Expensive Oakland Police Security Fees Force Cancellation of Community Events

KQED's Forum

KQED

Politics, News, News Commentary

4.6 • 656 Ratings

🗓️ 8 September 2021

⏱️ 21 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

First Fridays, a popular monthly art walk and street fair in Oakland, will restart in October -- months after event organizers originally planned to resume after pandemic closures. They said they couldn’t afford a $24,000 per event fee the Oakland police charged for security. Other events have also been delayed or canceled because of prohibitively expensive security fees, which event organizers say seem arbitrary and often surface at the last minute. Oakland’s city council approved a resolution last year to change the public events permitting process, but hasn’t been implemented. We talk about the cost of putting on events in Oakland and what the city could do to address the problem. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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0:42.7	From KQED.
0:45.9	Welcome back to Forum.
0:47.1	I'm Alexis Madrigal.
0:48.5	If you want to throw a special event in Oakland, you have to go through the Oakland Police Department,
0:53.2	which gets to
0:54.2	set the price tag for the security they will provide you through an opaque process. And according to
0:59.3	new reporting by KQEDs, Nastia vonofskaya, the system is dysfunctional and is hurting cultural
1:06.1	event producers in the city. Nostia, an associate editor on the KQED Arts Desk. Welcome.
1:13.3	Thanks for having me, Alexis. And we also have one of the central sources of her story,
	...

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