Bradley Marshall Jr. parked his Chevy pickup truck next to the construction site on Linda Avenue, a tree-lined Piedmont street where he had been hired to fix a leaking waste line.

Finding no one at the customer’s, Marshall sat in the truck and waited while jotting down estimates on a clipboard. Then he heard a knock on the passenger side window and saw a figure in a ski mask. Turning to the driver’s side, he caught a glimpse of the barrel of a semi-automatic pistol aimed squarely at his head.

“I raise my hands,” Marshall said, recalling his shock that July day in 2021 as a shudder ran down his throat. “I said, ‘Just take everything.'”

Within seconds, the thieves forced Marshall into the street and fled in his Chevy, which was stuffed with expensive plumbing tools: a new $15,000 sewer flusher, saw cutter, jackhammers, two sewer snakes, extension cords, copper, and a mechanical shovel. Piedmont police later arrested three people, but Marshall said he couldn’t positively identify them because they were wearing masks.

The truck theft at gunpoint was one in a string of power tool robberies in the Bay Area over the past year, a crime that appears to be rising and bolder, leaving some contractors in a state of constant fear.

“I’ve worked down here for 20 years and it’s never been like this,” said Marshall, whose family business Harry Clark Plumbing and Heating is suffering the emotional and financial toll of these robberies. According to Marshall’s father, Bradley Marshall Sr., thieves have stolen at least eight trucks and dozens of tools from the company over the past 18 months.

Jose Ramos, a plumber at Oakland Rooter Plumbing Co., works on a sewer inspection camera in Oakland.

Stephen Lam / The Chronicle

Such is the fear in the East Bay that at a recent meeting of the Plumbing-Heating-Cooling Contractors Association in Oakland, Mr. Rooter Plumbing board member Spencer Ferguson implored his colleagues to pool their money and hire a safety consultant for active gunnery and self-defense training .

“We found a person from Los Angeles who does training on what to do if someone puts a gun in your face,” said another Oakland plumber, Heiko Dzierzon, explaining how companies that normally compete, now work together to organize a training session. The club’s chief executive, Krystal Reddoch, said she wholeheartedly supports the effort.

Statistics from law enforcement suggest the plumbers’ concerns are justified. Oakland police said they had seen a spike in armed robberies involving power tools over the past four months, and officers investigated four such robberies and made two arrests in January alone. Contractors who spoke to The Chronicle also noted incidents in Vallejo and San Francisco. No pattern was known to police departments in those cities, although a spokesman for San Francisco’s robbery department said burglaries at construction sites were common.

Some cite evidence that thieves are using digital marketplaces to offload their stolen goods — possibly the same e-commerce sites that encourage organized retail theft. Dzierzon searched eBay for a seller with a massive inventory of plumbing and power tools and 1,600 documented sales. An eBay spokesman who was shown links to the seller’s listings did not comment directly, but said the company “has zero tolerance for criminal activity on our platform and has programs and policies in place to monitor our marketplace for stolen items.” “.

Unconvinced, Dzierzon insisted e-commerce platforms were full of looted items, and said he’d seen at least one other sign of a complicated crime ring in action: Weeks ago, he received a call from Las Vegas Police Department detectives who said they had discovered a $2 million cache of tools, one of which bore the logo of Dzierzon’s company PipeSpy. The tool was worth between $1,500 and $1,800, Dzierzon said.

While break-ins and theft have always been a business hazard, plumbers and handymen say criminals have become more methodical and aggressive over the past two years. Thieves routinely stake out warehouses or follow work trucks to jobs, preying on workers who have to toil in a fixed location for long periods of time, leaving their vehicles and equipment unattended. The perpetrators are increasingly wielding weapons.

Carpenters, painters, builders and other tradesmen all need to watch out for these types of crimes, especially with empty downtown areas amid the pandemic and projects still ongoing, said Andreas Cluver, secretary and treasurer of the Alameda County Building Trades Council.

He acknowledged that Mom and Dad’s work teams are more vulnerable because they may have to park far away and lug their own power tools to a job site. In contrast, union workers in large locations typically have guards and tool sheds to lock their equipment.

This could explain why the power tool crime wave has hit small plumbing companies hard, prompting workers to compulsively check their surroundings or leave work to make sure their trucks are still parked outside.

