Oakland City Council candidate has donations stolen by homeless woman during campaign kickoff event
They say no good deed goes unpunished. An Oakland, California, City Council candidate, Charlene Wang, who is running for office on a platform of addressing the city’s homeless crisis and “skyrocketing levels of crime,” said she had a bag full of donations stolen by a homeless woman during her campaign kickoff event on Sunday. To make matters worse, she said the police never showed up when she called 911.
Wang, who is running for the at-large seat in the California city, says the homeless woman grabbed the bag — which contained about $1,000 — at Clinton Square Park at around 4 p.m. Her team confronted the woman and pleaded with her to hand over the bag, but in the end, she made off with her ill-gotten gains, Wang said.
Video of the interaction shows Wang begging the disturbed woman to hand the bag back, but the homeless woman gets angry and refuses to turn it over.
Wang’s team tried calling homeless services, but they were not available on the weekend. They then called the police, who never showed up, having said there were 250 other calls ahead of their incident.
“The complete lack of response we saw from both mental health and police services was unacceptable,” Wang told Fox News digital. “I’m committed to hiring more police and improving mental health services to bring down response times and get people the help they need.”
Wang’s main policy goals include addressing public safety, reducing the cost of living, and implementing a new strategy for homelessness. She plans to provide homeless people with housing, social services, and a job with a new Oakland Corps program to clean up trash and plant trees with the goal of helping to turn their lives around.
In terms of crime, Wang plans to invest in technology and hire more police, noting that Oakland ranks among the nation’s highest in terms of violent crime rates while the police force is unusually small with far below the national average of police per capita.
Oakland has faced mounting issues such as housing costs, homelessness, and crime in recent years, with Wang hoping to tackle these issues if elected. Wang is a Democrat who previously worked for the Biden-Harris administration in the Department of Transportation (DOT), although she is running in a nonpartisan election, and no candidates will have a party affiliation listed on the ballot.
