Visitations: with the families of the killed in Oakland

Melted wax and other things at a homicide scene in Oakland

It's Wednesday January 21, 2015. Last night there was a double homicide in West Oakland. Five days ago there was a double homicide in East Oakland. A third killing happened a few hours later, near Adeline, in Dogtown. By my count, we have had 8 homicides already in 2015. This does not mean it will be a record-breakingly bad year in violence in Oakland, after significant drops the last two years. But it is a bad start, and an important reminder that, as I have written before, the urge to pull the trigger doesn't check the calendar. Those who cover or who pay close attention to the killing like to compare numbers and times of the year with this line: 

"This was the [insert number] killing of 2015. This time last year the city had [insert number] killings." 

Of course, we need some way to measure progress, but ultimately the comparisons by date are meaningless. (See: The Calendar and the Killing.)

What is meaningful is each killing and the effect it has on a family, a neighborhood and a city, and how we respond. In the past 10 years, Oakland has eked out a little tax money to contract with non-violence organizations to meet and help with the families of homicide victims. Mostly this is done by Marilyn Washington Harris of Youth Alive's Khadafy Washington Project, named for Harris' son, killed in Oakland in August of 2000.

On Monday I accompanied Harris on visitations to the families of two of this year's homicides, a 29-year-old man in West Oakland and a 19-year-old woman in East Oakland. Harris' job, her vocation since 2000, is to guide these shocked families through the aftermath, to help them take care of the business at hand at a time when they lack the will to do anything but grieve. Harris sets up appointments (and often accompanies the families) with the Victims of Crimes office, where they can get financial help, up to $5,000, which usually covers most of the funeral expenses. She meets them at the funeral homes to help with planning. Sometimes she meets them at the coroner's office.She asks questions -- have you taken your meds? have you checked your blood sugar? are you eating? -- and lets them ask questions, although often they are so baffled that they have none.

Also accompanying Harris Monday was a staff member from the office of Mayor Libby Schaaf, delivering a personal letter of condolence from the mayor and some things that might be helpful around the house at a time like this, items to help with visitors, items for writing and crying, eating and drinking. I am not aware of another mayor of any large city who does anything like this. I don't know if Schaaf will be able to keep it up, but I like the idea.

In a small apartment in Dogtown we visited the father of the 29-year-old man killed Friday on the street right in front of his dad's place. From the father's front door you could see, you could in fact not miss, the street memorial to his dead son, the accumulated artifacts deposited by friends and strangers since Friday, candles still flickering, candles guttered and gone, t-shirts, beer bottles, vodka bottles, poster board with loving notes to the dead. The gutter was lined with cat litter unevenly soaking up the spilled blood. There were dead flowers in the gutter. The father will need to move, and there is help available for re-location.

Through the treetop, the place where his son was killed.

That morning the mother of the dead man stood staring at the memorial. "They killed my baby," she said. He was her youngest. Inside the father's apartment, blues played from a music station on a small TV while the father discussed with Harris what appointments he had coming up and how things would work. We looked at pictures of his son. He said he'd been avoiding that. He choked up, excused himself, gathered himself, got back to business. From his daze he kept repeating that he was grateful, to Harris, to the mayor, to his family and neighbors. It was very important to him that everyone know that despite whatever else they saw or perceived in him, he was grateful. He wanted to leave them his gratitude for the love. The mother sat on the couch, ate hard candy. A song played, with the words "How could you leave me, where did you go?" It was the Blues, of course, so a song of lost love. But here it took on a different meaning.

That afternoon in Deep East Oakland we paid a visit to the grandparents of the 19-year-old girl, who had moved here to live with them, had gotten a job and was set to enroll at Laney. She was killed Friday afternoon, along with her boyfriend, who was 20 years old. We looked at pictures, prom pictures, graduation pictures from less than a year ago. So fresh. So ancient now.

A place you might not want to remember

Light tower, green light, late winter evening sunlight at E 16th Ave., Oakland

In Oakland, despite the freeways, concrete monstrosities that isolate neighborhoods from one another, despite the seeming differences between various neighborhoods and people and the varieties in its character, things can seem surprisingly connected. A man gets gunned down in West Oakland and you learn he had half a dozen close cousins in East Oakland. A man dies in Fruitvale and you find out he had worked for years in the Lower Bottom neighborhood, everybody knows him over there. A police officer on the beat in Eastmont grew up in violent Campbell Village. A restaurant owner in Jack London Square is from the Acorn neighborhood in West Oakland, and he’s committed to hiring parolees from The Deep. Sometimes it feels like every green freeway sign in Oakland is only a degree of separation from everywhere else in Oakland, and a reminder of a place you might not want to remember.

- from Until You Bleed - on life, violence and healing in Oakland - .99 e-book available at Amazon or as an audiobook at iTunes, Amazon and Audible. 

Oakland's tainted geography

YOU CAN LIVE A RICH LIFE in Oakland and never be directly affected by its history or its troubles. Even if the violence might occasionally seep into your consciousness, depending on where you live or work, your image of the city can be dominated by its hills, by the tall redwoods in its parks, the innovative cafes of Piedmont Avenue, or the relatively new gleam and bustle of Uptown on a Friday night. Inevitably, at its restaurants, you will encounter a racially mixed crowd of Oaklanders. Thirty-nine percent white, 31 percent black and 25 percent Latino, Oakland is nothing if not integrated in its public places and at public events. But it remains segregated in its neighborhoods, whose contrasting lifestyles create a tainted geography that informs and influences life here.

From the sprawling flatlands where the preponderance of violent crime occurs, you can look up and see the trees and big houses of the hills, but not the steep roads that wind and swirl through pines and stands of invasive eucalyptus. Many flatlanders probably can’t imagine the dizzying journey up.

Grand and abandoned in Oakland. Pic: JO'B.

From the ridges and high windows of the hills you can see the flatlands. It’s easy to comprehend their layout, the straight avenues, the diagonal byways, the waters of rambling Lake Merritt, the Alameda County Coliseum blight and the runways of the airport. But you never have to go in there if you don’t want to. Freeways tower over the flatlands and carry you swiftly past, or haltingly, depending on the time of day, to San Francisco, to Berkeley, to white suburbs to the east and north, or south to San Jose. Today the ground level roadways Oaklanders used to take, like MacArthur Boulevard, demarcate borders between two supposed forbidden zones, the hills off limits to flatlanders, the flats alien to hill dwellers.

