California Mayors Demand Surveillance Cams On Crime-Ridden Highways (arstechnica.com)

An anonymous reader shares an Ars Technica report: The 28 shootings along a 10-mile stretch of San Francisco-area highway over the past six months have led mayors of the adjacent cities to declare that these "murderous activities" have reached "crisis proportions." Four people have been killed and dozens injured. These five mayors want California Gov. Jerry Brown to fund surveillance cameras along all the on and off ramps of Interstate 80 and Highway 4 along the cities of El Cerrito, Hercules, Richmond, San Pablo, and Pinole.

Comments

Re:How about

[HornWumpus]

The bay area as a whole is a little nuts.

But SF is off the hook, batshit insane, loony left. The further you get away, the more sanity returns. (In general and Locally, LA has plenty of it's own insanity.)

The computer revolution _could not_ have happened in SF proper.

Gang Related, not random

[amxcoder]

This has been a more recent problem, and it IS gang related. Some relevant information about the problem... there are 2 feuding gangs, one from Richmond, and another from Vallejo that are having some kind of feud between each other (don't know which specific gangs). The corridor of the freeway and towns mentioned are for the most part, all the towns in the stretch between these two locations. El Cerrito is just West of Richmond, and if you travel east, there is Richmond, San Pablo, El Sobrante, Pinole, Hercules, Rodeo, Crocket, and then the bridge with Vallejo on the other side. The majority of these shootings are happening mostly at night, not during normal driving hours and almost all of them have been in this specific corridor (with a couple outliers happening near Berkeley).

These are NOT people on foot taking pot-shots at passing cars or anything of the like. These are mostly targeted, and are between multiple cars on the road, not on foot, so the perpetrators shoot and then just drive away and get off the freeway down the road. In some of these cases, one gang will in Richmond will spot a rival gang member on their turf, and chase/follow them, until the rival members gets on the freeway toward vallejo and the ensuing shooting occurs on the freeway. I think most of the shootings that I'm aware of, have happened on the East bound side, which indicates travel from Richmond toward Vallejo.

I've also heard rumors that one of the reasons the shootings have moved to the freeways, and the 2 gangs are attacking there is because the freeway does not have any "Shot-Spotter" system installed, which some of these cities in that corridor of the freeway do. I don't know if this is accurate, but it does make some sense. So in other words, if one gang intends to attack another gang IN Richmond, the shot-spotter system would detect it and they have a more likely chance of getting caught. If they follow the person onto the freeway, then open fire on them, then the Shot-Spotter systems are useless. So this could already be a case of one "safety system" pushing the violence out of the area where it has naturally occurred in the past, to a new area that does not have the same "safety system". So there is the real possibility that putting some system in place on the freeway will just push it somewhere else, maybe a worse place (for those not involved).