Oakland's victims and its healers, sometimes one and the same - The Almanac on KALW

Last night, KALW's The Spot program played part of the conversation I had recently with Brock Winstead on his podcast, The Eastern Shore. I got to talk to a wider audience about the homicide victims in Oakland who don't get much attention, and about the effects of gun violence on victims, their families and the city. It was especially satisfying to discuss the work being done to help victims and the city heal and find peace by the likes of Marilyn Washington Harris of the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence, who works with families of homicide victims, Caheri Gutierrez of Youth Alive!, who works with kids in East Oakland, and Kevin Grant of Operation Ceasefire, who works with gang members and the re-entry population. 

My bit is about 12 minutes long and comes about 17 minutes in, but the first two segments are fun and interesting and worth a listen. One is about a checkers club and the other about a boxer and barber in London.

Here's a link: http://kalw.org/post/spot-kinged-clipped

You can read lots about Kevin, Marilyn and Caheri, as well as families hit by violence, here on the blog.

Here's a story I wrote about the three of them for San Francisco Magazine: No Escape, No Surrender.
Here's one I wrote for San Francisco about Oakland's Ceasefire efforts: Guns Down, Don't Shoot. 
Here's the original, full conversation with Brock on The Eastern Shore - Jim O'Brien on Violence and Its Aftermath

Beautiful Wounded - a story from the Deep

Old hotel on San Leandro Blvd in E. Oakland

Many of those Oaklanders displaced by the midcentury changes in West Oakland settled in the crowded eastern part of the city. Today, all through sprawling, Hispanic, African-American, Vietnamese, hipster, lively, industrial, violent East Oakland, as well as good food, colorful shops, busy parks and bustling avenues, there are streets of danger, blocks under the sway of the gun, free-market drug corners, long prostitution strolls, and the blood of fresh homicide scenes. Sometimes people here refer to parts of East Oakland as “Deep East Oakland.” Or “DEO.” Or just “The Deep.” Depending on who is saying “Deep East” or “The Deep,” it can be a term of respect — “Yeah, the dude that started this company grew up on, like 82nd, Deep East Oakland.” Or one of fear — “I had to make a delivery in Deep East Oakland today. Man, was I nervous!” When used by someone who lives there, it’s simple shorthand, a useful, unselfconscious combination of geographic explanation and self-characterization.

Born in Los Angeles but raised in The Deep, Caheri Gutierrez was recognized early as an academically gifted kid. A visionary second grade teacher at Hawthorne Elementary took her under his wing. David Silver would bring the smart little girl along to meet with his colleagues in education and take her to college campuses around the Bay Area. His big idea was that very young students, especially in under-siege places like East Oakland, should think about college, should aim for it from the time they enter elementary school. Constant awareness of its necessity and what it takes to get there would help create more driven and better-prepared learners, all the way through school. It would especially aid smart kids like Caheri. Silver had an idea to found a school based on this principle, and so assembled a team of educators and parents to design it. There was one student on the team: 10-year old Caheri Gutierrez. By the time Think College Now, a school for fourth to eighth graders, opened its doors on 27th and East 14th in East Oakland, Gutierrez was too old to attend. She was finishing up at St. Anthony’s, where she was a student leader, a bringer home of academic awards and a burgeoning volleyball star.

Gutierrez’s mother, a waitress at a Mexican restaurant, scraped together the money to send her to a parochial elementary school, then managed to get the girl from East Oakland into a public high school over across the estuary, in suburban Alameda, near the restaurant where she worked. Encinal High School promised a less perilous environment and stronger academics than Skyline High in Oakland. At Encinal, Gutierrez led the volleyball team to the Northern California finals. She was aiming for a full college ride on the strength of her athleticism and good grades.

It’s hard to say what sidetracked her. It’s hard to say what didn’t. For one thing, Gutierrez couldn’t handle the responsibility of off-campus lunch periods.

“I just had too much freedom and I started partying a lot and I started smoking.” She started cutting class, hanging around at home all day while her mother was out working.

Some of what sidetracked her — too much freedom, too much partying — could have happened to a kid in the suburbs, in one of California’s rural counties, in any big or small town. Some of it was strictly Oakland.

“When you’re young and you’re in Oakland, it’s a trend to be bad, it’s a trend to smoke weed, it’s a trend to, you know, just not care,” Gutierrez says. “I don’t know, it’s stupid. You want to be tough; you want to hang out in the streets.”

