Oakland homeless woman steals city council candidate's fundraising money: 'I was left to fend for myself'

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Oakland homeless woman steals city council candidate's fundraising money at campaign launch event

A disturbed homeless woman stole a bag with $1,000 worth of donations from an Oakland city council candidate during a campaign kickoff event and police they never showed up when called. (Credit: Charlene Wang)

They say no good deed goes unpunished. 

An Oakland, California, City Council candidate, who is running for office on a platform of addressing the city’s homeless crisis and "skyrocketing levels of crime," said she had a bag full of donations stolen by a homeless woman during her campaign kickoff event on Sunday. To make matters worse, she said the police never showed up when she called 911.

Charlene Wang, who is running for the at-large seat in the California city, says the homeless woman grabbed the bag — which contained about $1,000 — at Clinton Square Park at around 4 p.m. Her team confronted the woman and pleaded with her to hand over the bag, but in the end, she made off with her ill-gotten gains, Wang said.

Video of the interaction shows Wang begging the disturbed woman to hand the bag back, but the homeless woman gets angry and refuses to turn it over.

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Oakland City Council candidate Charlene Wang confronts a homeless woman who allegedly stole a bag of cash, left, and Wang speaking, right. (Charlene for Oakland City Council)

"Can we just get the orange bag please," Wang asks politely to the woman. "When I'm done, y'all want me to take the s--- out so y'all can snatch it and run," she replies.

The homeless woman, who is wearing two hats, a toggle coat and untied sneakers, starts getting agitated and threatens a volunteer while shouting incoherently.

Another volunteer with Wang says he will give her $100 to hand over the bag, but she refuses and says she wants the $100 first. 

Then, Wang's team tried calling homeless services, but they were not available on the weekend, Wang says. They then called the police, who never showed up, having said there were 250 other calls ahead of their incident.

"The complete lack of response we saw from both mental health and police services was unacceptable," Wang told Fox News Digital. "I'm committed to hiring more police and improving mental health services to bring down response times and get people the help they need."

Wang told ABC7 that police told her they would still come by later to file a report, but she insisted that did not happen either.

"I very much tried to have a de-escalatory conversation with her to convince her to hand over the bag," Wang told ABC7. "Offer her a warm meal at the grocery store, even give her money in exchange for the bag, but that did not work out."

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A volunteer confronts the homeless woman and tries to retrieve the bag. (Charlene for Oakland City Council)

"I can only imagine the trauma she is going through having to live on the streets. I am not angry at her or anything like that, however, I think this is yet another example of first responder service. I was left to fend for myself in an essence."

Fox News Digital has reached out to the Oakland Police Department (OPD) for comment. 

Oakland has faced mounting issues such as housing costs, homelessness and crime in recent years, with Wang hoping to tackle these issues if elected. 

Wang is a Democrat who previously worked for the Biden-Harris administration in the Department of Transportation (DOT), although she is running in a nonpartisan election, and no candidates will have a party affiliation listed on the ballot.

Oakland City Council candidate Charlene Wang had a bag full of donations stolen by a homeless woman during her campaign kickoff event, and when she called the police, they never showed up, she says. (Charlene for Oakland City Council)

"In this [DOT] role, I helped launch a pilot program at the Federal Highway Administration to make construction job training available to people who are coming home from prison," Wang told Fox News Digital. "Those kinds of programs cut people's odds of reoffending in half and are crucial pieces of the public safety puzzle."

Wang's main policy goals include addressing public safety, reducing the cost of living and implementing a "new strategy for homelessness," according to her website. Part of that strategy is to provide homeless people with housing, social services and a job with a new Oakland Corps program to clean up trash and plant trees with the goal of helping to turn their lives around.

In terms of crime, Wang plans to invest in technology and hire more police, noting that Oakland ranks among the nation's highest in terms of violent crime rates while the police force is "unusually small with far below the national average of police per capita."

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Oakland police never showed up to the scene, according to Oakland City Council candidate Charlene Wang. (Jane Tyska/Digital First Media/East Bay Times via Getty Images)

"I plan to address the skyrocketing levels of crime and gun violence by investing in technology alongside community policing," Wang's website states.

Data released by the OPD in May reported that violent crime rates were down in the first part of the year, with crime down 33% overall. Burglaries had dropped 50%, while homicides had fallen by 17%, assaults were down 7% and rapes were down 21%.

However, a report by the San Francisco Chronicle and the Oakland Report claims that OPD is not comparing like with like when reporting its crime figures for Oakland, California, and thus, its perceived dip in crime is misleading. The publications argued the OPD was comparing incomplete 2024 crime tallies to complete 2023 crime tallies, since the 2024 figures take time to be finalized and have been historically under reported when comparing them in this manner.