront encampments and the rise in thefts and burglaries. Adrienne Klein, the commission’s enforcement program manager, delivered a presentation on the actions that local and state officials had taken thus far: an effort by Oakland in March of this year to sweep out a camp at the Embarcadero between Dennison and Livingston streets; a $100,000 award from the state for Alameda officials to remove derelict boats from the water; and an ordinance passed by Oakland City Council in March, empowering police to seize occupied boats that are anchored illegally in city harbors.
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