Her rampant truancy led to poor grades, she started missing volleyball practices, and in her junior year, Gutierrez got kicked out of Encinal. She was sent to Dewey, an Oakland school for students at risk of not graduating on time. She got kicked out of Dewey. Her transformation was almost complete. Then she was recruited by the Vixens.

Suddenly the girl who used to get attention for her good grades and her athleticism was getting it for her looks. It was intoxicating. In Vixen photos, Gutierrez tends to look serious, possibly unapproachable, but she was very popular at their events. She was a party girl. She was also under-age.

“I was getting attention for being pretty and having style. And I was like, ‘Oh my god, this is really fun.’ That was my lifestyle.”

She was drifting ever further away from her family, constantly fighting with her younger sister, becoming alienated from her brother, from her mother, who knew Caheri was missing school, smoking weed, who was threatening to bar her from her prom and who frequently kicked her out of their apartment on 82nd Avenue.

One day, in another vicious fight with her sister, Gutierrez said, “I’m so done with all you guys. Family is just a fucking word. It doesn’t mean anything.”

That fight happened in late summer of 2008. She was 18.

In those days, her mother worked on the cleaning crew of an office building near the Oakland Airport. Sometimes Gutierrez would help out there. One night in the fall she was running late and asked a guy for a ride, a guy she’d known only a short time. She asked her best friend to come along for the ride. They headed out around 9:30. and soon were cruising down 98th Avenue toward the airport. They caught a red light at San Leandro Boulevard. Gutierrez was in the passenger seat, her best friend in the back. They were a little stoned, not talking, listening to music.

“And all of a sudden,” she says, “I feel shocks, just really really intense shocks.” She thought the car had been hit from behind. She could hear her friend in the back seat asking “What is going on?”

Then the driver began to shout, “I’m shot! I got shot!”

Gutierrez could see that he had been hit in the hand and she tried to ask him if he was okay.

“And he looks at me,” she says, and pauses.

We’re sitting across a table, in the dimly lit, slightly dingy conference room of a violence-prevention organization in Oakland. Gutierrez has attentive eyes, pitch dark, but there’s a glint, a pilot light. Her bright smiles tend to breakout in slow motion, her long, straight, dark hair frames a face that is oval except where that small part of her right chin is missing. She tells the story without emotion, but occasionally the telling slows down. Imagine a person feeling through a dark cupboard for the ingredients to a dish she dislikes profoundly. And the cupboard is full of spiders. But she has promised to make the dish for you and so, over and over again, she reaches in.

She remembers the look on the driver’s face as he gazed back at her that night. A strange look, she says, a look of shock at what he was seeing.

“And that’s when I touched my face, and I didn’t feel anything, and I looked toward the dashboard and all of my gums, my teeth, everything was there.”

She was hit in the right jaw.

“It just exploded when it hit me, it exploded everything, and it came out of my mouth and exploded all of my teeth. And all of a sudden I just start feeling sleepy, so sleepy, oh my god I’ve never felt this sleepy before, and I couldn’t even keep my eyes open. I was like, ‘Oh, here it is, I’m leaving, this is it.’ I was really thinking ‘This is it.’”

The driver was not badly wounded. He continued down 98th Avenue. Gutierrez’ body was convulsing, her legs kicking, her mouth was full of blood, she couldn’t talk. Breathing was becoming more and more difficult. Near the airport they spotted two police cars and got the officers’ attention.

Gutierrez could see an entrance to the freeway nearby and began to calculate her chances of survival. Would she make it to the hospital if the ambulance arrived soon? She didn’t think so. She closed her eyes and thought, This is it. She thought about her family. Her mother. She wanted her mother to know that she had not died in pain. Suddenly her mind was saying Don’t give up, just try to hold on. But she was choking, kicking, holding her face together with her hand. The paramedics appeared, asked her her name. She wrote it down for them.

Then she let go of her face and everything fell out, her cheek, her severed tongue, everything.

She could hear the paramedic on her radio, “Level 1, Level 1, Level 1 trauma ...” The adrenaline was keeping her awake. She’d never been in an ambulance, she knew she was on her way to the hospital.

“I might have some hope here.” she thought. So stay up.

She remembers the bright lights of the emergency room, the shocked looks on the faces of the trauma staff, of these ER doctors and nurses who have seen it all.

“The last thing I remember,” she tells me, “was they laid me down on the bed and I just saw bright lights, really white lights, and after that I closed my eyes. I don’t want to see anything more, I don’t want to feel anything. I closed my eyes and that was it."

