It’s official: left-wing Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao will face a recall election in November.
Thao will face the historic poll amid mounting civic fury over her failure to stem the growing crime situation in Oakland.
The Democrat lawmaker is the first mayor in the city’s history to be up for recall, after a campaign to oust her gained more than 40,000 signatures, the Daily Mail reports.
Oakland Mayor Sheng Thao waves at a news conference announcing that the 2025 NBA All-Star Game will be played in San Francisco at the Chase Center in San Francisco, Monday, Nov. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
“In just a year, Thao’s incompetence and dishonesty accelerated Oakland’s decline, causing longstanding businesses to close and generational families to leave,” the Oakland United to Recall Sheng Thao (OUST) campaign website states.
The next steps will be determined by the city of Oakland.
The city’s 51st mayor has been the target of criticism since she fired Oakland Police Department Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who had criticized “defund the police” and taken a tough approach to crime.
Organizers knew they had to be careful about signatures as they worked towards their target, as Joel Pollak of Breitbart News previously reported.
Oakland residents were driven to the recall move against a backdrop of an area rocked by violent crime in recent months, including murders which have soared from 78 in 2019 to 126 last year.
Crime overall increased by 18 percent in 2023 with property crime up 17 percent and violent crime up 21 percent, the Mail reports.
And in the first four months of 2024 residential robberies soared by 118 percent on the same period last year.
Sheng Thao was elected as mayor of Oakland in 2022 and started her term in January of 2023.