“My crew was robbed of video equipment at gunpoint twice in three weeks,” said Ygnacio Becerra, owner of Oakland Rooter Plumbing Co., referring to a spate of robberies in the fall when his company was busy repairing sewers in Oaklands Dimond and Laurel Districts – Works that require expensive cameras with radio transmitters that can locate failed spots in sewers.

Handymen are so desperate that some require armed security guards in their contracts, while others, like Ferguson, occasionally include an extra worker in contract offers “just to watch and deter.” Some contractors are refusing to service Oakland neighborhoods they find dangerous — a plumber in Castro Valley said he’s limited his work in Oakland to big jobs at homeowners’ associations he’s known for years.

Pacific Gas & Electric Co. has hired Oakland police officers to protect construction sites, police department officials said — a utility spokesman said PG&E is “constantly evaluating the threat environment and taking appropriate action to ensure the safety of our onsite workers.” Businesses of all sizes have hardened their infrastructure and vehicle fleets, installing GPS devices and kill switches on trucks — though thieves have learned how to bypass those mechanisms, Marshall Jr. said.

Jose Ramos, a plumber at Oakland Rooter Plumbing Co., carries a sewer inspection camera to his work truck in Oakland. The company’s employees were robbed of their equipment twice in September and three of its vehicles were stolen last year.

Stephen Lam / The Chronicle

Dzierzon suffered several harrowing thefts over the past two years, including a shock on New Year’s Day 2021 when the perpetrators drove a pickup truck through the roll-up door of his Oakland store before searching the location for tools and pipe inspection cameras. Last year, robbers stopped at one of his construction sites in the Oakland hills, put a gun to the foreman’s head and ordered all workers to go behind a house while they were dumping tools from a company truck, Dzierzon said.

Though the sudden intensification of these power tool antics has left law enforcement in trouble, criminologists point to several converging factors.

“You need a few ingredients to start a crime spree, and one of them is opportunity and one is incentive,” said Stanford University law professor George Fisher. Incentives — namely needs and desires — don’t change over time, he said, but opportunities and circumstances do change.

With fewer people carrying cash these days, it’s no longer profitable to rob people on a street, which may explain why thieves have taken to breaking into garages, stealing catalytic converters, raiding drugstore shelves, or stealing tools. E-commerce sites provide a convenient portal for selling loot, often with relative anonymity.

Fisher also wondered if precautions like locks and kill switches have made thieves more confrontational, using guns to claim items they can’t easily snatch from a locked vehicle.

Oakland Police Department investigators attributed the frequency and severity of these assaults to the fact that “power tools are in high demand and victims offer little to no resistance,” a department spokesman said.

But contractors who have seen or imagined the metallic flash of a gun in their driver’s side window say they understand why a person goes deaf and obeys orders.

“We pretty much told our guys to step down, put your hands up and don’t risk your life or try to be a hero,” said Mike Bonetti of Frank Bonetti Plumbing in Castro Valley.

Bradley Marshall Jr agreed.

Since last year’s truckjacking, he’s become more nervous and strategic, only carrying tools that are “absolutely necessary” for a job. He was willing to sacrifice them, he said, because “no tool is worth your life.”

Rachel Swan is a contributor to the San Francisco Chronicle. Email: rswan@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @rachelswan

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According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there is a pension gap affecting industries dominated by hourly-paid jobs. Human Interest Inc., a small-plan 401(k) provider, believes it can help change that by offering low-fee retirement plans to franchises that employ hourly workers.

“Franchising is one of the areas that we’ve identified as a massive untapped opportunity,” said Rakesh Mahajan, chief revenue officer at San Francisco-based Human Interest. “Our mission is to help these workers so they can save for retirement. … We have the ability to help every American worker.”

Speaking to Mahajan, it’s clear that Human Interest – founded in 2015 – has big ambitions. It also operates in a crowded environment that already includes longer-term 401(k) small plan providers like Ubiquity and Betterment, as well as newer startups like Vestwell and Icon Savings Plan. However, Human Interest has some notable backers and announced a new round of funding in January, led by global investment firm BlackRock.

Part of Human Interest’s growth strategy is to integrate its 401(k) offering with payroll providers to essentially integrate its retirement plan into the installations of many companies that serve the large US service industry.

“We’ve partnered with over 400 payroll providers to be part of their weekly payroll and we’re seeing a ton of hourly workers signing up,” says Mahajan. “Now they don’t have to create a huge Excel spreadsheet, download it and manipulate it. …People in the past have shown me the screen of what to do and I said, ‘No wonder you didn’t want to manage a 401(k) plan!’”

Watch out for the gap

About 68% of workers in private industry had access to occupational pension plans in 2021, with 51% of eligible workers choosing to participate, according to the latest available data from the BLS. However, looking at the service industry, that hit rate drops to 40% and engagement to 24%.

These numbers fit with general trends showing that sectors with a high concentration of hourly workers, such as Some industries, such as services and retail, have lower access to pension plans and participation that can be half or two-thirds lower than some industries with higher coverage, according to Craig Copeland. Research director for wealth benefits at the Employee Benefit Research Institute.

According to Copeland, there is a need for more access to hourly workers’ pension plans. Automatic inclusion in pension plans for such employees could help increase coverage, he says, which was mandated by the SECURE 2.0 Act of 2022 and will start in 2024. Overall, however, Copeland sees state-mandated pension plans as having broader implications than federal regulation that relies on incentives.

“The state plans have the widest reach within these states because they require all employers [with exceptions] Putting money directly into a tax-deferred plan,” he says. “At the federal level, Congress hasn’t gone that far.”

According to payroll service provider ADP, there are currently 14 states that require small businesses to offer retirement plans. More than 30 states are now considering enacting some form of statutory retirement plan.

The combination of SECURE 2.0 and government mandates is a potential boon for providers of small plans like Human Interest. According to a company spokesman, the company currently has more than 11,000 customers and 200,000 plan participants.

Additional growth, Mahajan says, comes from working with organizations like Neighborly, a franchise model that has thousands of home care workers working on an hourly basis, including Molly Maid, Mosquito Joe and Glass Doctor. In a December announcement, Human Interest announced that its retirement plan would be offered to 4,400 Neighborly franchised locations across the United States

The goal of this and other partnerships is not only ease of use, but also relieving plan sponsors of administrative and fiduciary burdens. Human Interest acts as a 3(16) trustee and assists in the administration of the plan and compliance with ERISA guidelines. Another move Human Interest took was to move its recording services internally in 2020 to reduce fees that are often passed on to clients by recording administrators. The in-house option also improved timing and the experience for customers, according to the company.

can you hear me now

Mahajan admits that when he first retired about four years ago, he felt a bit embarrassed. He has had success creating growth at startups, but has never worked in the 401(k) space.

Now he says the “privilege” of wanting to help hundreds of thousands of American workers with their retirement plans has made him a firm believer in both the potential for growth in the field and the need for innovation. These include systems that allow new hires to start saving as soon as they start work, as opposed to the standard 20-day waiting period common to many legacy providers.

“We need a system for workers that says [when you start a job]”Here’s your 401(k) and you can start saving right away on day one,” he says. “That’s how it’s supposed to work, but it doesn’t.”

Mahajan equates this work to the time he spent at T-Mobile when it was a little-known wireless carrier that evolved into a cheaper option serving businesses and consumers across the country. The key, he says, is matching the right people with services that outperform existing systems and cost less.

“Partnership has always been the framework for me,” he says. “We’re speaking to payrolls, CPAs, brokers, and anyone who can help initiate a conversation with a potential plan sponsor. … The scale of the problem is vast, and the odds are in the trillions.”

That’s trillions with a “T,” not a “B,” Mahajan repeats, just to make sure the message and opportunity are clear.

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OAKLAND (CBS SF) — A warning went out to mountain bikers in the Oakland hills Friday, alerting to a recent spree of several armed robberies targeting cyclists.

Avid mountain biker Louisa Spier was believed to be the first victim in the recent cases.’

READ MORE: UPDATE: 3-Alarm Vallejo Hillside Blaze Quickly Halted; High Winds, Plunging Humidity Raise Fire Threat

“Everything about it just fitted me perfect. The handlebars, the seat, I could lift it up,” described Spier of her beloved Giant Trance X29 mountain bike.