Before she became mayor, Jean Quan represented a City Council district that reflects Oakland’s peculiar geography. Not only did it flow into some of the bloodiest streets on the edge of flat East Oakland, but it also included the most highly populated part of the white, upper-middle-class Oakland hills, known as Montclair. Quan knows Montclair’s people and its attitudes well. She knows there is very little social connection between the two Oaklands, “a tale of two cities,” she calls it.

“Some people in Montclair,” she tells me, “haven’t been below MacArthur Boulevard in twenty years.”

No doubt they are afraid to go too deep into East Oakland. What happened to Caheri Gutierrez happens in East Oakland regularly: bystanders in the crossfire are hit every year. In 2011, three of those East Oakland bystanders were very young children. All three died. When that happens, when a homicide victim is under the age of 17, the reaction of the city tends to be louder and more intense than if the victim is in the wheelhouse of urban murder: an African-American male age 18 to 39. When the victim is a child, more of the general population pays attention to the event, for a longer time. A realization dawns that the city is not only killing children but is giving birth to men who will kill children. For a time, the whole city cares about the violence that is mostly isolated in its eastern and western flatlands.

Still, ask how a shooting or a homicide in the flatlands affects a person in the hills and you will be met with a pause and then usually a rather abstract response: People in the hills are “progressive,”   they care about the problems of the flats. Or an economic response: The city’s violent reputation suppresses property values. Or a political response: People in the hills voted solidly in favor of a parcel tax to fund citywide violence prevention. But the effect remains impersonal, never real or raw and dirty like in the flatlands.

Some hills, Oakland. Pic: JO'B.

One way a killing elsewhere affects Oaklanders who live outside the most violent parts of the city is in the fear that circumscribes your world. You exit a popular restaurant near Lake Merritt, but feel afraid to stroll the shore because a week ago there were four shootings nearby. You live on the edge of the forest, but never venture east. Neighborhood merchant associations hire private security firms to patrol their streets, parents bar their children from watching the news, Montclair considers the possibility of seceding from Oakland.

Increasingly, fear is the one thing the two sides of Oakland do have in common. As the size of the police force has fallen, there have been fewer arrests, slower response times to emergency calls, and a decreased police presence all over the city. Crime is up, and not just in the usual places, but in the hills as well. If violent crime keeps mostly to The Deep and to the western neighborhoods near the port, burglaries and robberies have become common even in the hills.

Libby Schaaf grew up in Montclair and now represents it on the City Council. She says the scary part is not necessarily the increase in crime in the hills, but the brazen nature of it — doors are kicked in, shots fired. She says the proliferation of online bulletin boards that spread word of each crime soon after it happens has made people more aware of the dangers than ever before, and this awareness has led to greater fear.

“I’ve lived in this city my whole life,” says Schaaf, “and I have never until this last year heard of people actually moving out of the city because of their fear of crime, and this year I have heard several instances of it.”

An episode from her childhood gives a sense of how sweet life can be in Oakland, and yet how enduring the city’s troubles have proven. Schaaf says she was blissfully ignorant of any problems in Oakland, until as a young girl she went to Washington, D.C., for a national Girl Scout conference. When she said she was from Oakland, someone asked if she was scared to live there. That was thirty years ago.

“I just had no idea what they meant, I grew up in the Montclair hills, I grew up on the edge of the forest, and the only thing I could think of that was negative about where I lived was the deer sometimes ate my mother’s flowers in her garden.”

She remembers a book about Oakland that her parents had around the house. She loved the title, Oakland’s Not for Burning, and wholeheartedly agreed with its sentiment, but she'd never read the book.

The title Oakland’s Not for Burning is a kind of paternalist admonishment of the city’s minority population. The book is a 40-year-old apologist memoir of white fear and a failed federal attempt to assuage the stirring masses in Oakland’s poorest neighborhoods. In the mid-1960s, in the aftermath of the Watts riots, there was concern that Oakland, a city of increasingly frustrated, destitute and displaced minorities, would be next to erupt. Something needed to be done for these people if they were to be kept calm and peaceful. Oakland’s Not for Burning was written by the man the government sent to Oakland to try to coordinate its effort to head off any violence. Those efforts were centered on a grant for the city’s port and job training to prepare minorities for the new jobs it would create. It was a valiant effort in noblesse oblige, doomed to failure by politics, union racism and bureaucracy. A few hundred jobs were created, very few at the port, which used much of the federal grant money to further automate and containerize, thus eliminating jobs.

While poor neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. and Detroit burned, Oakland never erupted. But things were heating up. The Black Panthers were born. In another decade, the drug kingpin Felix Mitchel would rise to exploit the crack epidemic. The Black Muslims appeared and for a time they thrived. The bitterness and cynicism at the heart of all three enterprises would serve to further separate white from black, flatland from hills. Even as the city’s political structure evolved from conservative to liberal, its authoritarian police force became more hated and distrusted in the minority communities. Decades later, in crime-ridden, violence-ridden parts of Oakland, the police still are seen as failures, at best.

“Particularly in the African-American community,” says Oakland Police Captain Paul Figueroa, “there’s this sense that police come in, they stop guys, they don’t find anything, and the dealers are still out there. So there’s this real sense of ineffectiveness.”

The rise in crime across neighborhoods, the shortage of police and the need to patrol the authentically violent areas of the city continue to pit the hills against the flatlands in a fight for services. Worse than that, says Figueroa, is a perception he’s encountered in the hills that it is people from the flatlands who are coming up there to rob and terrorize them.

Councilwoman Schaaf responds to their fears with neighborhood meetings about crime. They are well attended.

“I held a town hall about crime in Montclair,” says Schaaf. “I thought I had chosen a large enough venue to hold it in, a school auditorium. Three-hundred and fifty people showed up, they stood for two hours, they sat on the floor, they crowded in the doorways, literally there was no more space that people could be squeezed into, that is how upset people are about crime in this city.”

