InBerkeley

The Daily Californian reports:

Berkeley police are investigating a Downtown Berkeley bank robbery that occurred Monday afternoon.

Police received calls at approximately 1:40 p.m. from the Chase Bank at 2150 Shattuck Ave., said Berkeley police Officer Andrew Frankel.

An individual passed a note to a bank teller and fled the bank with an undisclosed amount of cash, he said.

“He fled the bank in an unknown direction,” Frankel said.

The suspect is described as being a 45-year-old male with a medium to heavy build wearing a black jacket and a white cap.

In my running Twitter search for “berkeley” a number of people were wondering about all the police activity on Shattuck today.

Business, Downtown, Issues

InBerkeley’s own Tracey Taylor reports on SFGate that Berkeley has been named the 43rd most dangerous city in the US according to a survey by relocation consultants Neighborhood Scout.  It’s difficult to unpick the methodology from the description on Neighborhood Scout, but Berkeley receives a “crime index” of 2 — supposedly safer than only 2 per cent of the cities in the country. By comparison, Richmond has an index of 5 and Oakland 7.

The map provided by Neighborhood Scout on Berkeley’s “crime report” shows wide variation on the safety of different neighborhoods. The area immediately to the west of the UC campus is rated safest, with a crime index of 85 (safer than 85% of US neighborhoods). The area just south of the campus, including People’s Park, has the dubious distinction of a crime index of 0.

According to the Neighborhood Scout statistics, for violent crime Berkeley actually has a lower murder, rape and assault rate than the national average. But its robbery rate is 2.5 times the national average. On property crime, however, Berkeley’s rates are way above the national average: burglary is twice, theft three times, and motor vehicle theft nearly three times the national average.

Issues

Robert McNamara, one of the more fascinating graduates of Berkeley, and the most likely war criminal, died today, aged 93. The Guardian obituary is a great read, and also provides the essential summary:

During his lifetime he was perceived as a high-flying academic, a widely admired business executive, a ruthless killer of innocent women and children, and the man who did most to alleviate the developing world’s chronic poverty.

McNamara graduated with a degree in economics from Berkeley in 1939 1937, having chosen the university when he found out tuition was only $52 a year (some things have changed a bit). He was an architect of the massive bombing of Tokyo during the Second World War. In Errol Morris’s brilliant documentary, Fog of War, he admitted to war crimes:

[The Air Force's Curtis] LeMay said, “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” And I think he’s right. He, and I’d say I, were behaving as war criminals. LeMay recognized that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?

He never said quite the same thing about the Vietnam war, although he did come to see the war as a tragic error, one for which he had enormous responsibility.

University