Large fight in Oakland draws attention to city's downtown-uptown area
Massive fights broke out Friday night in downtown Oakland, with young crowds brawling near the Fox Theater on Telegraph Avenue.
Oakland police said officers encountered a chaotic scene between 9:30 and 10 p.m., with an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 people in the area and several fights happening at the same time, especially near 18th Street and Telegraph Avenue.
Some residents say Oakland First Fridays is drawing unruly crowds and should be shut down. But event organizers and city leaders say the official First Friday event is not the problem.
Vanessa McGhee, organizer of Oakland First Fridays, said the permitted event takes place several blocks away in the KONO, or Koreatown Northgate, district between 22nd and 27th streets on Telegraph Avenue. She said the event runs from 5 to 9:30 p.m. and draws families, older crowds, vendors, food trucks and people supporting local businesses.
"We believe the city needs to step up and figure out a way to create some programming or structure or a place for these kids to hang out in a positive way," McGhee said.
Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife said she supports Oakland First Fridays because it helps boost local businesses, but said the city is dealing with a broader crowd-control problem in the uptown and downtown areas.
"I've seen social media pages where they're coming to specifically fight," Fife said. "That is a huge problem we are trying to address."
Fife said the problem is not limited to First Fridays.
"Essentially, what we have is a festival every Friday, not just First Friday, but every Friday in the uptown-downtown area," she said. "We have to figure out how to create plans for crowd control."
Small business owners in KONO said the official First Friday event brings valuable foot traffic.
"It brings more awareness to our business," said Pierre Slack of Black Forest Kitchen. "We get a lot of repeat customers because they end up finding us here."
Oakland police said the fights were unrelated to the official Oakland First Fridays celebration and did not take place in the event's permitted area.