She invites to the meetings salesmen of home video surveillance systems to give presentations. You can monitor your property live, receive alerts when the system detects movement. You can more easily identify intruders. That’s one way to react.

Figueroa understands the trauma of being robbed or having your house broken into, but he knows that what’s happening in the flatlands is worse.

“The disastrous effects of violence and losing someone to a homicide are just severe, and severe for a long time. Being burglarized, although super, super upsetting, after some of the other things I’ve seen, I’m able to maybe keep it in perspective a little more.”

Like Schaaf, Figueroa grew up in Oakland thirty years ago. Only he grew up in East Oakland, near High Street, then as now a magnet for mayhem and violence.

“It hasn’t changed that much,” says Figueroa, “the epidemic of speeding cars continues, the loud music, in that area of High Street there’s a lot of narcotics.”

The shooting, the killing, the short- and long-term aftermath of each act of violence, are part of what shaped Figueroa, of what led to him becoming a cop. When Figueroa was 10, a beloved neighbor, father of his best friend, was shot and killed while walking his dog. Figueroa says the killing cast a pall over a once relatively normal, happy, active block, a pall that took years to lift. As a cop now, he sees it every day, the lasting and widespread effect of each individual killing or shooting. It becomes the muck Oaklanders must push through every day, the encoded trauma.

“There was this funk, this depression,” says Figueroa, “that just set over the neighborhood for a long time, and I’ve seen that in my career over and over again, and often times I try to describe it to people, because I’ve lived it. And what I’ve seen in my experience, is that you get homicide-homicide-homicide-violent-act, even burglaries can certainly be as traumatic for somebody, and so you get that trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma, and the funk, that we were eventually able to pull out of, it’s difficult when you stack trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma.” 

- from Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story
          an Amazon Kindle Single available for .99
          Also available as an audiobook at iTunes and audible.com

A sub-100 year: what history tells us

2013 is coming to an end and some in Oakland want to, if not celebrate, then find hope in the city's homicide number for the year, which will be that rarity since the early 1970s: fewer than 100. Maybe this is the beginning of a change that will be permanent. No question, it will have been a far better year for the city than 2012, when over 130 people were murdered here. 

Of course, tell that to the families of the nearly 90 dead in 2013:

Oakland's Civic Trauma; 
Cold Bodies, Cold Analysis, Chilling Irony;  
Read About Today's Killings, Then Forget;  
OPD Chief on Young Murder Witness;  
Death Like a Public Bus.

No one has ever told me how or when we will know that we have genuinely shed our murderous character as a city. It's important to remember that the homicide numbers have fallen below 100 here and there (see this brief history of the homicide rate in Oakland), and that politicians have touted those numbers as progress every time, and that eventually, usually quite quickly, the numbers have surmounted 100 again, sometimes by a lot. As recently as 2010, there were 95 homicides. Then in 2011, there were 110. In 2012, 131.

And anyway, as I wrote back in June of 2011: 

The human urge to squeeze the trigger never checks the calendar. Perhaps grasping for hope when they’re down, or out of morbid shock when they’re up, like now, we tend to pay too much attention to the daily and weekly violent crime numbers in Oakland. We assign them too much meaning.

Quan’s Objection

Certainly politicians and the newspapers do. Precisely one year ago, then-mayoral-candidate Jean Quan reacted defensively when I suggested to her that violence should be a priority of the next mayor. “We’ve brought the murder rate down,” she said.  

That was in June 2010, and so far there had been 37 homicides in the city, 6 fewer than June 2009, a modest number, and a more seemingly significant 24 fewer than June 2008. 

The Calendar and the Killing

The calendar year 2010 ended with 13 fewer homicides than the year before -- 100 vs. 87.

But what does it indicate, that in the twelve months since Quan’s objection to my suggestion -- mid-June 2010 to mid-June 2011 -- there have been 100-plus homicides, at least six more than between mid-June 2009 and mid-June 2010?

What does it mean? 

Nevertheless, in daily news reports of homicides, habitually reporters insert the current year’s number of killings-so-far alongside the total from “this time last year.” These numbers shouldn’t bring readers much hope, as in 2010, or, in the case of June 2011, when we have already suffered 51 homicides, deeper despair.

              - From Trauma Cache, Part 1: The Calendar and The Killing

Again, I hope the 40 fewer homicides from last year to this really is the result of police re-organization or Ceasefire or whatever else the politicians will tell us has turned the tide. But it will take time, it will take years, maybe even generations, to know if we have gained some peace. There were 3 homicides as the calender turned, 2 in East Oakland, 1 in West Oakland.

Anniversary of an end and a beginning in Oakland

From the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence:

Killed in Oakland, but his spirit lives

Sunday August 4th, 2013 marks the 13th anniversary of the shooting death of Khadafy Washington on the campus of McClymonds High School in West Oakland. Khadafy was 18. He had graduated just two months earlier. He was riding his bike that night. He died quickly, but his family's pain and struggle were only just beginning. 

Thirteen years later Khadafy's mom, Marilyn Washington Harris, and the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence continue to support thousands of survivors of the well-over 1500 people killed in Oakland since that fateful night in 2000. 

Miss Marilyn started in the months after Khadafy's killing by conceiving billboards, which were distributed, 19 of them, about the city, with Khadafy's picture and the blaring question: Do You Know Who Killed Me? They were a stark reminder to a city sometimes in denial that too many of its young men were dying violent deaths. 

Soon she was organizing marches to bring attention to Oakland's problem with violence, and to the lasting pain families of victims endure. Privately, she would reach out to individual families in the immediate aftermath of a homicide, sending them mementos and reminders that they were not forgotten.

Then she began seeking them out personally, at their homes, the hospital, even at crime scenes, taking them by the hand to guide them through the craziness that descends on a family in the days and weeks after a loved-one's sudden, violent death. In their weakest moments, she protected them from exploitation, scraped up funds for the mostly poor families so that they could bury their dead with dignity and grace, and continued to counsel and care for them as they tried to get back to life. Today, as the violence persists, Khadafy's mom is Oakland's primary crisis responder, touching the lives of thousands of suffering Oaklanders. 

