BERKELEY—Berkeley police said today they can’t explain the rash of armed robberies that has fueled a 15-percent rise in violent crime here since 2006. In a report to the Berkeley City Council Tuesday evening, police said there were 213 robberies in the city between January and June of this year, up from 171 during the same time period last year.
“The trend is something that’s been very troubling in the Bay Area and is very troubling for us,” said Berkeley Police Department Sgt. Mary
Kusmiss, adding that although the “huge influx of students and visitors” to Berkeley could contribute to the upswing in robberies, “there’s not anything that’s really obvious” about why so many are occurring.
About 50 percent of people arrested for crimes in the city are not
Berkeley residents, the report states, a statistic reflected in the recent spate of robberies at UC Berkeley, where several suspects are minors with who have no affiliation with the university.
There have been 22 robberies on the UC Berkeley campus so far in 2007 — a jump from 12 in 2006 — with the most recent nine occurring between Sept. 1 and 10. Two cases yielded the arrests of six male juvenile suspects, but five of the nine cases remain unsolved, including two separate incidents on Sept. 9 in which suspects stole cell phones from a man and woman at gunpoint.
A Sept. 9 incident, in which a gun-toting man quietly approached eight customers at Café Strada on the corner of College Avenue and Bancroft Way and asked them to hand over their laptops, may be close to being solved, according Kusmiss of the police department. A suspect in the case has been identified, and officers showed victims and eyewitnesses photo line-ups on Wednesday in an attempt to corroborate the man’s identity, which has not been released because of the ongoing investigation.
The Café Strada robbery struck police as unusual, Kusmiss said, because of the suspect’s brazen attitude about the crime. “Most robbers don’t want to be seen,” she said. “They don’t want resistance.”
Berkeley isn’t the only city to experience a recent spike in violent crime, which includes homicides, rapes, robberies and aggravated assaults. In nearby Richmond, violent crimes rose 4 percent; in Hayward, they jumped by 21 percent; and in Oakland, violent-crime rates skyrocketed by 32 percent from 2005 to 2006.
In a Sept. 10 incident, two 14-year-old males took a UC Berkeley graduate student’s backpack, kicked him and shot him with three BBs. Campus police later arrested them on charges of robbery, conspiracy, assault with a deadly weapon, battery with serious injury and resisting arrest.
“Even though we don’t have a good sense of why they’re happening, we have a fair number of cases that are closed by arrest,” Kusmiss said. “We just hope that we’re able to keep chipping away at it.”
Earlier this month, two men and one juvenile allegedly ordered three
Berkeley Ace Hardware employees to an upstairs manager’s office at gunpoint after the University Avenue store closed. There, they used an array of merchandise to attempt to open the store’s safe, but when the effort proved fruitless, they tied the employees up, bound their mouths with duct tape and fled with cash and several household items. One employee was treated at an area hospital for a head injury; all three suspects were arrested later that evening and booked for robbery, kidnapping, false imprisonment and assault with a deadly weapon.
Despite the boldness of the incident, one store employee said she wasn’t surprised to learn of the robbery.
“I think that something like that was going to happen at some point,” said the employee, who declined to be identified for this story. “Robberies happen all the time. It’s 2007 — times are changing.”
The employee said the Berkeley Police Department was “very effective” in solving the case. “The police were wonderful,” she said.
Berkeley police have been working to combat elevated crime rates since earlier this year, when the city council approved $100,000 for uniformed officers and undercover narcotics agents to patrol Shattuck and Telegraph Avenues. To date, these undercover operations have yielded 31 drug sales involving 35 suspects; 29 of them have been arrested. The remaining six are wanted on outstanding warrants. Police also seized $9,000 in cash and one handgun during the stings.
UCPD will add two to four more patrol officers to the southern side of the
UC Berkeley campus, where the majority of the on-campus robberies have occurred.
“Typically, with the influx of students in the fall, we do see an increase of criminal activity, usually of thefts of laptops or iPods, but clearly
we have seen a significant increase from this year to last year,” said UC
Police Department Lt. Mitch Celaya in a campus press release. “Early on,
UCPD identified additional resources to put into the south side of campus to address the violent street crime. We are going to continue to look at how best to deploy these individuals to address this crime trend.”
UCPD and the Berkeley Police Department are collaborating on current investigations and will continue to work together, representatives of both organizations said.
Talia Kennedy is a student at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of
Journalism. She can be reached at tmkennedy@berkeley.edu.
Staying Safe
In light of the recent string of robberies, the UCPD has made recommendations about how to avoid becoming a robber’s target.
* Be cautious and aware of your surroundings at all times.
* Do not wear earphones or talk on the phone when walking at night.
* Do not carry your laptop in an obvious laptop case.
* Do not walk alone at night.
* Report suspicious activity.
* Stay informed.
To make an emergency call on the UC Berkeley campus, dial 911 from landline phones or (510) 642-3333 from cell phones. Non-emergencies on campus can be called in to (510) 642-6760.
To dial emergency services within the city of Berkeley, call 911 from a landline phone and (510) 981-5911 from cell phones. For non-emergencies, call (510) 981-5900.
For more safety information, visit the UCPD website at police.berkeley.edu or the Berkeley Police Department website at www.ci.berkeley.ca.us/police.