- 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. 

Healers in a plague

The paragraph below comes near the end of Camus' novel The Plague. It refers to those who tried to comfort and save the citizens of Oran during the epidemic. Reading it this morning, I was reminded of all the Oakland violence prevention workers I write about here on the Almanac, but especially those who themselves were once victimized by the violence, like Marilyn Washington Harris and Caheri Gutierrez, Oaklanders who do what has to be done, who refuse to bow down, who strive to be healers, despite their own afflictions. Just replace "terror" with "violence," and "pestilences" with "guns" or "killers" -

...he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could only be the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never ending fight against terror and its relentless onslaughts, despite their personal afflictions, by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. -From The Plague by Albert Camus

Marilyn Washington Harris

                                                         

Caheri Gutierrez

                                                                                           

A history of the homicide rate in Oakland in 4 paragraphs

As I said in the preceding post (A history of Oakland crime-fighting strategies in 4 paragraphs), despite its unrelenting troubles with crime and violence, Oakland remains a great and beautiful place to live and work. Unfortunately, Oakland also remains, especially for young African American men, a frequent place to die. Actually, the past couple of weeks have been relatively quiet in terms of death. Although, of course, tell that to the family of Aya Nakano, shot multiple times and killed here last week, on the eve of his 23rd birthday. Their tumult and terror is only just beginning. (See: Adrift in a churning tide: life after homicide.)
 
It is true that we have had signficantly fewer killings this year than last. 51 by mid-June of 2012 compared to 43 so far in 2013. (Last year's numbers at this time included the 7 people slaughtered by one man at Oikos University in April, in America's forgotten mass shooting.) 
 
Death's almost-holiday here is welcome, but I hate myself whenever I employ the "this-time-last-year" thing, as journalists and city officials like to do. (See: Trauma Cache, Part 1: The Calendar and the Killing.) And so I wish to take this opportunity to emphasize that it will take many years, maybe decades, to really know if somehow, some way, we really have lowered the rate of violence in Oakland, in Chicago, in Philadelphia... 
 
It's understandable that politicians and the media tend too quickly to claim progress (or sometimes regress) based on fluctuations in homicide numbers. Politicians want success, they want to have figured out a way to make their cities safer. They also want credit for it. So, as Mayor Quan has done with me in interviews, they will site any comparative dip in homicide numbers as evidence the tide has turned and they are the moon. The media is just looking for stories. Here's my history of the homicide rate in Oakland from the 1960s, in 4 paragraphs (for the record, 2012 was worse than 2011, worse even than bloody 2007):

In Oakland, homicide numbers might fall or rise incrementally from year to year, but the annual death count has remained staggeringly high for nearly four decades. The lowest recent count came in 2010, when the city had 90 killings.Even in raw numbers, many larger cities have far fewer annual killings than Oakland. In 2011, Oakland had five times as many homicides as did much-larger Seattle. It had four times as many killings as San Diego, with over a million residents.

Such homicide numbers are a tradition in Oakland. City leaders like to tout as progress even the indication of a dip, but an examination of murders in Oakland over the past forty-plus years demonstrates that the numbers never stay down for long. In 1960, Oakland’s population was just over 300,000. There were twenty homicides that year. By 1969, the number had risen to eighty-nine. No one could, or would, say precisely why. When the city first broke the 100 homicide mark, in 1973, Oakland Police Captain John Lothrop was baffled by the violence. “We are living in violent times,” he said.

From 1986 through 1995, the city would suffer an average of 124 homicides a year. Years with fewer than 100 killings were anomalies, but they would be marked as progress. When there was a dip in killings in the late Nineties, it was credited to a decrease in drug dealing and a strong economy. In 2001, the San Francisco Chronicle trumpeted a turnaround for the city.

Then, in 2002 the number rose to 113. By 2003, reporters were using the term “killing fields” to describe certain neighborhoods in the city. There were 148 homicides in 2006. By 2007, a writer in the Oakland Tribune was worried about what he perceived as a “sinister acceptance of violence” in the city. There were 126 homicides that year. 

                       -From Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story
                        a Kindle Single by James O'Brien
                        "Captivating" - Visión Hispana
                        "Gutierrez is an unforgettable subject" - San Francisco Chronicle
                        Available at Amazon for $0.99
                        Soon to be an audiobook from Audible.com

A history of Oakland crime-fighting strategies in 4 paragraphs

The Oakland Police Department announced this week that it has introduced a mobile command center, in part to deal with an increase in robberies (often of smartphones) and burglaries in Uptown and near Lake Merritt. You can read what they have to say about it here: http://local.nixle.com/alert/5020675/. Its announcement reminded me of all the many things the OPD and city leaders have tried in just the past 15 years as crime, especially violent crime, in Oakland has continued to taint an otherwise great and beautiful place to live and work. (See also: A history of the homicide rate in Oakland in 4 paragraphs) Here's my history of their efforts, in 4 paragraphs:

Randomly, like the coming of the carnival, mayors and their chiefs announce new crime prevention plans, or resurrect old ones and give them new names. Sometimes, the new plans come to the public attention with fanfare, at press conferences or State of the City speeches or Community Crime Summits. But they tend to peter out quietly. In 1999, Mayor Jerry Brown sought to ease crime first through gentrification, through the building of mid-market condominiums to draw a hoped-for 10,000 new, nonviolent, middle-class residents to moribund neighborhoods near downtown. He had a plan to mimic the blight abatement approach said to have helped New York City curb violence. When the homicide rate soared in the mid-2000s, Brown adopted an element of what is known as the Ceasefire model, in which known perpetrators of violence are called in to City Hall — the meetings are called “call-ins” or “forums” — lectured by law enforcement, by mothers of murder victims, threatened by the district attorney and the federal prosecutor, then offered help from social workers to get out of the gang life. The idea is that often a preponderance of violence in a city is perpetrated by only a handful of residents; if you identify them, pressure them and help them change, you save your city time and money. Later Brown got Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to lend Oakland a hundred California Highway Patrol officers to flood the city’s crime hot spots. He called it “Operation Impact.”

Just before Brown left office, the police chief introduced his “Vision and Plan of Action to Reduce Crime — Improve Accountability.” There would be greater hiring of officers, computer mapping of crime patterns, needs-based deployment of the force, community policing, neighborhood watches and greater police attendance at neighborhood crime prevention council meetings. But soon a new mayor would come into office, with a different plan.

Unlike the carpetbagger Brown, his successor, Ron Dellums, had deep roots in the African-American neighborhoods of West Oakland. His father had been a sleeping car porter and an officer of the historic union. Dellums knew many Oaklanders did not trust the government or the police and would likely chafe against a heightened police presence in their neighborhoods. A majority of Oaklanders favored a crime approach that balanced prevention and enforcement with nearly equal care. Dellums introduced what he called the “Prevention, Intervention, Enforcement, Sustainability,” or PIES, safety strategy. He used revenue from a violence-prevention property tax to send intervention specialists into the violent neighborhoods to negotiate with the gangs, to convince them not to fire. Dellums oversaw a reorganization of the police force. Reluctantly, he increased the number of officers. But retirements, attrition, union problems and budget shortfalls soon pared the force back down. Near the end of Dellums’ time in office, a new police chief proposed the return of computer mapping, or hot spot policing, to re-flood those most violent parts of the city with officers. He proposed the adoption of gang injunctions that would prohibit known gang members from associating with one another. The injunctions met severe opposition in the community and the courts. By now, Oakland had re-introduced, sporadically, the lecture-threat-aid gang call-ins, as well...

In 2011, Oakland Mayor Jean Quan announced her “100 Blocks” strategy. Her staff had determined that 90 percent of Oakland’s violent crime occurred within about 100 blocks of the fifty-seven-square-mile city. This is where the police force would focus most of its presence. Quan was coy about precisely which 100 blocks were to be targeted, but it didn’t matter. Soon a respected crime think tank, Urban Strategies Council, released an analysis demonstrating the widespread nature of Oakland’s shootings beyond any 100 blocks anyone could imagine. And residents of the city’s gentle hills, where there is little to no violent crime, began complaining about the possible effects on their neighborhoods if so many officers were assigned elsewhere. The 100 Blocks plan fizzled.

                       -From Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story
                        a Kindle Single by James O'Brien
                        "Captivating" - Visión Hispana
                        "Gutierrez is an unforgettable subject" - San Francisco Chronicle
                        Available at Amazon for $0.99
                        Soon to be an audiobook from Audible.com

                                         

Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

This is the story of how it looks and feels when the bullet finds you. It’s the kind of story you encounter in violent neighborhoods across America. Only there's one big difference.

In old modeling photos, the face of Caheri Gutierrez confronts you with one of human history's miraculous hybrids, a sublime symbol of what we can accomplish, over centuries, if we work together: the big, dark, almond shaped meso-American eyes and wide, pre-Columbian cheekbones; the flared, triangular, European nose; the dark skin — burnt, Mexican; the full, downward, frowning mouth pure early 21st century Oakland, California, USA.

Gutierrez thought that face was her ticket to the future. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, came the bullet. Suddenly, on a cold night in November 2008, she found herself bleeding, choking, holding her face together with her hands, calculating her very chances of survival.

Caheri Gutierrez' inspiring struggle to heal herself and the city of Oakland is woven with courage, fear and defiance. In many ways, her personal story is much like the story of Oakland itself, a polyglot city decades in murderous decay, not quite so innocent as it wishes, but a victim nonetheless of the political flailing that comes of desperation and neglect. Like Gutierrez, Oakland is beautiful and wounded, unable to let go of its past and uncertain about its future.

Until You Bleed is a deeply researched, literate and brutally frank portrait of a city under the gun, and a young, wounded woman trying to change that.

Available as an Amazon Kindle Single, for $0.99.

Oakland Violence Prevention Workers Grant and Gutierrez in the Media

In the past couple of weeks, two of the three violence prevention workers I profiled in No Escape, No Surrender (San Francisco Magazine, April 2012) have been featured in local media. First, Caheri Gutierrez and some of the students she works with at Castlemont High School (in the Teens on Target program, out of the nonprofit, Youth Alive) were interviewed for a KTVU news spot. Then Kevin Grant was the featured guest on KQED's Forum program. Caheri and her students talked about life in East Oakland and their work to create change. Kevin talked about trying to keep the peace between gangs and answered some tough questions about the state of things in Oakland here in the beginning a new year. Here are links:

Caheri Gutierrez on KTVU

Kevin Grant on Forum

Prologue to a Maze of Dreams

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.

Backwards graffiti at 16th Street Station

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.

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.

Gutierrez teaching

In Oakland, a New Way Out?

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.

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?

Three from Oakland's Violence Prevention Community Profiled (the good kind)

No Escape, No Surrender, by Jim O'Brien,
in the April issue of San Francisco Magazine

Ice City Almanac's Top Stories

From I Might Have Some Hope Here: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

It was late winter 2009, and while the face of Caheri Gutierrez was healing, her soul was roiling. Just a few months earlier, in November, at the Oakland intersection of 98th Avenue and San Leandro Street, she'd had half her beautiful face blown off in a drive-by. She was 18. The bullet burst through the passenger-side window out of nowhere. It ripped through her jaw and cheek and stopped in the right arm of her friend driving the car. Gutierrez felt a shock, she says, but didn’t know she’d been hit until she saw the driver’s expression -- he was looking at her -- and the gory mess all over the dashboard. That’s when she reached up to touch her face.

From A Violent Thing: Inside an Oakland Gang Call-In 
All gunshot wounds in Oakland are brought to Highland. She tells them, calmly, that the worst case scenario if you end up at Highland is surviving. Surviving a gunshot wound is the worst thing that can happen. It only takes one bullet in the spine and you’re a quadriplegic. No movement, no sex, someone has to wipe your ass. No one comes to visit you because no one wants to see you like that. I become your only friend, she tells them. She approaches the sharply-dressed Participant, points over toward the baby. Is that your baby? Is that your queen holding the baby? He nods politely. He’s looking her in the eye, looking up at her. You want that baby to see you paralyzed, with tubes coming out of you, with a colostomy bag? Imagine that. This is not rhetorical, it’s a demand. Imagine it. This right here today, she tells them, this is a blessing. Because you are alive and free.

From 13: At the Funeral of Thirteen-Year-Old Jimon Clark
Just ahead of me in line at the funeral of Jimon Clark, the last of six homicides to occur in Oakland between August 18th and August 25th, a group of kids in their early teens has reached the coffin. They look like they are not quite sure what to do. In line, all but two of them have been fairly upbeat, nonchalant, possibly faking their cool, or possibly they have done this so many times that it feels about the same as standing in line at a taco truck. I want to think they are faking, that their hearts are beating faster than usual, that they are at least a little freaked to confront the dead body of their friend and schoolmate, that maybe they are hiding secret worries that his gunshot wounds are visible.  I want to think that for these baby-faced, rather slight, early teenage kids from Oakland, neither the day nor the event is routine.