Through the life and growth of the foundation named in his memory, we like to think that Khadafy still lives and grows, and that it's his spirit reaching out to the survivors of Oakland's killed, those living victims of homicide, that it is Khadafy's spirit helping them begin the long process of healing, of finding some kind of peace and love in their lives and their city. 

Read more about the work of Marylin Washington Harris and the Khadafy Foundation for Non-Violence in San Francisco Magazine, "No Escape, No Surrender", and at Ice City Almanac "She's gonna help you get through it."

Jim O'Brien
Oakland
Member of the Board
Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence
khadafyfoundation.org

Oakland's Civic Trauma

City-wide, Oakland doesn't tend to dwell on its homicides. We have a habit of profiling the victims, so that if they are young African-American men killed late at night in East or West Oakland, we read about the shooting, maybe feel bad for a moment or two, give a brief sigh for a mother who has lost her son, then, in part because we think it possible, even probable, that the victim had done something wrong to put himself in peril, we forget. (Most of us do, but not everyone. See: Miss Marilyn.) 

If the victim doesn't fit our profile, if he or she is very young, or very old, or killed at work, or white, as has been the case with four of our most recent killings, we linger a little longer, the news outlets publish stories on the victim's life and character ("Slain Oakland Pet Sitter was Beloved, Watchful" - sfgate, July 25, 2013), our leaders express their outrage publicly, they call for change ("Oakland Leaders Call for Crime Crackdown" - sfgate July 26, 2013), for new violence prevention strategies, they meet with residents, attend funerals, take up collections in support of the survivor. 

But, again, with the bulk of our killings, we seem to sigh then shrug and move on. At least we think we move on. But in reality, each killing, even the ones considered run-of-the-mill to everyone but the family of the killed, digs us deeper into a civic trauma that affects daily life in ways we might not even notice: we become used to avoiding parts of the city that scare us; we become ever more familiar with the tension strangers cause; we feel a little less proud of, a little less confident in our otherwise beloved city. With each killing, there is a traumatic effect that begins with a victim's inner circle, then radiates out to a street, a block, a neighborhood and beyond. It is difficult to heal, even if you are trying to heal it. If you ignore it, or deny it, it probably won't ever go away.

Oakland Police Deputy Chief Paul Figueroa grew up near High Street in East Oakland. Here he describes how, when he was a kid, the killing of one person changed him and his close-knit neighborhood and how, as a police officer, he continues to witness the ongoing, cumulative effect of Oakland's persistent troubles with violence:

The shooting, the killing, the short- and long-term aftermath of each act of violence, are part of what shaped Figueroa, of what led to him becoming a cop. When he was 10, a beloved neighbor, father of his best friend, was shot and killed while walking his dog. Figueroa says the killing cast a pall over a once relatively normal, happy, active block, a pall that took years to lift. As a cop now, he sees it every day, the lasting and widespread effect of each individual killing or shooting. It becomes the muck Oaklanders must push through every day, the encoded trauma.

“There was this funk, this depression,” says Figueroa, “that just set over the neighborhood for a long time, and I’ve seen that in my career over and over again, and often times I try to describe it to people, because I’ve lived it. And what I’ve seen in my experience, is that you get homicide-homicide-homicide-violent-act, even burglaries can certainly be as traumatic for somebody, and so you get that trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma, and the funk, that we were eventually able to pull out of, it’s difficult when you stack trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma.”

                         From Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

                         One young, wounded woman's quest to heal herself and her city, Oakland

                         A Kindle Single by James O'Brien

                         Readable on any device

                         Soon to be available as an audio book from audible.com

Sound of the Oakland Front Lines

Prior speakers at Oakland City Councilmember Libby Schaaf's valuable Safe Oakland series had tended to be academics advancing their theories and brands; I had skipped their appearances. It's an attitude problem I have, but I admit that I'm a snob for the voice of the streets. For the information and tone that emanates from the front lines of the violence. It's a voice that's sharp, confident, sometimes exasperated but never hopeless. It has a sound that cuts through the echo of self-interest and fear you so often hear around her.

So when I saw that one of the speakers this week was a member of Kevin Grant's Measure Y Street Outreach Team, and that another was the leader of Youth Alive's Caught in the Crossfire program, I figured I could learn something about Oakland. So I joined the hundred or so other mostly middle-aged, extremely white people from the hilly part of Schaaf's council district (I actually live in Noel Gallo's nearby district, but I have no idea what he's doing) who, to their credit, had made the trek up to Holy Names University on a soft May evening.
 

For two hours that night, tucked away in the hills in seeming safety, in the well-built but sterile performance center at Holy Names, two toilers on the front-lines of Oakland's violence spoke with utter frankness about their work, their successes and failures, about what they see and hear on the streets of Oakland and in the hospital rooms of the wounded at Highland and, nowadays, Children's.

They spoke, each for about 20 minutes (before participating in a long panel discussion), without notes, without much self-consciousness, without agendas of self-promotion or even necessarily of promoting their own programs. (Although I admit that I might be a little naive...) They were the farthest things from politicians you could find at this kind of public event, and so you could learn things from them that you could trust. I'll write about Kyndra Simmons of Caught in the Crossfire next, but first, here's what I got from Akil Truso of the Measure Y team.

I'd seen Kevin Grant, the leader of Oakland's Street Outreach program speak many times (I've written a ton about Grant. Here's something here: No Escape, No Surrender), but tonight the team was represented by Truso, in the oversized white t-shirts he and Grant favor, this one advertising Grant's Way Out program. (See my write up of its introduction last year: In Oakland, a New Way Out?)

Truso is leader of the seven-man team that walks the streets of West Oakland on the statistically most dangerous nights of the week -- Thursday, Friday and Saturday -- at the statistically most dangerous hours of the night, in a non-violent effort to keep the peace, to douse any possible sparks of violence, to engage the young people they find on the corners, to offer them alternatives.

Here's the kind of thing you learn from listening to guys like Truso:

Frisk the Bushes

An official "stop and frisk" policy in Oakland probably won't find very many illegal guns, because most guys hide their guns around the neighborhood, in bushes, under houses. They don't necessarily carry them with them in cars. Until, of course, they're needed. (At-large Councilmember Rebecca Kaplan, who participated in the panel discussion after the talks, made the good point that with 200 fewer cops than we are supposed to have, OPD really doesn't have the manpower to be stopping and frisking people for rather vague reasons, anyway.)

