Oakland group starts "no bippin" campaign against vehicle break-ins
OAKLAND – A longtime business owner has brought together other restaurants and shops in downtown and near Lake Merritt to create a "No Bippin Allowed Zone" to stop more car break-ins.
"Bippin" is a term for breaking into a car and the community hopes their effort can partner with the city and police to reduce this crime.
"Oakland provided family, a sense of entrepreneurship, or sense of, you know, how to take care of yourself and just moving forward being proud of who you was," said Tyranny Allen, the creator of the campaign and the owner of eight different businesses including Winky Dinky Hot Dogs. "If we lose as a business then we lose the structure of the city, without no structure then you provide chaos, chaos is not the way we want to live."
Allen is from San Francisco but moved to Oakland decades ago while becoming a member of the Hip Hop group Digital Underground. He later became an entrepreneur, which kept him deeply connected to the town he now proudly calls home.
"One car, all six windows got broken into, the lady said they didn't even take anything," Allen told CBS News Bay Area.
The growing problem of car thefts, which are trending up on a three-year average according to Oakland Police, motivated Allen to start the "No Bippin Allowed Zone." While car break-ins are down slightly compared to last year, the crime impacts thousands of residents each year.
"Even if they don't have, you know, a laptop sitting out, obviously it doesn't matter, it's like if your car is there it's, it's a target," one woman said after hearing about the new campaign while on the street talking to Allen. "People say insurance covers it, it does not cover it. Like, it affects people, it affects working-class people the most when you break a window, because you have to pay for it out of pocket."
There were 2,862 auto burglaries in 2021, the number went up to 3,434 in 2022, and reached 3,336 as of early December in 2023.
Other businesses joining the campaign say they hear from customers all the time that coming to Oakland feels like a risk. They don't want to pay to repair part of their car like a window just to shop or dine in Oakland. This makes it hard to hire as well for these businesses.
"We are suffering from all these break-ins, people are not, they don't wanna come to Oakland, they don't wanna visit our business," said the manager of a restaurant supporting the No Bippin Allowed Zone campaign.
Allen believes that working with the police and city leaders is part of the campaign to have a community-wide approach. He hopes the signs along with word-of-mouth of the campaign in person and on social media can convince more people to think twice about breaking into a car.
Mayor Sheng Thao's office said in an email that Oakland now has more police officers than at any other time in the past two years, 724 officers when you include recent graduates from the academy. The city council has also approved the mayor's plan for 300 automated license plate readers throughout the city.
"Enough is enough, you know, when there's a certain tragedy people come together but it doesn't have to be a tragedy for us to come together," Allen said.