Crooks broke into a KGO-TV news van outside an Oakland art gallery on Tuesday, but that's become common in California's city of constant crime. What's weird is that the burglars also broke into the private security vehicle assigned to protect the news van.

The local television crew was taping a news segment in broad daylight near Jack London Square when the brazen thieves broke the van's windows and helped themselves to whatever iPhones and other little stuff was easily stolen. Then they busted into the security guard's car.

Reporters and TV crews in Oakland are routinely robbed of all their equipment, so it's now common to assign security guards to the teams before they take on harrowing assignments such as a feature story at a local art gallery. But the guard was inside the art gallery protecting the crew, instead of protecting the van. Lesson: Assign at least two security guards per TV news van—one with the crew and the cameras, the other with the van.

The team of four crooks hopped into a green Jaguar and sped away. No arrests have been made, because there are never any arrests for this stuff in Oakland, where one cop was recently assigned 10,000 burglary cases.

Thieves have been targeting reporters and TV news vans for the past year, according to the San Francisco Chronicle:

It’s the latest in a spate of holdups and break-ins targeting the media in Oakland, often in broad daylight. Some TV crews have had expensive cameras taken from them — sometimes on live TV. In one case, a KPIX news cameraman was punched and robbed of his camera during a live broadcast in November.

[Photo of Bay Area news vans—in San Francisco, not Oakland—by marshallstax via Flickr.]