Turf War

Truso said there's a war going on right now between groups in the McClymonds area and the Acorn, which to me had always meant pretty much the same thing. They are adjacent and kind-of flow into and out of each other. I always think of McClymonds High School as being pretty much in the Acorn. It was on the campus of McClymonds that my friend Marilyn Harris' son was killed in August of 2000. She's lives and is a manager in the Acorn development. (I've written quite a bit about Miss Marilyn, too, if you're interested.) Just goes to show you how geographically specific Oakland's turf groups can get. (Me on the turf groups: A Violent Thing.)

Heroin Demographics

A high percentage of customers coming to San Pablo Ave to purchase heroin are white. One of them felt cheated and brought a bunch of buddies back with him to confront his dealer. He got his money back. In terms of racism, said Truso, down there, I don't really see much discriminating going on. 

Paying for Help

Truso has come up with a new approach the Measure Y teams are using to try to change things on the street. For years they have been offering gang members help finding jobs, but there are so few jobs, and they're not great jobs, and so lately the team has been, in a sense, hiring some of the gang members to work with them, paying gang leaders stipends to help them reach out to other gang leaders, to act as ambassadors in the gang world, to draw others into the conversation about alternatives to violence and the Game.

Like Measure Y's Kevin Grant -- like Truso, as well -- many of the outreach team members grew up in the neighborhoods where they now work. Like Grant and Truso, many of them got in trouble in those neighborhoods. And like these two men, some of them served serious time for their crimes.

Truso said he was in and out of prison for 18 years. Grant spent 17 years in 11 different federal penitentiaries. Unlike some who go through the corrections system, at some point, both experienced a profound change, if not in who the were, then in the direction in which they wanted to take their lives. On Wednesday night, Truso searched for an answer to what caused the change in him, and finally said it was the change he'd seen in the streets, the chaos that had led to so many wounded and killed children in Oakland. That was too much for him. He'd gotten the opportunity to work for change in the city and had grasped it.

He said that many of the guys he runs into through his work, the ones he's trying to keep calm and peaceful, still see him as he was in the old days, still call him by his nickname from back then, which I noticed he declined to share with the audience; it was absolutely not the person he was representing tonight, and so irrelevant to us.

But it is that old identity that allows the guys on the streets to trust Truso, to hear his new message in a way they might not hear it from anyone else, from a cop, or a preacher or a professor of criminology. When Grant or Truso give them the "guns down" message, when they offer stipends to help the outreach team communicate with other gang leaders, these are acts no one else could credibly engage in, and the conversations that result are ones no one else could generate. 

Hope against Hope

"I truly believe there's an answer," said Truso, pleading for city-wide engagement, "but it's gonna take everybody. If we don't jump right in, the violence is going to get worse and worse."

When an audience member said every member of her family had been a victim of crime in Oakland, and that after 56 years living here, she was feeling hopeless, Truso said if you're feeling hopeless, look at me, there's a miracle sitting right up here in front of this room.

by James O'Brien
twitter @icecityalmanac
author of Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story, a Kindle Single, available at Amazon ($0.99)
"Captivating" -Vision Hispana 
"Gutierrez is an unforgettable subject" -San Francisco Chronicle

Read about today's killings, then forget

Two killings this weekend in Oakland. (After two late last week following the Warriors' final game.) But it was the bare bit of information in today's news about yesterday's killings that struck me. As we learn more, it may change, but for now, these seem to be precisely the kinds of killings we hear about, then ignore. They occurred, with a depressing balance, in precisely the places we expect them to occur. One in Deep East Oakland, at 92nd and International, one on West Street in West Oakland. 

There's no description yet of the West Oakland victim, but the East Oakland victim is described as a 27-year-old male, shot "shortly after 4:30 a.m." 27. Don't know yet if he was African American, but for sure his age of death lands him right in, as I have referred to it in the past, the wheelhouse of urban murder. That is, most homicide victims in Oakland are African-American men between the ages of 17 and 39. And ultimately, their murders are shrugged off by the majority of the city. 

I remember being in the ICU with the family of Daryl Starks back at Christmastime 2010. Starks had been shot on a Friday night at 78th and Bancroft, a popular area in Oakland to get shot. Starks was 26, a dangerous age for a man in Oakland. He was in a coma. I remember sitting in the Highland waiting room (see the wonderful documentary about the Highland waiting room, called The Waiting Room) talking to his younger sister, 16, who herself had been shot the year before, in a park at Seminary and E. 14th, another hotspot in the dangerous Deep. Her shooting had made the TV news, but I knew Daryl's wouldn't. The details would seem too common. 

Daryl was shot while driving home from the store, which if he had been white in Montclair, or if he had been, say, 16, his story might have gained some attention. But given his age, his race and the location of the shooting, there was I believe a tacit citywide conclusion that his death was run-of-the-mill for Oakland and that, if he did not necessarily deserve to get shot and die, then likely at least he had done something wrong to put himself in position to get shot and die. And whatever that wrong thing was, it was a type of wrong thing, a type of mistake different from any mistake we might have made in our lives, worse than any wrong thing we had ever done ourselves. It had led to his death. So while we might be mildly sorry for him and his family, we weren't going to nurture our sympathy or cultivate some outrage. We weren't going to march for peace because Daryl died, or petition the government for new gun laws, or write about his murder or think about it much. (Ultimately Daryl's death did get a little publicity, as his family agreed to donate his organs.)

2010 was a relatively sane year for homicides in Oakland. There were 10 fewer killings than in 2009. Not one single homicide victim that year was white. But Daryl, who died five days before Christmas, wouldn't be the last murder of the year.

