Beast Blog

Preparing for National Night Out

I was forwarded the following email. It was sent by a neighborhood-active southwest Berkeley woman to a reporter at the Berkeley Daily Planet:

Hi Angela,
I wanted to let you know about what we hope will be a big event for National Night Out on Tuesday, August 5th in Southwest Berkeley. You can get some info on NNO from the Berk PD website. With many of the recent shootings, violence, drug arrests, etc. in the neighborhoods of SW Berkeley we recognized California Street as a common denominator for a lot of the crimes and problems. Some of us got together to discuss this and called our group "California Corridor". Our desire is to have healthy neighborhoods to benefit all. We include members of the Alcatraz Neighbors Assn, the Lorin District Neighborhood Assn, Lorin Safe, 63rd and 62nd St neighbors. Our plan is to have events for NNO at three locations, 62nd and 63rd St at California St, on Alcatraz at California St, and a staging area on California St from Woolsey to Fairview. We hope to have food, music, socializing and strolling among the locations.

We communicated with members of ROC (Russell, Oregon and California). They are having a potluck in Grove Park 1730 Oregon at 6:30. At 7pm they will have a stroll, encouraging members to bring flashlights, singing voices, signs and walk to California St joining us at Woolsey. Our hope is that at Woolsey and California we will have news media to give us some coverage for the neighborhood participation. Can you help us? We have appreciated your excellent coverage of the "border wars" so much.