From The Dark Urges: In the ICU with Daryl Starks' Family
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.  It’s Saturday night. Starks was shot on Friday evening, at 78th Avenue and Bancroft, while driving home from the store. He was hit once in the shoulder and once in the back of the head. Now an ICU nurse sits distractedly at a computer station just outside a picture window with a view onto Starks' unmoving body. Occasionally the nurse checks his iPhone.

From Imaginary Pain: At the Grim Geographical Nexus, with Kids

In the neighborhood where these kids live and go to school, shootings and homicides occur with a depressing regularity.  Five days ago a man and a teenager were shot right here on Foothill Boulevard.  Last summer, Jimon Clark was killed on nearby Bancroft.  He was 13.  A few days before Jimon was shot in the back, Melvin Murphy was stabbed to death in an apartment complex on Bancroft.  Derrick Jones was killed on Bancroft by police back in November.  Alvaro Ayala was a student at the same high school as Lovell.  He was killed almost one year ago to the day. And yet, somehow, at least superficially, they remain, like all teens, conventional: self-conscious, social, periodically oblivious, ignorant of or uninterested in decorum.  They do tend to cooperate with the instructions of the preachers, to clap when they are asked to, to stand when they are asked to.  They know when they are expected to say “Amen” or to answer in unison a question about Jesus or the perils of smoking pot. But they don’t take any of the pastor’s words seriously.  Hopefully that’s because they assume they will never kill anyone anyway.  No doubt, being kids, and despite today's evidence to the contrary, some think they will never die.  And they don't seem gloomy. Until it is time to see their schoolmate’s body.

From Against Nostalgia: After The Death of Raymen Justice
There is a note, handwritten in black, taped to the apartment door, discouraging visitors from knocking. It makes the point that the Justices will have nothing to give you, especially money, and don’t knock unless you have brought something for them.  Marilyn Harris, of course, brings, as always, the promise of help, hope, and healing. She always enters even the tensest, most somber, most fraught rooms with the confidence and even the joy of the gifts she brings. It’s 9:30 in the morning. There are maybe seven people in the small, dimly lit, disheveled apartment. Raymen’s sisters are here. On the day after the killing, Raymen’s brother, Rayven Jr., collapsed and was taken to the hospital. Rayven Jr is a composer and performer of sort-of hip hop love ballads. He seems to be talented and is no doubt a sensitive person. He is recuperating with the boys’ mother at her home in East Oakland. A family friend named Miracle is here. Two years ago her brother was taken from this very apartment building and murdered; his body was burned so severely that the police could not declare the death an official homicide. There is a Tupac poster on the wall. Over the couch there is a narrow, framed portrait in oils of Raymen’s father, Rayven, in his younger days in a suit and round hat with an upturned brim. It was, I believe, a certain favored style in Oakland in the early 80s. Rayven Sr is a slight man, gray-haired, a Vietnam vet, angry as hell, righteous about having raised his two sons on his own, about their potential and their good grades. Raymen had a 3.3 grade point average, he tells us several times. Rayven Sr is sitting next to me on a small sofa. He’s drinking coffee with cream and sugar. Man he is pissed. He gets up a number of times and leans over the coffee table and into people’s faces to declare his independence from any need of the money being offered him.

From The Big Event
That bullet that wounds or kills, it also ricochets. As the news spreads through a family, through the streets, it continues to wound or kill; if one person has been taken from us body and soul, a dozen more are lost to us in lasting bitterness, subversive grief, debilitating fear, and, in the case of a child growing up on streets lorded over by the gun, a way of life they learn from repeated violence and loss.

From (New) Code of the West
In genuine disbelief, I turned and walked back against the tide and stood across from the church entryway to watch, as more and more people staggered out. Soon I heard sirens but only gradually realized they were for us. Within twenty minutes there were dozens of cops from numerous forces -- OPD, CHP, Alameda Sheriffs, Parole, Corrections. Lots of collegiality between them. Hugs and handshaking and "Where you been lately?!?" There were guys in riot gear. That erie modern sight of helicopters hovering over you. Most of the cops had tear gas guns, but at one point a tall, white officer (I'd say 80 to 90% were white) took something that looked like a guitar case out of a van, snapped it open, pulled out a machine gun, clicked the cartridges in, slung it around his shoulders and headed up the street. He looked thrilled. I counted nearly a hundred cops in half a dozen picket lines across at least two streets.

Caheri in Her Own Words

Read about the life and ongoing recovery of Caheri Gutierrez, the subject of "I Might Have Some Hope Here," at her blog, Life.