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| Caheri Gutierrez with a student in East Oakland |
Thinking a lot about
weaving the City of Oakland's rich life and current times into Caheri Gutierez' incredible story. Life in Oakland today, for many of the
kids who come from where Caheri did, continues to be one very dark
maze of dreams, dreams most of us could never begin to interpret
because they are either too humble or too profane. More the former.
Maybe their dream is simple peace.
Oakland is not
Afghanistan, and so by peace we mean an absence of stress and a freedom from the fear of
bloody interpersonal violence. Oakland isn’t Mexico, so the bodies
don't pile up, so much as they are found scattered throughout mostly
the eastern part of the city at a rate of two-plus per week.
The shootings are
worse.
People don't hear
about the shootings as much because, unless the victim is under 16 or
white, things don't get reported as faithfully when the victim
survives. It's interesting that many of today's shootings would be
killings except that the trauma team at our county hospital (where
Caheri spent a month after her face was shot through with a
hollow-tip bullet) has gotten so good at their work. Even so, the
homicide rate maintains its morbid buoyancy. As I write, the number
of homicides for the year sits above that of last year by precisely
the number of people killed in the Oikos massacre in March, about
which I wrote this short piece for San Francisco Magazine.
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| Backwards graffiti at 16th Street Station |
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To address the
violence.
Quicker than her
predecessor, the somnambulist Mayor Dellums, or his
predecessor, the careerist politician carpetbagger Jerry Brown, our
current mayor, Jean Quan, almost a native, having arrived in our tiny
but intense Chinatown as a child, came up with a newfangled public
safety plan. She announced it in front of hundreds of semi-hostile
Oaklanders at a public safety "summit" just days after the
City's ill-planned, ill-timed and poorly-executed eviction of the
Occupy protesters at City Hall last September. I was there,
depressed, but not particularly hostile.
To explain it
requires a bit of background: By and large, Oakland doesn't have a
lot of big gangs like other cities with similar troubles. It has
instead what are called turf groups, small, liquid, often essentially
leaderless, always violent. To monitor all this, protests that pop
up, and whatever other disruptions of the peace occur, Oakland has
about 650 police officers, a woefully inadequate number.
The Oakland Police
Department (OPD) has been able to identify with precision the city'scrime hotspots, and under Quan's plan would deploy the bulk of its
small force at these intersections and in these neighborhoods. Quan
called this her 100 Blocks strategy, explaining that most violent
crime can be isolated to 100 blocks of the city, and arguing that
that's where we need the force to be if we are to be safe.
Of course, if you
avoid those parts of the city, you might already feel safe. If you
avoid those parts of the city, they begin to feel less real, what
violence takes place there affects you less, if at all, it affects
you as a hit to your property value, perhaps, as the city's
reputation for violence grows, even if your house is many miles
away.
Oakland is hilly but not mountainous.
Oakland's highest
height is only 1800 feet, but it reaches there breathless, leaving
behind the lower hills, where I live, and the flats, which peter out
at the big port, and on the estuary as it rolls between Oakland and
Alameda, and by the bay, and where live the people of Oakland in
genuine daily peril, people under the thumb of the gun, where CaheriGutierrez grew up, where she became who she was, first standing out
as the seemingly rare good girl defying the odds with top
grades and athletic stardom, then the weed-smoking, street-tough and
aggressively hot teenage dropout and model, then the victim of
shocking violence, and now where she works as a violence prevention educator and servant of the desperate city.
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| Gutierrez with violence prevention peer educators in Oakland |
It all happens
in the flats.
Also known as Deep
East Oakland, and in a city of 400,000 or so souls (and slowly
shrinking, by the way, mostly due to the emigration of frightened and
fed up African Americans), and 15% unemployment, the flats are where
most of the violence occurs, where victims are made, where most of
the guns are, where Oakland's turf groups rule, where they vainly but
violently protect, in a criminal perversion of that word, their
little blocks.
We have arranged the
city in a way that allows many of us to avoid those blocks, to drive
quickly over them on freeways. We will be far along down Highway 880
to Berkeley when our exhaust fumes have permeated the air of the Acorn or
Ghost Town. With the overpass system of highways, we no longer need
to stop there even for gas or coffee or cigarettes. Even if we care
that someone had been killed there, if we don't see it, don't know
them, don't feel traumatized the next day as we emerge from our home,
then we don't feel connected.
Quan pretty frankly admitted
that the downside of her plan was that the gentle, genteel hills
would be somewhat on their own in terms of police protection. We'll
come if you call us, but otherwise, will have less of a presence than
before.
The hills wouldn't suffer quietly.
The hills have
needs, they have means. And, yes, they have things worth stealing.
And it goes without saying that hills residents deserve to live in a
safe and secure city. It's what their taxes are supposed to pay for.
And objections have floated down on us from the hills. And the 100
Blocks plan is slowly crumbling, through genuine civic pressure and
the genuine political weakness of an administration under the shadow
of two admittedly weakening recall campaigns.
The 100 Blocks
strategy hasn't appeared to work, anyway, as the city's
homicide numbers climb, but it's really too soon to tell. But not too
soon to abandon the program. That's what politicians do here. We
might never know if it was destined for success. In the meantime,
people die, lives get ruined, and the people trust the City and its
police force ever less.
Caheri, this daughter of the city.
As I have written,
there are places in Oakland where a scar speaks louder than a badge,
louder than a pulpit, louder than a diploma ever could. Politicians
flounder; their fears and their personal weaknesses are nearly as
palpable as the fear of Oaklanders in the Deep, if infinitely less
honorable.
The OPD, a hated
enemy in Oakland since the days of the Panthers, the Black Muslims
and the gang lord Felix Mitchell, become ever more the evil Other. I
have seen neighborhoods under police siege and the looks on the faces
of the people who lived there, the deep-seated resentment of the
flack-jacketed blue line. I have watched at funerals of the killed as
the young people tune out the old preachers and their plaintive
nostalgia for some supposed time when men fought with fists instead
of guns.
But I've also seen Caheri, her beautiful face and her
wounded soul demand attention and respect in these same neighborhoods
and among these very same young people. Caheri was recruited into her
work because of her charisma , but also because of her tragedy,
because of her peculiar but symbolic story.
In the rudderless
city.
In a wounded city
without trust, no one in a uniform and no one with a formal title is
going to begin the change that lasts for generations. They all have
roles to play. We need more cops. We need good churches and good
civic leadership. But if Oakland is ever to change its reputation for
violence, which clings to it like mud to the soles of your shoes, it
will be the wounded, stepping into the wound, who do it.
As I write more
about Caheri and others like her, I won't fall into the trap of
looking for heroes, but this is the story of one of those wounded who
might make the city that created her, change itself, through its
trauma, just the way she has changed.
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| Gutierrez teaching |
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