These two as yet unnamed homicides from yesterday, May 19th, 2013, bring the year's number of killings to 39. Some have generated publicity and hand-wringing. Even arrests. What was the difference between those killings and these? Between those killings and the killing of Daryl Starks? Is one life worth more than another?

by James O'Brien
twitter @icecityalmanac
author of Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story, a Kindle Single, available at Amazon ($0.99)
"Captivating" -Vision Hispana 
"Gutierrez is an unforgettable subject" -San Francisco Chronicle

Miss Marilyn

Recently someone asked me to write up a summary of the work of Oakland's Marilyn Washington Harris, whose son, Khadafy, was killed on the campus of McClymonds High School in West Oakland back in the summer of 2000. Marilyn is the founder and executive director of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence. I was asked to write about the background to the problem she addresses, the specific work she does, the impact she has on the community, how she is a leader, and finally to sum it all up. And to do it all briefly. I thought it turned out to be a nice, succinct testament about one of the finest, most courageous people I've ever met, so decided to post it here on the Almanac. First the summary, then the other four sections.

Marilyn Washington Harris aids Oakland's forgotten and its shunned. Since losing her only son to the gun in 2000, and finding no help available, she has dedicated her life to stepping into the immediate aftermath of homicides to provide help, hope and healing to stunned, angry, mourning families. Daily, she guides Oaklanders through the craziness, the hopelessness, and the business -- coroners, funerals, city offices, police -- of being a survivor. In 13 years, at homes, at crime scenes, at churches, chapels and funeral homes, she has aided thousands of families, making appointments and arrangements, accompanying them, protecting them from exploitation and beginning the healing process with patience, love and trust. A government clerk when her son was killed, she has become a vocal advocate for peace, a model of selfless service, an inspiration to a generation of violence prevention workers, and a healer of the city and its victims.

Background (of the problem Miss Marilyn addresses in her work)

For more than three decades now, Oakland has had one of the highest homicide rates in the nation. Police and programs exist for the prevention of violence, but very little has ever been done for the survivors of the killed who, lost and scarred, frightened, often friendless and poor, must continue to live and function in the community. When her son was killed in 2000, Marilyn Harris found that there was no one to guide loved ones through the great uncertainty, through the grim business so suddenly at hand in the wake of the violent death of a son, husband, daughter, wife. Suddenly, in a mental and emotional daze, there are police to deal with, coroners, city clerks, funeral arrangements, often with very limited funds. The opportunities for neglect and exploitation are many. Through the lonely, often bitter process, the anger, sadness and alienation of the survivors are only increased and solidified. To ignore their needs is to let their wounds fester. It is to risk returning them to the community utterly bereft and hopeless. To aid them, is to demonstrate that love and healing are still possible.

What She Does

Sometimes she gets a text, or a colleague calls. Often, the police call Marilyn Harris when there has been a homicide in Oakland. Sometimes neighbors of the killed call; they know it's time for Harris to do her work, as only she can. She steps into the bleakest environments, at crime scenes, in homes under a cloud of shocked mourning. She connects with the sufferers, demonstrates rare understanding in the face of anger, confusion, even hostility, casting a balance between compassion and necessity. She finds the right moment for the business at hand, then provides knowledge, will, and a clear mind. Harris knows the system, from cops to florists to morticians. She makes appointments at funeral homes, at the coroner's office, at victims' services. She meets you there, or drives you, assures you are cared for and not exploited. She scrapes and scrounges for funds if you need them, checks if you have taken your medications, if you need food or childcare. She is with you at the funeral, there for you as you return to life. For many, she becomes for a time the one person they know they can trust and believe in. They never forget it.

Her Impact

More than 1,000 people have been killed in Oakland since 2000, when Harris' son was murdered in West Oakland. Nearly all of the 1000-plus victims' families have been helped through their most excruciating days by the sure hand of Miss Marilyn, as Harris is known throughout Oakland. With a minimal staff and small budget, Harris has almost single-handedly aided thousands of Oaklanders. When her son was killed, there was no one to help the survivors; they were the forgotten people, often shunned even within their own communities. And they would remain bitter, sometimes bent on revenge. Now, instead of returning survivors of the killed to the world alone and lost, she returns people who have begun the process of healing. The impact of her work spreads far beyond the individuals she guides, far beyond the days and weeks after a homicide. Even the police rely on Harris to calm the roiling souls of survivors so they can do their investigative work. To grieving families, she is a vivid reminder that the whole world is not against you. To anyone who knows her, she is a symbol of the possibility of carrying on against the greatest odds. Marilyn Harris saves lives.

Her Leadership

When her son was shot dead in 2000, Marilyn Harris had billboards erected across West Oakland with his picture and the stark question: Do You Know Who Killed Me? We still don't, but ever since then she has been an unapologetic defender and proponent of the victims of Oakland's implacable problem with violence. She is the inspiration for countless survivors and for violence prevention specialists throughout the city. An accomplished public speaker of unimpeachable credibilty, Harris is an articulate and reasoned voice of reality in a city grasping for healing. She has the ear of everyone, from city leaders to wounded and disaffected victims. In her own life, with self-effacing modesty, she demonstrates acceptance without surrender, while cajoling the powerful and the seemingly powerless to move forward, to see reality, to choose peace and forgiveness, and to maintain faith in the city and its people. With her humor, her honesty, her belief in the necessity of love and healing on a personal and a civic level, she is an example of the strength and fortitude to be found deep inside all of us. Every day, she leads individuals towards healing and Oakland toward its better self.

Trauma Cache, Part 2: Oakland's Moneyball Approach to Public Safety

Castro Street, West Oakland

There are plenty of veterans of Oakland’s troubles -- survivors of assaults, survivors of the killed, formerly-incarcerated Oaklanders making amends -- out there addressing our abundant, sometimes hidden hoards of trauma.  (See Trauma Cache,Part 1: The Calendar and the Killing.)

Some are with city government, others work out of nonprofit organizations dedicated to violence prevention and supported in part by Measure Y, the city program approved by a public vote, which funds anti-violence efforts among Oakland’s youth. 

In Oakland, even as the dark urge wins battle after battle, the number of police officers continues to diminish, down now from just over 800 in early 2010 to fewer than 700 today. 

And so, as I heard Police Chief Batts say at a fundraiser early this year, the work of non-violence organizations to inject the idea of peace into a community accustomed to violence has become more crucial than ever, more crucial than planned.  Meant to supplement, to complement police work, meant to lay a seed of peace for the future, the non-violence programs, whether they know it or not, whether they want it or not, are taking on a far more urgent role in protecting Oakland than originally envisioned.

