My San Francisco Magazine article on Oakland's Operation Ceasefire

https://sanfran.com/guns-down-dont-shoot

Backwards graffiti pic: Caitlin O'Brien

They are, according to the Oakland Police Department, the city’s most violent or potentially violent men. All are on probation or parole, having been convicted of robbery, drug dealing, assault with a deadly weapon, and a litany of other felonies. Some were summoned here by a letter received in the mail; others had the letter hand-delivered to their home by a probation officer with a police escort. When the authorities knocked on the door, “people were nervous, ready to go on the run,” says Malik, one of the parolees who was paid a visit. Better to flee and ask questions later, the men believed, than to open the door and leave in cuffs: “If they catch me,” Malik says, shrugging his shoulders, “they catch me.” 

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https://sanfran.com/guns-down-dont-shoot

Retaliatory: Street corner confrontations and Operation Ceasefire in Oakland

I will have an article in the October 2014 issue of San Francisco Magazine all about Oakland's Operation Ceasefire, the city's current violence prevention campaign, a collaborative effort among law enforcement, churches, service providers, former victims and former perpetrators. The piece looks at how Ceasefire works, whether it works, and whether it can survive, financially and politically. Comprehensive though the story is, some things could not be elaborated on, including custom notifications, one of the ways the Ceasefire partners communicate with the men they believe commit most of the violence here. So here is something I wrote about how these often tense meetings go down:

Retaliatory - Custom Notifications and Operation Ceasefire

When we have those painful stretches in Oakland, those weeks when there are three, even four killings in quick succession, often they are the result of retaliation. Meant to stanch that flow of retaliatory blood, Operation Ceasefire's most urgent mode of communication with the city's most violent, and its most vulnerable, is called a "custom notification."

Unlike call-ins, meetings which a dozen or more gang members attend, and which can take months to plan, custom notifications usually involve one potential victim or suspect, a person whom intelligence indicates is either in imminent danger of being shot, or who is planning to shoot. Custom notifications might take place on a street corner, in an apartment, at the jail. At these small, seemingly impromptu meetings, one or two highly-trained police officers, along with a probation officer, approach the suspect. Sometimes a street outreach worker who knows the suspect accompanies the officers. 

Usually the first part of the message is specific: You are in danger. 

Or, We know your sister got killed last week. We know you or your friends are gearing up to retaliate. We are watching you.

Then the Ceasfire message comes: We love you, we care about you. But this city cannot take any more violence. It must stop. If you help us, if you pull back, we can help you change your life. But if you or your associates strike, we will strike harder, and you will be gone, prosecuted to the furthest extent of the law, no deals possible, sent to the farthest away prison for as long as possible. The time is now to get out of the life, and we can help you. We have services -- job training, legal advice, substance abuse counseling -- whatever you need to exit this dangerous life alive and free.

There have been 48 custom notifications in Oakland since late 2012.

Also see: Death & the Mother: inside an Oakland gang call-in

Also, the October 2014 San Francisco article is out - Guns Down. Don't Shoot  

Death and the Mother: Inside an Oakland Ceasefire Call-in

I'll have a story in the upcoming, October 2014 issue of San Francisco Magazine about Oakland's current violence-prevention campaign, Operation Ceasefire, its effectiveness and its own political and financial prospects for survival. The story goes inside a meeting between police, prosecutors, community members and, according to the Oakland Police Department, 15 of the city's most violent men. At the meeting -- there have been six such meetings held since October of 2012 -- these mostly young men are promised severe punishment if they commit any further acts of violence, and also offered help getting out of the life. Much of the work done through Ceasefire is funded by the parcel tax known as Measure Y, which expires this year. If its replacement, Measure Z, fails to be approved by Oakland voters in November, Ceasefire will lose a crucial source of funding for the social services it offers those members of violent gangs and groups who want to change their lives.

This scene did not make it into the final version of the story, but it gives a great sense of the atmosphere inside the room and of the ultimate things at stake. I wrote about the two speakers featured here in another story for San Francisco back in 2012: No Escape, No Surrender.

Death and the Mothers: Inside an Oakland Ceasefire Call-in

Ever so gradually, you begin to sense that there is another crucial message being communicated at the call-in. It's not about law enforcement, not even necessarily about putting the guns down or getting a job, but about choosing between your own life or death. It starts when the focus shifts to Marilyn Harris, who lost her only son to the gun in Oakland back in 2000. Harris is also a service provider who steps into the immediate aftermath of homicides, often at the very crime scene, to aid families of the killed. In fourteen years, she has helped thousands of victims' family members in Oakland at the moment of their rawest grief. "You don't want to see me," she says. "Your mother doesn't want to see me. Because if I show up, it means you're dead." It's a fundamental point to make and a key finding of Ceasefire's data analysis: these young men are not only the most violent, they are also the most vulnerable to violence.

