District 1 City Council candidate Dan Kalb was mugged by an armed robber outside of his Temescal home on Wednesday evening as he returned from an anti-crime meeting, Kalb said Thursday afternoon.

Kalb, who has made increasing officer staffing in the Oakland Police Department and anti-recidivism programs centerpieces of his campaign, was at a meeting of the Golden Gate Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council on Wednesday evening. He had driven home, and was talking to a voter on the phone around 8:35 pm as he got out of his car near his home on Manila Avenue, he said. Kalb said that as he was retrieving campaign flyers from his back seat, he felt “a firm poke in the back of my ribs.”

He initially thought it was a neighbor saying hello, but Kalb said he turned around and saw a man holding a hand gun. Kalb said he turned over his wallet to the mugger. The man then asked for Kalb’s iPhone, which the candidate had dropped. Kalb couldn’t find it and began looking through his back seat as the man kept his gun pointed at Kalb. Kalb says he thought, “He’s frustrated, he may shoot me.”

The gunman joined the search, looking for the phone on the ground. After about 20 seconds of searching, Kalb says, the gunman told him to run. Kalb ran to his home down the block, where he called 911. Police arrived about 10 minutes later. Kalb says he assumes the gunman found and took his iPhone because it was missing later.

The OPD have not yet made an arrest in the case.

Kalb said the incident has helped him understand how residents feel as victims of crime. Kalb called himself a “strong supporter of gun control and gun buybacks,” programs through which police departments pay people to turn in firearms.

Public safety was already a focus of Kalb’s campaign, but he says he doesn’t plan to make an issue of the robbery. “I don’t want to take advantage of this,” he said. “It is what it is.”