Leaning house, West Oakland

Because they are undervalued, because they are accustomed to supporting themselves through fundraising, because they have lower overhead than a police department, and because the salaries of non-profit workers are far lower than police officers, broke Oakland can afford to support non-violence organizations.  

Think of it as the Moneyball approach to public safety.

(See the trailer for Moneyball, the movie, starring Brad Pitt, coming this September) 

Baseball's Version

Moneyball, as most who read this will probably know, is a term used to describe the Oakland A’s method (emulated by a few similar organizations) of fielding a competitive team despite its own penurious (think: Scrooge) ownership and despite the need to beat rival teams willing and able to pay unimaginable salaries to numerous superstar players. 

Theoretically, in addition to finding and developing its own younger, and therefore cheaper, talented pitchers and position players, the A’s seek out “undervalued” veterans: seemingly mediocre players with particular, undervalued skills; good athletes with a history of injury whom they gamble will finally stay healthy for an entire season; or superstars at the ends of their careers who might have one good or great season left (see Frank Thomas).  All this in the hopes that some combination of these affordable, undervalued players will become a winning team. 

To an extent, the approach worked, culminating in an appearance in the American League Championship Series of 2006.  All through the early Oughts, the A’s fielded fun-to-watch teams who won a lot of games, including, of course, a record-breaking twenty-in-a-row in 2002.

No championships, though, and in recent years, the downside of Moneyball has become evident, as injury-prone players get injured, once-great veterans fail to recapture their youth (see Mike Piazza), and the A’s organization seems incapable of drafting and developing its own superstar position players.  Although they are still very good at identifying and developing pitchers.  No question they know pitching.

Intersection, Oakland

Life & Death & Moneyball

Think of the police as the superstars who make a lot of money, and why shouldn’t they?  Pretty hard job they do.  Danger every day.  Elaborate training required.  Lots at stake.  (Of course, the current dispute between the City and the police is not over salaries, but over how much the officers organization should pay into its own pension plan.  Absent a 9% payment, the City says it can’t afford to hire more officers.)

Non-profits, like YouthAlive!, in Oakland, tend to work where they can find cheap or donated space, often their equipment is old computers, metal desks, flip charts and magic markers, thumb tacks and their own cars.  Usually they do get reimbursed for gas.

Diet Rite Cola sign, West Oakand

Training Comes with a Bullet

You might say that non-violence work requires less training than police work.  Technically, perhaps. 

But training also comes with a bullet. 

Working in Oakland programs that deal with the various stages of a life touched by violence, there are victims of drive-by shootings, mothers of the killed, even formerly incarcerated gang members. 

Gutierrez & the Kids

Caheri Gutierrez, who lost her face in a drive-by shooting in 2008, works, with her colleague Robert Watts III, in a program called Teens on Target, where high school students in violent Deep East Oakland learn to cope, where they learn how to tell the stories of their lives and their community.  These students then go into the middle schools to work with younger kids exposed to violence, to share stories and ideas about coping, about finding solutions other than violence. 

The idea is to give these kids an alternative to the path of the gun, to the path many of the adults and many of the older children, in their neighborhoods and families have been taking for decades now.  Sometimes it is the only path, and violence the only solution, these young people have seen.

(Read the full Caheri Gutierrez story, I Might Have Some Hope Here)

Grant & the Gangs

For those who have entered the life already, there is the Measure Y Street Outreach team, led by Kevin Grant, who committed crimes in Oakland and got sent away to Federal prison for 17 years, only to become, in the years since his release, one of the most persuasive and compelling voices of non-violence in California. 

Grant and his colleagues take to Oakland’s most dangerous streets at the most dangerous times of the night to engage young people who have the potential to do harm.  He approaches them with an insider’s instincts, a gang-veteran’s credibility, and a passion for peace in their lives.  When he talks to them about the failure of the life of the gun, he tends to make a lot of sense.  They tend to listen to him.

Dan Simmons & the Returned

Some do, anyway.  Others don’t hear or don’t heed the message Grant brings.  They get arrested, get sent away.  Many, probably safe to say most, who return after a period of incarceration are unskilled, uneducated, unwanted.  A return to the kind of life that got them into trouble might be the only choice they see. 

As part of Oakland’s prisoner re-entry program, city-employee Dan Simmons, a veteran of incarceration, now with a masters degree and a mission, and his colleague Emilio Vann, along with Grant, work to introduce people out on probation or parole to the possibilities of a lawful, peaceful existence.

Simmons works with the OPD and Alameda County Probation and Parole offices to coordinate Call-ins.  Call-ins are meetings between, on the one side, the police, the DA, the United States Attorney and other law enforcement organizations and, on the other side, Oaklanders identified by their records and affiliations as most likely to commit violence in their communities. 

(Read an in-depth report on an Oakland call-in: A Violent Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) 

These meetings, held at City Hall, are business-like and even polite, but very intense.

First, the police and the government attorneys promise vigilance.  We are watching you, even the FBI is watching you now: commit more acts of violence, and you will be sent far away for a very long time, we promise. 

Then Grant talks to the participants (read about Grant's talk in "It's over, you lost").  He shows that he understands their lives, then helps them imagine a different path, all the while acknowledging the difficulties they face in trying to leave behind the life of the gun. 

Then the law enforcement people leave the room, and Simmons invites representatives of local non-profits and local businesses to speak.  They offer job training, legal and spiritual aide, actual jobs. 

Then case manager Emilio Vann works tenaciously for months to keep the participants on track.

Tammy Cloud & the Shot

Shots are fired anyway.  220-plus shootings so far this year.  Last year we had an average of three per day.  (See: even I can’t resist the urge to compare years. See, again:,Trauma Cache, Part 1: TheCalendar and the Killing.)  On one particular day last year, there were eleven incidents of gunfire reported.  Guns are aimed and triggers are pulled and people are wounded.  Many survive.  