Late in the meeting, in the pregnant silence after DA Creighton and other law enforcement speakers have made their threats, the theme of death is revisited. Kevin Grant scrambles under a table and takes the center of the room. He is the one speaker who is given no time limit. Grant spent 17 years in 11 different federal prisons. Some of those years were for crimes committed on the streets of Oakland. Now his is the one voice that everyone in the city—the police, the politicians, the prosecutors and the street— listens to. To the young men he drives home a simple point, one gleaned from attending the sites of countless homicides as the city's premier gang intervention specialist: You are the ones who will end up on the ground.

"The sheet they put over the body is always too short," he says, "so there's always those shoes sticking out." Sometimes the victim’s mother shows up and when she sees the shoes, she knows that it's her son on the ground and her grief comes sudden and loud and excruciating.

He asks the guys, "What if that was you? What if that was your mom? And listen to this: What if God came down to you and said, 'You know what, I feel bad about this. You're still dead, but I'm gonna give you 60 more seconds with your mom to say whatever you want to say.'"

Grant walks to their places at the tables, looks at each young man and, one-by-one, asks him, "What would you say?"

Some tell him they would say "I love you."

“What about ‘I'm sorry?'" says Grant, with a hint of impatience, perhaps even a tinge of anger in his voice. And they nod, all but two of them, sitting near each other at one corner of the square, easily the youngest looking guys in the room. One is like no other participant I've seen at the call-ins I've attended. Throughout the meeting he has stared off into some undetermined space, into the shadows at the edges of the otherwise bright room. He has hardly paid any attention to any speaker. He looks lost, distraught, or possibly high. Others tell me they think he might have been mentally disabled. He responds to Grant's question with the barest nod then returns to his private place.

The other one has held his phone under the table and worked it through much of the meeting. He shrugs off Grant's question, while in a folding chair behind him sits his mother, crying.

It is a quietly devastating scene, hopeless even. But later, after the meeting, I see one of the pastors talking to the kid and his mom. Then I see Grant in a conversation with them. It is one of the great moments of a call-in, when the formal part is over and the preachers, the social workers and the former victims begin the hard work of urging these young men into a different life. It is an encounter only Ceasefire could make happen, so long as Ceasefire survives.

Also see: Retaliatory: Street corner confrontations and Operation Ceasefire in Oakland

Also, the October 2014 San Francisco article is out: Guns Down. Don't Shoot.

Deleted passage offered up to posterity

San Francisco was writing about restaurants elsewhere in their Oakland (June 2014) issue ("The Oakland 100"), so this passage from my obscure Oakland piece was considered redundant. But I kind of like it, so thought I'd throw it up here for posterity. You're welcome, posterity.

If anything in recent memory has challenged Oakland's reputation for violence and crime it's food. Nowadays, when the New York Times or the Guardian or GQ or other far-flung publications risk encouraging their readers to visit here, they might mention Lake Merritt or the Oakland Museum of California or the weather, but it's restaurants they emphasize. What started promisingly in 2003, with Tamarindo and then the Trappist in Old Oakland, with Luka's and Flora in Uptown and Dona Tomas in Temescal, has spread with great fervor and many wood-burning ovens to Piedmont Avenue, Grand Avenue, to Jack London Square, to Downtown. It's begun taking its first tentative steps into parts of West and North Oakland. Today, all over town, restaurants open and close and open and close like eyes blinking. In just three neighborhoods, Uptown, Downtown and Old Oakland, over 100 restaurants have opened since 2003. Some of them are already gone, but twenty more are set to open soon. That's some sort of narrow progress, I guess. Sometimes cities lumber forward more than they stride. And after several years covering violence in Oakland, it's good to be reminded that this is not just a place where people die but also a place where people live. 

Related by Blood

Profiles of the wounded, 2010-2015, Oakland

The bullet that wounds or kills is only the beginning of the story. These are profiles, written since 2010, of those living in the aftermath of violence in Oakland, where you can multiply their stories, and their pain, by thousands, to include all the wounded and all the members of the families of the 450-plus killed in the past four and a half years.

