Here’s what’s happening in the Bay Area, as curated by KALW News:
San Jose: Police formally adopt no-chokehold policy to alleviate community concerns // San Jose Mercury News
In a gesture of transparency, the San Jose Police Department announced Monday it has formally banned the use of chokeholds to subdue a resistant suspect, a point of national controversy since the infamous death of Eric Garner in New York.
SJPD has never permitted chokeholds to be used by its officers. But since Garner's July 2014 death on a Staten Island street corner at the hands of an NYPD officer, the technique has drawn heavy scrutiny, and eventually a recommendation by LaDoris Cordell, then San Jose's independent police auditor, to recommend explicitly banishing the technique in the department's duty manual.
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For West Oakland Startup, A $9 Computer About More Than Getting Rich // Oakland Tribune
Last year, a West Oakland startup called Next Thing Co. raised more than $2 million from more than 39,000 people around the world to create a low-cost computer called C.H.I.P.
But if you talk to the vice president of operations, a 28-year-old woman named Ari Turrentine with a masters in social work, her growing revenue stream is just a means to an end. Though she must keep an eagle eye on a supply chain that stretches from Oakland to Southern China, Turrentine sees the $9 C.H.I.P. as about more than making money. She wants to place computing within the reach of schoolchildren, low-income people in the United States and the developing world, where 900 million people live on less than $2 a day.
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Moving day on horizon for residents of Bay Area public housing complex // Reveal
It’s a day that Hacienda residents never thought would come. After years of languishing in squalid conditions, the elderly and disabled residents of Richmond, California’s worst public housing complex will finally be moved out.
This week, the federal government approved the estimated $1 million needed to relocate the hundred-or-so residents of Hacienda while a nonprofit developer revitalizes the dilapidated high-rise. Residents, many elderly and disabled, can begin moving out immediately – nearly a year after city officials declared the building uninhabitable and vowed to evacuate them. They have the option of returning once the renovation is complete.
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13 leaders aiming to increase African Americans in tech // USA Today
In Silicon Valley, they call it the 2% problem.
African Americans make up a tiny fraction of the overwhelmingly white and Asian male workforces of major technology companies, the ranks of aspiring entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who control the spigot of money and access.
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CSU faculty to strike for five days if contract deal isn’t reached // Sacramento Bee
The California State University faculty union announced Monday that it will strike for five days across all 23 campuses if an ongoing contract dispute is not resolved by the middle of April.
The action depends on the conclusion of a fact-finding arbitration process with the university over a raise for the 2015-16 academic year. If an independent report expected to be released in about six weeks does not bring management back to the negotiating table, the California Faculty Association said it will direct teaching staff to cancel classes and picket April 13-15 and April 18-19.
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How the Bay Area’s first residents lived // SF Chronicle
San Francisco’s first permanent inhabitants, a linguistically distinct group of Ohlone Indians known as the Yelamu, settled here around 4,500 years ago, drawn by the food-rich environment on the bay. Only about 150 to 300 of them inhabited the land at any one time, moving among several sites, including major camps near Candlestick Point, Vistacion Valley and the land now occupied by AT&T Park and Mission Dolores.
The Yelamu were made up of roughly 20 related families, each with 15 or so members. Like most California Indians, their social structure was not particularly hierarchical. At the time of Spanish contact they had a chief, but chiefs in Ohlone culture usually played an advisory role. They wielded real authority only in times of war.