Homeless pirates are now marauding onto houseboats in the San Francisco Bay in the latest criminal enterprise to plague California.
Residents along the Oakland-Alameda estuary told a community meeting last week that boats have been cut loose so that they drift out to sea.
One woman even recounted how she had rescued another resident on a sailboat in the middle of the night after pirates slashed his rigging lines during an argument.
The brazen thieves – whose homeless encampments have spilled out of the city – are taking small motor-powered dinghies and using them in smash-and-grab raids on larger vessels and houseboats.
During Wednesday’s San Francisco Bay Conservation and Development Commission’s enforcement meeting community members spoke of having to fight off the pirates themselves as police in the Democrat-run city have failed to intervene