On Tuesday, March 29th around noon, she was riding solo on the Skyline Boulevard median trail near Parkridge drive not far from Oakland Fire Station 21. Spier said three masked suspects cornered her.

“The first one just said, ‘Give me your bike’ and I started to get off my bike,” Spier told KPIX. “And the one on the street came and pointed a gun at me and said, ‘Give us your bike’”

Spier jumped off her bike and ran into oncoming traffic. She said a woman driving on Skyline Boulevard stopped, let her in and drove her away from the gunman.

“To have a gun pointed at your face when you’re out just trying to enjoy nature and clear your mind is like the worse possible experience,” Spier said.

Police said after Spier’s robbery, they responded to two other robberies of mountain bikers on Skyline Boulevard near Joaquin Miller Road.

On March 31st, robbers pulled a gun on a father and son to take their bike. On April 6th at the same location, robbers took two bikes from bikers who were riding together.

The biking community reported on social media there was a fourth gunpoint robbery this week on a group of three bikers at the end of Skyline Boulevard near the Clyde Woolridge Staging parking lot. Police have not confirmed a fourth case.

“We made the decision to move our practice location this week because of this rash of thefts,” said Morgan Fletcher, a mountain bike coach.

He and fellow volunteers coach about 100 middle schoolers on how to bike in the Oakland Hills. Aside from moving their location, they now strongly encourage parents to pick up their kids after each session.

READ MORE: Local Expert Concerned As COVID Spending Bill Stalls In Senate; ‘It’s Leading To A Ripple Effect’

“We’re guiding the children that if someone asks for you bike, just give them the bike,” Fletcher said.

Last April, Berkeley police reported a group of robbers targeting bicyclists near Grizzly Peak. It was unclear if police arrested that group.

Victims in the latest cases reported on social media the robbers were driving SUV’s. And given the proximity of the recent locations, the victims suspected the latest cases were connected.

But Oakland police have not released any information on the suspects.

Police report that the number of overall robberies involving guns in Oakland is down slightly this year compared to last. They said from January 1 to April 3, 2021, there were 324 gunpoint robberies.

In the same period this year, there were 307 cases.

“We try to ride in big groups now,” mountain biker Jose Luis Monroy said. “We love to do night rides, (but) we start to avoid that.”

The crimes may be the latest in crimes of opportunity. Many carbon fiber bikes cost between $5,000 and $10,000.

Spier said her bike was worth less, but it was the perfect Christmas gift from her husband a few months ago.

“(I’m) really afraid and upset and scared to go back out on a bike right now,” Spier said.

Safety advocates used to tell bikers to ride with at least one other person. Now they are telling people to ride in very large groups, citing strength in numbers.

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Oakland police said they were deploying more officers to areas where they were seeing spikes in robberies.

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By Betty Yu, CBS San Francisco:

SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) — Frustrated San Francisco Mission District business owners and residents are fed up with repeated vandalism destroying their neighborhood.

Find out what’s happening in San Franciscowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Video shows what might look like the line to get into a night club, but it’s actually a mob of people at an organized spray paint party, according to witnesses. More than 100 people showed up to tag the block, including a vacant building, a parklet and several storefronts.

At one point, a fight breaks out. It all happened Friday night on 18th Street near Mission Street.

Find out what’s happening in San Franciscowith free, real-time updates from Patch.

Read more at CBS

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To request removal of your name from an arrest report, submit these required items to arrestreports@patch.com.

Graffiti Mob Targeting San Francisco Mission District Businesses

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In this Sept. 26, 2018 photo, Alison Collins, right, speaks during a meeting in San Francisco. | Liz Hafalia / San Francisco Chronicle via AP, file

SAN FRANCISCO – Voters with “recall fever” will decide next year whether they want to recall three members of the San Francisco school board in one of the most significant firing attempts in the country, fueled by parents’ anger over pandemic closures and controversial school renaming, including Senator Dianne Feinstein was considered unworthy.

The city’s electoral department on Monday confirmed a February 15 dismissal for three officials on the San Francisco Education Committee – President Gabriela López, Vice President Faauuga Moliga and Commissioner Alison Collins. Recall supporters filed 80,000 signatures to remove each commissioner, far more than the 50,000 required.