Intervention Specialists like Tammy Cloud, from a program called Caught in the Crossfire, meet the victims, often when they awaken at their hospital bedsides.  They do two crucial things: first, they encourage the victims and their friends and family to consider foregoing violent retaliation, to consider breaking the bloody cycle; secondly, they don’t leave.  Instead, they work with victims for the long-term, to help them deal with the emotional trauma that comes in the wake of an assault, and to make their way back into a life not dominated by anger, by fear, or by confusion and depression. 

(Read about Cloud at work in Until We Bleed & Youth, Alive) 

Miss Marilyn & the City

Some die.  Mostly in East Oakland.  But not exclusively.  Many die in less-populated but long-besieged West Oakland.  Some make it to Highland Hospital before they die.  They leave behind in their loved ones an emptiness, something bottomless, an absence of hope, of reason, of whatever current runs through us that urges living and survival. 

Into this grim void step Marilyn Harris and Fabian Martinez of The Khadafy Washington Project.  Harris started the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence after her only son was shot dead in the summer of 2000. 

You might remember a series of jarring billboards, 31 of them, visible off of Highway 580 and all over West Oakland, where Harris lives and where Khadafy was killed.  On the billboards, alongside a large picture of her handsome son, who had just graduated from McClymonds High School, blared the stark, confrontational, resonant question: Do You Know Who Killed Me?

For going on eleven years now Harris has spent her days, and often her nights, and sometimes into the early mornings, at homes, at hospitals, at fresh crime scenes, bringing comfort and the very beginnings of healing to the parents, the spouses, the children of homicide victims in Oakland. 

I’ve written a lot about the work and impact Miss Marilyn has on lives in Oakland, so I won’t go into great detail here about all she does for the families of the lost, all the practical things, how she provides a clear eye during their time of shock, all the heavy lifting of the spirit, how she comes to them with an example, with the promise that life goes on.   

Read about her work here, and here and here. 

The Hope

At first glance, the work of Harris and Gutierrez and Cloud, and of Simmons and Grant and Vann seems to speak to a grim reality: hatred and the hopelessness of the gun are part of us.  And certainly each of them is a realist.  They have seen too much to be otherwise.  But what they’ve seen, what they have endured, has not made them cynical.  The energy and even joy you often see in them as they work indicates their hope. 

For sure each of them works in the moment, the urgent, frightening, depressing moment, but always with an eye to a more peaceful future Oakland.  More than any numbers that rise or fall, they carry on their shoulders the despair of the city and demonstrate the real hope we cling to. 

If they are less a fiscal burden to the city than the police, they are also undervalued, like a light-hitting first-baseman with a high on-base-percentage.  Still, even if the Moneyball approach makes sense for a cash-strapped baseball team trying to win games, I’m not sure it will work for a cash-strapped city trying to save lives and to change lives. 

And this worries me too: the best of the A's Moneyball teams were fun to watch, and they won their share of games, but, again,  they never won a championship.

Empty chair, abandoned station

Trauma Cache, Part I: The Calendar and the Killing

Backwards graffiti, 16th Street Train Station, West Oakland

The human urge to squeeze the trigger never checks the calendar. Perhaps grasping for hope when they’re down or out of morbid shock when they’re up, like now, we tend to pay too much attention to the daily and weekly violent crime numbers in Oakland. We assign them too much meaning.

Quan’s Objection

Certainly politicians and the newspapers do. Precisely one year ago, then-mayoral-candidate Jean Quan reacted defensively when I suggested to her that violence should be a priority of the next mayor.  “We’ve brought the murder rate down,” she said.  

That was in June 2010, and so far there had been 37 homicides in the city, six fewer than June 2009, a modest number, and a more seemingly significant 24 fewer than June 2008. 

The Calendar and the Killing

The calendar year 2010 ended with 13 fewer homicides than the year before -- 100 vs. 87.

But what does it indicate, that in the twelve months since Quan’s objection to my suggestion -- mid-June 2010 to mid-June 2011 -- there have been 100-plus homicides, at least six more than between mid-June 2009 and mid-June 2010?

What does it mean? 

Nevertheless, in daily news reports of homicides, reporters habitually insert the current year’s number of killings-so-far alongside the total from “this time last year.”  These numbers shouldn’t bring readers much hope, as in 2010, or, in the case of June 2011, when we have already suffered 51 homicides, deeper despair. 

Portraits of the Barely Living

Notwithstanding that unhelpful habit, there is some really fine coverage here of Oakland’s violence and its impact; there is plenty of good writing and reporting and people should read it.  Scott Johnson’s Oakland Effect blog always delivers a good combination of hard reporting and even harder witnessing of the toll of violence on the living. Recently, the Bay Area News Group has had its reporters go beyond the daily litany of shooting, death, community silence, “Police request anyone with information call Crime Stoppers,” to put together a valuable series describing in part what happens after the violence, and what life is like for the survivors of the killed in Oakland. It amounts to a necessary, cumulative portrait of what the killing does beyond the sudden, brutal taking away from us of one person at a time forever.  

What the Survivors Find

The killing keeps on killing. As I’ve written elsewhere, that bullet that kills, it also ricochets. The lasting impact of violence comes in the years of grief and pain and bitterness the living endure, in the trauma we cache away, that seeps out like bad medicine from some malevolent time-release capsule.  The lasting impact comes also with how those angry, despairing, lost walking wounded affect the community, or worse, the next generation.  If we ignore them, we ignore ourselves.

Not much the police can do about that, even if they had as many officers as they would like to have. 

Addressing the impact of violence and loss on the living is an imprecise, necessarily intuitive, always difficult process.  There are no templates for healing a grieving our wounded person.  There are no definitive checklists of symptoms of their grief, no precise timelines or confident prognoses for their recovery. 

For many, faith and family help.  

But many survivors get no outside help at all.  Fortunately, some find great stockpiles of fortitude inside themselves; they discover strengths they’ve never needed before and likely never imagined they’d possessed.  In these strengths they find the resources to make their own comeback. 

What I’ve witnessed in covering the aftermath of violence in Oakland is that those victims who go on to help and comfort subsequent victims usually seem the most healed themselves. .

Empty chair, abandoned station, West Oakland

Coming up: Trauma Cache, Part 2: A Moneyball Approach 
to Public Safety