Caheri Gutierrez was shot in the face and nearly killed:
After nearly dying that night, after waking up to find her self jawless and toothless and deaf in one ear, and after a month in the hospital, Gutierrez had gone home to East Oakland, only to find her struggle for recovery haunted by fear of the street, by nightmares, by a growing anger and an incipient grief for her lost identity. This is where victims of violence find themselves, in a lonely place where no one around them knows how to help. The victim feels helpless and so do the victim’s loved ones, coworkers, neighbors and friends. Many are afraid even to approach that dark place full of fear and confusion and anger where the victim exists.
I Might Have Some Hope Here
Beautiful Wounded: a story from the Deep Prologue to a Maze of Dreams No Escape, No Surrender

Rose Holman lost her son:
"I know it, but then I don't," says Holman. "I still feel like we have had one of our arguments, a falling out. But that sooner or later we will meet up, at a family gathering or something, and we will sit down to talk and then we will be past it and move on." Sooner or later, maybe much later, it will hit her, though, that there will be no chance to reconcile with her son, or to watch him become the man she hoped he would be. And then all the grief will come tumbling down on top of her again.
Life After Homicide  - Part 1: Adrift in a Churning Tide & Part 2: "She's gonna help you get through it"

Mallie Latham lost his daughter:
It wasn't just her mannerisms that struck her dad as free and easy. Before she was shot to death in 2012 on a street in East Oakland, Mallie Latham's youngest daughter, Shanika, a college student one week shy of her 21st birthday, had seemed untouched by the things in life that strip away our joy and our trust in others. "She had that openness and freshness," says Latham. "She made friends easily." 
No Manual: After the death of Shanika Latham 

Jean Eason returned from the war in Afghanistan unharmed:
 Even today, tonight, walking around the lake, some stretches of our path are darker than others, and Jean can seem suddenly nervous, lost in a story he knows well, quiet for a moment. At one point he says, "Man it's dark here" and it sounds like the path he is still on in life, the path all victims of violence find themselves on: struggle, progress, healing, then suddenly the dark, the nervousness and confusion return. 
Unwounded in Afghanistan, Shot in East Oakland 

Daryl Starks family waited for him to die in the Highland ICU:
Darryl Starks' little sister needs $20. She needs it for a new tattoo, one that will commemorate his death, which is imminent. Starks himself lies intubated and comatose in a narrow hospital bed, in ICU room #19, at the Alameda County Medical Center, a.k.a Highland Hospital. He lies under bright lights. His head is tilted back a little on the white pillow, skewed just slightly to his left, toward where his oxygen tube runs. His eyelids are not completely closed. 
The Dark Urges

Ultra and Akim Humphries lost their son:
Then came those long hours between rumor and knowing, the last, strange, painful hours between a normal life and the void, hours like a slow breaking of your bones, as you search for the truth, for something solid, some authority to tell you he is alive or dead. Sometimes the only real authority is your own eyes.
After the Death of Darnell Byrd, Jr - Part 1: Between Rumor and Knowing & Part 2: "A Story that is Killing My Heart"
 
Marilyn Harris lost her only son:
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. 
Miss Marilyn
A Plight, and a Plea for Oakland
Anniversary of an End and a Beginning
No Escape, No Surrender

Lashawn Randolph lost her daughter, Rich Livingston lost his son; they died together:
Both Rick and Lashawn talk about a future they will never witness. Rickey's dad dreamed of taking his son to exotic places, "away from the concrete of Oakland and San Francisco." Alexis mom talks about the happy answers she will never get, what college Alexis would go to, what career path her promising daughter would follow. Both young people have had birthdays since their deaths. Each family had a party.
A Search that Never Ends
 

Essay about Oakland in SF Mag

A Unified Theory of a Tough Town by Jim O'Brien, in the June issue of San Francisco Magazine. The entire issue is dedicated to the life, politics, culture and people of Oakland. Here's a little excerpt from my article:

Oakland is hilly but not mountainous. It is a physically beautiful place, but unlike in San Francisco, its beauty does not confront you at every hill crested or corner turned. You have to seek it out. Try standing at Van Buren and Euclid and looking north to the hills or south to the gleaming lake. Stroll the beautiful unpainted remnants of the town once known as Brooklyn at the strange elbow bend in International between 12th and 14th Avenues. Or feel the moody haze as you sit on the little knoll just east of Lake Merritt at dusk in autumn. Some early spring day at sunset, find your way to the obscure meeting place of Wellington Street and Everett Avenue in the foothills, watch the sun blast its way into the city’s broken-comb skyline, and try not to be moved. Walk certain historic blocks in West Oakland, rich in architecture, any time of the day or year: Eighth Street between Henry and Pine, or Chester between Fifth Street and South Prescott Park.