The San Francisco elections were announced just weeks after California voters overwhelmingly rejected the removal of Democratic governor Gavin Newsom. It is the most recent reminder that voters are in a bad mood after a prolonged period of the effects of Covid-19 on their lives, and shows the politicized environment that school principals are increasingly facing.

“Callback fever is alive and well in San Francisco and the voters are all in,” said Democratic strategist Katie Merrill, who supported the effort but had no formal role. “They were angry, they were frustrated with the school board, which” shirked its responsibility during the pandemic – trying to get children back to school. “

Joshua Spivak, one of the country’s foremost recall experts, said Monday that the movement in San Francisco reflects how school board members in particular have been targeted by recalls across the country this year, in some areas due to Covid-19 policy and in others because of fears that schools teach “critical racial theory”.

In 2021 there were around 200 individual attempts – the lion’s share unsuccessful – to recall members of the local California school board, Spivak said. And that makes the San Francisco Board of Education perhaps one of the largest and most momentous of those efforts in the country right now, he said.

Spivak said the “largest and most important recall by the nation in the country’s history” was the removal of school board members in Little Rock, Ark. in 1959 for attempting to maintain segregation.

While most efforts to recall school board members never get to the vote, Spivak said that once they qualify, there is a 75 to 80 percent chance of success, which means that the San Francisco effort is likely to pass with an all-absentee ballot. And with issues that “bridge the partisan divide that makes it even more interesting” – a choice that is being watched across the country, he said.

López and Collins did not immediately respond to requests for comment, but Moliga said the recall had little to do with his positions on education.

“Trying to call me back is politically motivated, not educational,” he said. “This electoral process will bring these motives to light, and I look forward to this discussion.”

As with the Newsom recall, the attempt to recall the San Francisco school board was fueled by parents’ frustration with the pandemic policy. San Francisco took weeks longer than other major counties to fully open this spring, despite the city having comparatively low Covid-19 rates, a situation that upset parents who were pushing for classroom instruction.

The board further angered some voters during the pandemic by deciding to end performance-based admission for its elite Lowell High School, a decision that should address racial inequalities.

In perhaps the most sensational move, the board drew national ridicule for its decision in January to remove the names of 44 schools, including President Abraham Lincoln, President George Washington, and Senator Feinstein – all while the actual campuses were closed. The board decided that the historical figures were linked to historical racism or oppression; In Feinstein’s case, it was problematic that in 1984 it replaced a destroyed Confederate flag that had been part of a historical exhibition in City Hall.

The board finally decided in April not to continue the name changes, but not before it was derided by more conservative corners as an example of liberalism going too far.

Lopez’s meandering interview with The New Yorker in February didn’t help, as it seemed to gloss over whether some of the reasons for the decisions were historically correct. Lopez told The New Yorker, “Lincoln is not someone I normally admire or see as a hero because of these specific instances in which he has contributed to the pain of decimation of people – this is not something I want to ignore. “

Collins sued the school district and her fellow board members in March after they voted to remove her from her vice presidency based on tweets she wrote in 2016 criticizing Asian Americans. Collins, who accused Asian Americans of “using white supremacist thinking to assimilate and ‘move forward”, dropped her $ 87 million lawsuit on the same day in September that callback supporters filed the signatures to try to displace them.

A federal judge had dismissed the lawsuit a month earlier, and Collins chose not to fight it. Lopez was the only board member not named in the lawsuit.

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Police in South San Francisco are investigating an incident in which two men cheated out of money on an elderly victim.

On October 14, a man approached the elderly South San Francisco resident and persuaded the victim to meet with another man, according to the South San Francisco Police Department.

The suspects then told the victim they would give him money that one of the men had just inherited from a relative in South Africa.

The suspects said they needed to find people they could trust and they convinced the victim to withdraw money from his bank account and give it to them.

After the victim gave the money to the men, they fled the scene.

When the victim realized what had happened, he reported the incident to the police.

Police described the first suspect as approximately 60 years old, 5 feet 8 inches tall, and weighed 150 pounds.

Police described the second suspect as approximately 50 years old, 5 feet 4 inches tall, and 150 pounds.

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