Irony out of Oakland: Cameraman Attacked Outside School, While Filming Education Puff Piece
11/09/2012
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A reader writes:
TV cameraman attacked outside tough high school... 
http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Oakland-robbers-assault-rob-TV-cameraman-4020757.php 
...while filming a piece about how thanks to Prop 30, the schools stand on the edge of a new golden age: 
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/video/7932012-teachers-celebrate-passage-of-california-prop-30/


From the newspaper article:

11-08) 11:36 PST OAKLAND — A KPIX news cameraman was punched and robbed Wednesday during a live broadcast outside an Oakland high school, the latest in a spate of holdups targeting the media, police said.


You can see the camera swing wildly in the last one or two seconds of both clips.

Reporter Anne Makovec and cameraman Gregg Welk were on the air shortly after noon outside Oakland Technical High School near the corner of 42nd Street and Broadway. They were at the school to do a story on the passage of Proposition 30, the tax measure preventing deep budget cuts to education. 
As Makovec was finishing her report, police said, five men rushed up and grabbed a $6,000 camera from the tripod. Viewers saw the live picture being jarred and turned sideways for about two seconds. 
One of the assailants punched Welk in the mouth before the group fled in a Mercedes-Benz, which apparently was accompanied by a Lexus, police said. ... 
Monifa said the station would continue to report in Oakland but declined to specify whether any changes would be made to protect its crews. 
Sources, however, said all KPIX crews covering stories in Oakland would be accompanied by security guards, day or night, effective immediately. 
The incident comes amid a series of robberies in which the news media have been victims throughout Oakland, often in broad daylight. 
Veteran Oakland Tribune photographer Laura Oda has twice been robbed of cameras since July. 
Late one night in June, a KTVU news crew was robbed of a computer, camera and tripod by several men who pushed their way into their van parked on Redwood Road in the Oakland hills. 
In May, a man stole a camera and tripod from a KNTV crew at 20th Street and San Pablo Avenue.


With Jerry Brown on top of the world again and talking about running for a fourth term as governor of California, I recall when I met him a decade ago. When Brown was mayor of Oakland, I attended a Milken Institute speech he gave in which he explained what he had learned as mayor. I was quite astonished, because the gist of his speech, as far as I could tell, was that being mayor of Oakland had been a most eye-opening experience for an old liberal like him, that he had concluded that the main hope for Oakland was persuading poor people to move out and for the the poor people who insisted upon staying, trying to get their kids to go to a public military school he started to get some discipline pounded into their dysfunctional heads.

Unfortunately, Brown is a remarkably incomprehensible public speaker for somebody who has won Presidential primaries in three separate decades. I don't think many other people in the room could follow his convoluted and halting sentences. I finally obtained a tape of the speech to see if it could be turned into an article, but my editor and I eventually agreed that even that Jerry's quotes had too high of a Gibberish Quotient for readers to follow.

I give Obama a hard time for being a moody introvert of a politician, but compared to Jerry Brown, he's practically Arnold Schwarzenegger. And yet Brown will be governor of California off and on over at least a 40 year span, and perhaps 44 years, plus he won multiple Democratic Presidential primaries in other states in 1976, 1984, and 1992. What a long strange trip it's been.

Now, that I think about it, why not Jerry Brown for President in 2016? Who is his competition? Hillary? Biden? That would be quite a field. The Democrats could really use some of that Senior Citizen Mojo that's been working for Republican nominees so well since 1992.

According to this Wiki page from the future, Jerry does run, but the 77-year-old drops out after a poor performance in the 2016 Iowa primaries. So, now we know...

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