Among their other
efforts, Oakland's Measure Y Street Outreach team attends the scenes
of shootings and killings. Their purpose is to identify anyone
related to the victim -- friends, family members, members of the
same gang or turf group -- and to persuade them not to retaliate. One
violent act has already taken place, they work to prevent the next
one, to head-off an escalation. It would be difficult to quantify the
shootings and killings that don't happen because a street outreach
worker has intervened, has found a way, even in the heat and passion
of the immediate aftermath, to calm a person bent on vengeance. We
should probably find a way to count that.
Still, by the time
the Measure Y guys show up, someone has been wounded, or someone is
dead, and the sad, painful, infinitely wounding chain of events that follows a violent act is already set in motion. A mother and father
are devastated, a neighborhood is traumatized, a kid feels less safe,
becomes more distracted. He can't focus on his schoolwork, but he can
sense, in that way kids have, that his mother is jittery, that she is
more reluctant than usual to let him go beyond the front gate. The
kid knew things were bad, but now they seem worse; inside and
outside, there are less peace and less hope than before.
Despite his
certainty about how much violence his street outreach team prevents,
Kevin Grant says he's tired of showing up after the fact. He wants to
find a way to prevent the original blood from flowing. And so he has
begun to formalize, as a Measure Y violence prevention program called The Way Out, a thing
he and his team members have been doing occasionally, which is
mediating between antagonists before a dispute erupts. It is tense
and sometimes dangerous work, and it will require an effective and
pervasive publicity campaign among the groups they hope to work with.
Often there will be an urgent need for interruption and mediation. A
guy on the street who feels a situation is on the brink will have to
have a number, make the call, to someone he trusts. That person will
need to be available quickly, and will have to know the stakes,
intuitively. He will need to have some understanding of the emotional
state, even the psychology, of the people in the room. He will have
to know how to communicate.
As I've documented many
times on this blog, it is a job that only certain people could
probably do. Rare is the cop who could serve in this role. (See (New) Code of the West or Idealists with Wary Eyes) One can
imagine preachers doing it, maybe, but only the kind you meet out there who,
in a past life, had lived the life. Most, if not all of the members
of the Measure Y Street Outreach Team have lived the life, some only
recently escaped. Many of them have been shot, some have lost a loved
one, or multiple loved ones, to Oakland's troubles. They are on a new
path now, but they can speak the language; they can relate.
At a meeting to
introduce the program, in a grungy clubhouse of an unkempt park in
East Oakland, a kid in a wheelchair told us about getting shot nine
times last February, about life in a wheelchair. Even though it was
stuffy in the clubhouse, he wore a coat and a hat with flaps over his
ears; probably he gets cold due to the blood circulation problems
paraplegics suffer.
His voice was deep.
"Three months
ago I was walking," he said. "Now I can't play football.
Can't hurry. Can't play with my nephews. All I did was go to
the store," he says. His one mistake? "I wasn't watching my
surroundings." And he had another lesson to learn, while he lay
un-visited by any of his friends at Highland Hospital: "Everybody
I thought would be real to me, they turned out to be fake."
His mother talked
with great energy and intensity about seeing her son bleeding at the
gate to their apartment complex. He'd been shot in the back nine
times, but he was conscious. "He said, 'Mama don't let me die.'
All we did was cry and pray, cry and pray," she said.
She talked about
life with a young son in a wheelchair. "He's paralyzed like I'm
paralyzed. I'm with him, taking care of him 24 hours a day."
Violence prevention
educator Caheri Gutierrez, of Youth Alive, talked about growing up in
the Deep, about seeing her brother shot in the head, then pistol
whipped, then abandoned by his so-called friends. She talked about
the night she herself got shot, in the face, through the face by a
hollow-tip bullet, while sitting at a traffic light on 98th Avenue,
how she almost choked to death on the blood gathering in her throat.
She talked about life with a different face, a scarred face.
Gutierrez rose above it all. And she uses that experience now to
convince young Oaklanders that violence solves nothing, but only
presents new problems that are much, much worse.
Here is a story I wrote for San Francisco Magazine, in which she plays a key role -- No Escape, No Surrender -- as do Kevin Grant, and also Marilyn Harris, of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence. And here is a brief relation of Caheri's story from the Almanac: I Might Have Some Hope Here; Here's Caheri's personal blog: Life.
Caheri Gutierrez speaking at Youth Alive 20th Anniversary event |
Here is a story I wrote for San Francisco Magazine, in which she plays a key role -- No Escape, No Surrender -- as do Kevin Grant, and also Marilyn Harris, of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence. And here is a brief relation of Caheri's story from the Almanac: I Might Have Some Hope Here; Here's Caheri's personal blog: Life.
A mother who'd lost
her son last December spoke. I'd talked with her before the event. She was
nervous. It would the first time she'd talked to a group about her
loss, I said I thought this would be a good thing for her. She gave me
a hug. Up in front of the the gathering, she teared up but wasn't
self-pitying. She was emotional and powerful and you could almost
begin to get a sense of her despair, and even just lightly brushing
up against her pain for a moment was jarring.
"I'd like to be
able to hug all of you. I can't hug Charles anymore."
Mayor Quan was
there. She recalled brokering a series of demilitarized zones in
Oakland, so that kids might get to school safely. Those zones
disintegrated long ago. Programs come and go. At times during the event I stared at
banners hanging from the clubhouse rafters. I wondered which if any
of these programs still existed. The banners were wrinkled and
curling and covered with dust. Here's how some of them read,
verbatim:
Oakland P.A.L.
The Bond Between
Cops and Kids
Lets Get To Kids
Before They Get Into Trouble
FILLING
PLAYGROUNDS NOT PRISONS
Programs come and
go. It's the going that's a problem. Some don't work, and they should
go. Some take time to work, so-called leaders become frightened by
the early appearance of failure, and the program is abandoned. This
one will take time. To get the word out, to establish trust. Even if
The Way Out is a success, still, sometimes it will fail. Will the City
stick with it?
No comments:
Post a Comment