Oakland First Fridays, an event that began as a beloved, arts-driven street fair that activated a long dormant Uptown, continues to attract and\/or inspire conflicts among attendees, and last Friday’s was no exception. <\/p>\n
As SFist earlier reported<\/a>, there was an incident around 1:37 am Saturday in which a vehicle jumped a curb on 18th Street, a few blocks from the First Fridays event and in the hours after it had officially ended, and injured seven people, including a 15-year-old girl.<\/p>\n But that came after a series of large brawls broke out in the street between 9:30 and 10 pm, minutes after the event’s official end time and around the intersection of 18th Street and Telegraph Avenue \u2014 with the crowds clearly tied to First Fridays.<\/p>\n As you can see documented in the Instagram reel below, Oakland police were working to separate people who were engaged in physical fights, and teargas was deployed to disperse the unruly crowd.<\/p>\n Those tensions appear to have lingered in the area for several hours, and as KTVU reports<\/a>, more brawling was occurring on 18th Street when the car drove onto the sidewalk \u2014 and its driver can be seen in social media video exiting the car and fleeing the scene on foot.<\/p>\n It’s become a pattern for these events that violence can stem from the large gatherings even if it does not occur in the space of the First Friday party itself. <\/p>\n Several hours after the March First Fridays event, two people were killed<\/a> in connection with a bar fight that happened in downtown Oakland, eight blocks away from the event.<\/p>\n And six people were shot, two of them fatally<\/a>, in multiple street incidents in the hours following the September 2025 First Fridays event, all within several blocks of the event. <\/p>\n Similarly, in the hours after the July 2024 event, a young woman was fatally shot outside the Fox Theater<\/a>.<\/p>\n A mid-April shooting in East Oakland that left Derrick Hubbard dead, as well a second female victim, has now been linked by police<\/a> to an earlier beef that occurred at the April First Fridays event.<\/p>\n First Fridays has come under fire before<\/a>, and organizers remain defensive, arguing that the event itself has not seen any violence. But this may be an academic point, after several years of a pattern of violence around, and stemming from, the event.<\/p>\n First Fridays organizer Vanessa McGhee tells KPIX<\/a> that the event takes place not in Uptown but in KONO, Koreatown\/Northgate, a few blocks away \u2014 the event footprint is Telegraph Avenue between 22nd and 27th streets. And the event technically only runs from 5 pm to 9:30 pm.<\/p>\n And speaking about this past Friday night’s violence, McGhee tells KPIX, “We believe the city needs to step up and figure out a way to create some programming or structure or a place for these kids to hang out in a positive way.”<\/p>\n Oakland City Councilmember Carroll Fife tells the station that she supports First Fridays, but there is a broader problem at play in the city. <\/p>\n “I’ve seen social media pages where they’re coming to specifically fight [at the event],” Fife tells KPIX. “That is a huge problem we are trying to address.”<\/p>\n The tradition of the First Fridays street fairs dates back to 2005, and for many years was a peaceful affair. The event, now organized by the Koreatown\/Northgate Community Benefit District (KONO), went on hiatus during the pandemic and had to pause and relaunch a few times in recent years for financial reasons<\/a>.<\/p>\n The popularity of the event seems to have returned, but much like with popular free nighttime street gatherings in San Francisco where drinking is involved \u2014 like the former Castro Halloween and Pink Saturday \u2014 violence unfortunately seems to follow.<\/p>\n Previously: First Fridays Organizers Push Back on Blame for Shootings<\/a><\/p>\n Top image via @sstackss925\/Instagram<\/a><\/p>\n