Second Stage

Yep, the second stage has begun. I guess the rain kept them away for a night. This morning I found the taggers had visited me last night. I will of course send a picture and alert the Oakland Police that our neighborhood has garnered the attention of the local thugs. They will of course be helpless to do much since there are a lot fewer police officers around thanks to the city of Oakland’s political suicide plan, where they tax the businesses out of existence and coddle the ‘Occupy’ morons to the tune of millions they’ve stolen from us few surviving citizens still here.

Now, the battle of attrition begins. They tag us, break in to unattended houses, and make their presence known to the shop keepers and cafes in the neighborhood while passing out low priced samples of whatever drug commodity someone up the chain wants them to distribute. My friend and long time customer Dave heads our neighborhood watch, so I have to call him up to let him know this morning. I noticed they tagged a few other places besides mine. Our first weapon is clean-up the moment we get tagged. Second is Dave starts pressuring for whatever police presence he can get from the already undercut and outnumbered OPD. Third is we report the stop-in scouts like I had and don’t pass them off as a joke in a blog like I did. My bad. I should have called Dave and the police so the first report would make them take the tagging incident more seriously.

We nearly lost our neighborhood a few times in the past, where the buildings remained tagged, burglaries were common place, hoodlums roamed up and down 38^th terrorizing people in broad daylight, robbing shop owners, and gunning other thugs or kids with the wrong colors on down in the street. It was Dave, and some of the other long time residents who demanded the political idiots running the city start enforcing the law before we were wiped out, that finally turned the tide of battle. They allowed the police to bust the crack-houses across the street from me, put the career criminal parolees back in prison, and arrested the gang taggers making our neighborhood look like a ghetto.

My part in the battle was limited because I don’t sleep in the shop, although I had to sleep up on the roof a few times with my shotgun during a couple of the worst incidents. My shop was the safe zone for kids walking home from Allendale Elementary up the street from me on Penniman. On bad days I won’t go into, they knew they could use the phones, stay in my office, and sometimes wait until I closed to catch a ride home. I was taking care of my own kids at the shop so their parents knew it was safe. No thugs were allowed in front of or inside my shop and I enforced that rule in any way I had to.

Our neighborhood right now is the best I’ve ever seen it, thanks to guys like Dave. We have many families in the area with kids walking everyday to school. I don’t plan on allowing it to descend into hell again, and neither are my neighbors. If the hoodies want to find out how uncaring I am about their innocent plight to become full fledged gang-bangin’ idiots, bring it. We unfortunately don’t have ‘stand and defend’ here, but we will anyway.