The Bay

In February, Vallejo police officers shot a young black man 55 times after he was found unconscious in his car. Another was killed last year after an officer tried to stop him for riding a bike without a safety light. Fatal police shootings of Black and Latino men are drawing attention to the small, diversely-populated suburb of Vallejo, which has been largely ignored by most media and activists, until recently. There are protests and lawsuits; there are calls for investigations and resignations. In a three-episode series starting Monday, The Bay will take you into the homes of families who have lost loved ones to fatal shootings by Vallejo police. We will visit contentious council meetings and examine how the city found itself in this situation — again. The episodes will be released on August 19, August 21 and August 23. Subscribe to The Bay to hear more local, Bay Area stories like this one. New episodes are released Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3 a.m. Find The Bay on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or via Alexa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A San Francisco native was shot in the Philippines earlier this month in what friends and family believe was an attempted extrajudicial assassination by the Philippine government. Brandon Lee became an activist through San Francisco State University's League of Filipino Students. Lee moved to the Philippines in 2010 to work as a paralegal and human rights advocate for indigenous communities in the Ifugao province in northern Philippines. San Francisco has been the epicenter of activism for decades, and Filipinos are significant part of that history. Activist friends of Lee's are now asking for a moratorium on U.S. aid to the Philippines National Police and the Armed Forces of the Philippines. Guest: Faye Lacanilao, a San Francisco activist and friend of Brandon Lee's Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

More than 34,000 people are homeless in the Bay Area. There's not enough housing or resources to help them all. Some have friends or family who have been searching for their loved ones to bring them home, but finding someone who is homeless is very challenging. They're always on the move. They don't often have access to a phone. And even after finding that person, they might not be ready to go home. In this podcast episode of The Bay, we'll hear from a woman who, through her long search for her mother, started a Facebook group to help others search for their relatives and friends that are missing and homeless. The group helped a Northern California family find their son who was homeless in San Francisco but not before learning that supporting him meant practicing unconditional love, patience, persistence and even letting him go. Guest: Rachael Myrow, KQED's Acting Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Latinos this week have expressed fear, anger and unity after a gunman shot and killed 22 people at a Walmart in El Paso, Texas. The suspect wrote a racist manifesto blaming immigrants and Hispanics for economic changes in the U.S. The massacre in Texas followed the Bay Area’s own mass shooting last month in Gilroy, a city that is majority Hispanic. Since then, many Latinx people have shared how these shootings have changed their lives, including two KQED reporters, both from Texas. Guest: Vianey Alderete, KQED reporter Subscribe to The Bay to hear more local, Bay Area stories like this one. New episodes are released Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3 a.m. Find The Bay on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or via Alexa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The three victims from the Gilroy Garlic Festival were young -- ages 6, 13 and 25. Many of the victims from the shootings in El Paso and Dayton were also young. And it was children, teenagers and young adults who joined the debate for gun control, notably after the Parkland, Florida school shooting in 2018 where 17 students and staff members were killed. Here in the Bay Area, high school students channeled their outrage into a regional activist group they formed to lobby for gun control legislation and protest gun violence at schools, neighborhoods and public spaces. At first, people listened. But a year later, keeping the fight alive is harder than they had hoped it would be. Guest: Vanessa Rancano, KQED education reporter Subscribe to The Bay to hear more local, Bay Area stories like this one. New episodes are released Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3 a.m. Find The Bay on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or via Alexa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

After the shooting at the Gilroy Garlic Festival on July 28, a local newspaper photographer criticized how media quickly descended on the small city in south Santa Clara County in ways we've seen too many times: cameras, lights satellite trucks, neatly-dressed journalists. To Robert Eliason, it felt cold, transaction and distanced. "I'm press, but I'm not really press," he wrote on his Facebook page. In an era when, shootings and other deadly assaults on the public happen often, how should the media respond and cover these terrible, violent acts , the victims and the places where they happen. Guest: Robert Eliason, newspaper photographer for SV Media, Inc. Subscribe to The Bay to hear more local, Bay Area stories like this one. New episodes are released Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3 a.m. Find The Bay on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or via Alexa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Google pledged $1 billion earlier this month to help ease Silicon Valley's housing crisis. That crisis is playing out in Google's home city of Mountain View, where city leaders want to ban RVs from parking overnight on city streets. RV dwellers say they have nowhere else to go. But some Mountain View residents say they're concerned about waste, parking availability and public health. The city plans to give some vehicles a safe place to park, but not all. Guest: Rachael Myrow, Acting Silicon Valley Bureau Chief Subscribe to The Bay to hear more local, Bay Area stories like this one. New episodes are released Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3 a.m. Find The Bay on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or via Alexa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

A San Francisco nurse named Bobbi Campbell was the first person to publicly announce he had a cancer associated with AIDS in 1981. Around this time, he convinced a Castro drugstore to display pictures of his lesions to educate other gay men in the city. This was the beginning of an activist-led campaign to alert the gay community of a new disease that has since affected millions around the world. And while initially federal officials were turning a blind eye, local activists were shaping San Francisco into the epicenter of a movement that still resonates today. Guest: Sarah Hotchkiss, KQED Arts’ Visual Arts Editor Read more of KQED Arts’ series Pride as Protest. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Can an artist’s original intentions withstand the test of time and modern sentiment? A mural at George Washington High School in San Francisco that intended to depict America's founding father in true light and criticize the country's racist past has sparked debate for decades. Some have described the mural as degrading; others have called it historic. After years of contention, the S.F. school board plans to obscure the school campus mural from public view. The question is how, and will it be permanent? Guest: Sam Lefebvre, reporter for KQED Arts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

President Trump on Monday announced that federal immigration officers were gearing up for deportations next week. Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf responded by urging her community to be prepared. It’s unclear whether the federal government is even capable of widespread raids or deportations, and who exactly they're targeting. Trump administration officials have said their immigration policies are meant to deter migrants, many traveling from Central American countries, from coming to the U.S. Today, we’ll revisit an episode from December about one family’s arduous migrant journey from El Salvador to the Bay Area. Guest: Farida Jhabvala Romero, immigration reporter for KQED Subscribe to The Bay to hear more local, Bay Area stories like this one. New episodes are released Monday, Wednesday and Friday at 3 a.m. Find The Bay on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, NPR One, or via Alexa. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices