Police investigate overnight home-invasion robbery
During the break-in, the apartment was occupied by two children, ages 4 and 6, their parents and their grandparents.
Berkeley police are investigating what they described as a "well-orchestrated home invasion armed robbery" on Fifth Street last month.
Police say the robbery crew was inside the home for "an extended amount of time" and fled to Oakland afterward in a car with a stolen license plate.
According to police, four people in masks — at least one of whom had a semi-automatic firearm — kicked in the door to a northwest Berkeley apartment in the 1700 block of Fifth Street on April 17 at about 3:15 a.m.
The apartment was occupied at the time by two children, ages 4 and 6, their parents and their grandparents.
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The group threatened to shoot the 6-year-old and demanded "money and guns" from the children's father, Berkeley police wrote.
The group pushed the grandmother, resulting in minor injury, and took $10,000 in cash along with jewelry, a firearm and other items before leaving the apartment.
According to court papers, police found neighborhood surveillance footage and Flock camera footage related to the crime.
The evidence put the suspect vehicle in Oakland after the Berkeley home-invasion robbery, police wrote.
Police also determined that the group used a stolen license plate from a similar car in an effort to evade detection.
Berkeley currently has a network of about 40 Flock cameras that scan license plates and vehicles in the city, according to Berkeley's Flock camera transparency portal.
The system compares vehicle data to a "hotlist" of certain felony crimes, such as stolen cars and other wanted vehicles, and alerts for missing children and elders.
It does not detect faces, people, gender or race, police say.
In the last 30 days, Berkeley police have gotten about 8,300 hotlist hits from nearly 720,000 vehicles in the city.
Over the same period, BPD has searched Flock data about 400 times, according to department data.
The city's automated license plate reader policy prohibits its use for immigration enforcement, any type of harassment, personal use and traffic enforcement, according to the city website.
Home-invasion robberies are exceedingly rare in Berkeley. So far this year, no others are listed in department data.
Overall, Berkeley has had about 70 robberies this year compared to 88 last year over the same period. That's a 21% drop.
