'Pirates' in San Francisco Bay sinking sailing school for kids: owner
Seafaring bandits in the San Francisco Bay put a local, nonprofit sailing school for kids on the cusp of closing after they stole half its fleet
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"Pirates" in the San Francisco Bay are sinking a nonprofit boating school for kids as homeless bandits wreak havoc along the Oakland and Alameda shores.
Kame Richards, who owns the Alameda Community Sailing Center, said that four of their eight safety boats, which cost between $25,000 and $35,000 each, had been stolen and destroyed by seafaring bandits.
"We cannot run our program without these boats," Richards wrote in a letter to a local municipal commission that focuses on enforcement in the bay.
"The response we received from APD (Alameda Police Department) was that they could do nothing, and a warning not to approach the perpetrators if we located our boats."
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Powerboats were allegedly stolen by "pirates" after they were docked in the Oakland Harbor area (Dan Hill / Fox News)
Since the summer, burglars have been using small boats to raid yachts and houseboats in the Oakland-Alameda Estuary, which is populated by marinas with over 3,000 slips, to steal anything of value.
Then, they either sink the ships or dump whatever is left of them miles away in the Oakland Harbor or along its shorelines.
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For months, local residents have banged the table and called police and government leaders to address this issue, which is finally being taken seriously, said Dan Hill, who lives on his boat with his family.
Several residents, including Richards, shared personal anecdotes of physical confrontations and scary run-ins with the boat burglars during Wednesday's San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission's (BCDC) enforcement meeting.
Before and after photos from an alleged "pirate" attack in the Oakland Estuary (Dan Hill / Fox News)
The sailing school needs one safety boat for each group of six sailboats on the water, Richards said, but it's on the cusp of closing.
"If we don't have enough safety boats, we can't put enough kids on the water," she said during the meeting. "We had all hands on deck to retrieve this stuff, and it took 35 hours to get a police report number from the Alameda Police Department.
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"We called them right after it happened, and they said, ‘Wait, we’ll send an officer.' It's dinner time, and there's still no officer. . . . Then they said they can't help us, and their best advice is to find the boats but don't approach the perpetrators."
Then, jurisdictional issues came into play.
Most of the attacks happen in the 800-foot-wide estuary that separates Oakland and Alameda.
Even though a crime could happen in Alameda, it falls under Oakland's jurisdiction if the stolen boat floats into Oakland's waters, Richards said.
"We declined to heed that advice (from police)," Richards said in her letter to the commission. "We were able to retrieve all of our boats, and another RIB (rigid inflatable boat) that was stolen from the Golden Gate Yacht Club (at the Marina in San Francisco).
"How many replacements of these boats will our insurance company pay for before they drop us? We cannot continue our programs without the RIBs and cannot continue without insurance."
Suspected pirates using a small boat to board large ships and yachts in Oakland Harbor. (Dan Hill / Fox News)
Former harbor master Brock de Lappe said he asked the commission whether there's currently another other issues that "poses a great threat to San Francisco Bay."
"I was told no," de Lappe said. "This is the top problem."
Where are the bandits coming from?
Residents and the local municipal commission said the "pirates" came from Oakland's exploding homeless crisis that has overflowed into the waterways.
The city of Alameda, which is an island with a population of just under 80,000, is rated as one of the best suburbs to live in, according to niche.com.
The city of Alameda, which is an island and considered a suburb of Oakland, is separated from Oakland by a waterway. (Niche.com / Fox News)
It's neighbor across the water, Oakland, has been crippled by homelessness, which a neighborhood advocate told Fox News Digital in a previous interview has made the city "unlivable."
Alameda Police Chief Nishant Joshi told Fox News Digital that his department is working with the Oakland PD and the Coast Guard, which has a base in the estuary, to curtail this issue by taking "a regional approach."
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"In the waterways, it's very difficult to draw a line," Joshi told Fox News Digital in an interview Monday. "There are no roadways or fence lines, so we all have a shared interest, much like crime as a whole, to deal with this as a regional approach."
Watch the on-camera Zoom interview with Chief Joshi here.