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.

East is East

Try as I might, I can’t disassociate myself from the pernicious Oakland, the one that seems so different from the green, peaceful Oakland I’ve lived in for the past ten years.



I identify as an Oaklander, and I had long been trying to define Oakland by its hills, its restaurants, its proximity to wild spaces, its public integration and its aura of counter-cultural romance; that has been an act of avoidance. The passion and pain of everyday life on Oakland’s bloody streets define Oakland as much as anything else, no matter how much I might succeed in arranging my own life here to deny this. You can’t write about Oakland without writing about the open, flowing wound of daily violence it cultivates.



Call it a feeling of guilt I’m reacting to, if you want to. I prefer to characterize it as neighborly concern, or civic alertness. Whatever it is, I can’t help it.



Fortunately, what I find as I orbit the outskirts of that other Oakland, which is my Oakland, is a strange, intrepid, human beauty that thrives amid the grief and pain and violence, a network of people willing to go shieldless into the wrecked lives and neighborhoods to pick up the pieces.



It is endlessly interesting to follow people like Marilyn Harris of the Khadafy Foundation, who arrives within 24 hours to help the families of the slain, or to visit with the Crisis Response team at Catholic Charities, who provide longer term help to the survivors, or to listen to gang-interventionist Kevin Grant, who takes his team to the most violent corners of the city at the most violence-prone hours of the night to preach calm, or parolee re-entry specialist Dan Simmons, who understands the temptation to re-enter your old life when you get out of jail, or Ann Marks, whose team at YouthAlive approach the literally wounded, the gunshot victims at Highland Hospital, to finally address the damage done by bullets to minds and souls. Daily these people challenge my own hard-fired cynicism.



This work arose from defensiveness about Oakland’s image across the country, and from the fact that invariably at restaurants in Oakland I encounter a common, unselfconscious mix of white and African-American and Latino and Asian, and smugly think, “You will never find a more integrated city than Oakland.”*



And yet every night from my bed in my house on a little green hill in East Oakland I can hear the gunfire in the flatlands. (I mark the time, anticipate the news report.) This part of Oakland, the Oakland of the killers and the dead, their nurturers and survivors, is hardly integrated. The killers and the dead are African-American and Latino, and very occasionally Asian. Of the 52 (by some counts, I count 54) homicides in 2010, not one victim has been white. It is as if to be white in Oakland is to be immortal.



You can’t define the things you love or hate solely on your own terms.** I can’t define Oakland by the beauty and the food, or even by the mixing-bowl crowds at its eating establishments. They are aspects of a complex civic personality.



Still, it is possible in Oakland to live a great, peaceful, safe, delicious life while giving only infrequent, passing attention to the other side. This is not to say that my neighbors don’t love all of Oakland, or that they are unmoved by the killing here. But only that, in real life, we read about the killings, or hear about them on the TV news, and we feel bad a moment, maybe more, but then we move on. We have to move on. What else are we supposed to do? It’s just that it seems possible that in the moving we forgo, we surrender the energy to make change.



And so, moving forward, this work will be dedicated to the stories of the people who, unlike me most of my life, refuse to move on.



But first, something about the relationship between the Oakland I live in, and the one where most of the killed lived in, the one most people outside of Oakland seem most aware of. It’s frustrating.



I’m not alone in my frustration with Oakland’s image problem. Indeed, some who live in these East Oakland foothills don’t like to hear this part of the city referred to as “East Oakland,” with all its violent connotations. Of our 52 homicides so far this year, far more than half have occurred on the low-lying streets of the larger section of town referred to as East Oakland.



These East Oakland killings usually take place somewhere along MacArthur Boulevard, International Boulevard, or in the high numbered avenues: 89th Avenue, 79th Avenue, 78th Avenue, 77th and Ney, 92nd and Bancroft. These last two intersections are where two teenagers were killed within 9 hours of each other on March 28th.



I live about five miles from where they were killed in the blandly, if accurately, named neighborhood called Glenview. (A future posting will consider the great neighborhood names of Oakland and give a go at orienting readers to the lay of the land of Oak.) Last month in our neighborhood newspaper, which we share with an adjacent, more upscale neighborhood called Montclair, some local wrote an op-ed suggesting that for the benefit of their property values, Montclair should secede from the troubled city, in just the way wealthy, racist Piedmont did 103 years ago. Piedmont is adjacent to Glenview and Montclair. From my front porch, I can see the mansions of Piedmont lording it in the hills to our north. A city of 1.8 square miles, Piedmont is entirely surrounded by Oakland.



Like an unimaginably wealthy municipal monk, the city of Piedmont is inside of Oakland but not of it. It’s a gilded civic island and we are the brackish waters circling. If we were a calzone, it would be the meat and sauce and we the dry dough. End of metaphors.



Unlike its complicated oakey crust, Piedmont has famously good public schools whose permanent records are uncorrupted by the necessity of educating poor kids who failed to attend pre-school, or who might have behavioral problems, or who might have only one, harried parent unable to or uninterested in monitoring their schoolwork.



Piedmont has awe-inspiring mansions lining its seemingly deserted streets. It is home to the biggest house in all of the ostentatiously wealthy Bay Area. It is owned by the guy who invented wireless microphones. There are houses in Piedmont that sell for $4, $5, $6 million. Some of these estates are less than 2 miles from my little house in view of the glen.



Over in Montclair, the mostly mid-century architecture never rises to the gloating-grandeur level of Piedmont’s. But Montclair does have more old, pretty trees. Montclair has very high priced houses. Not Piedmont-high, but some pretty amazing, woodsy, multi-million dollar hideaways. Nevertheless, economically and in terms of reputation, Montclair is Piedmont’s poor sister, the one who married the patent attorney instead of the inventor. It is Oakland to Piedmont’s San Francisco.



Just like the time when I was a kid and ran away from home, if Montclair should succeed from Oakland, probably no one would notice for awhile. We would of course eventually feel the pain in our pocketbooks, as I’m sure comparatively wealthy Montclair bears a good deal of the city’s tax burden. But in our everyday lives, no one would notice it was gone, because it is the least interesting neighborhood of Oakland. Most Oaklanders have never been there because, besides its two independent book stores (I give it credit for that), there is nothing in Montclair you couldn’t find elsewhere.



There is edible food in Montclair, but in a city growing ever richer with lively culinary gems, there is nothing interesting to eat there. If you’re looking for a great meal you go to Temescal, Uptown, Jack London, even Glenview.



Montclair’s streets can bustle, but the bustlers are pretty homogenous. If it’s a lively, Oakland street scene you seek, you either head to the Fruitvale section of International Boulevard or hipster Piedmont Avenue (which by the way is not in Piedmont, but Oakland).



While not necessarily criminal, the public architecture in Montclair isn’t noteworthy. If you want cool old architecture, you go to Uptown, or Old Oakland, or you check out the Victorian and Italianate beauties around Chestnut and Linden Streets, over behind the giant post office in West Oakland.

A saltbox style cottage in Oakland

Montclair does have its uses. Actually, I go there all the time. It has a post office, two pharmacies, two supermarkets, two coffee houses, a bar, a park, some banks, and the kind of moribund department store you emerge from with a crushing depression. But no purchased items.



The secessionist op-ed writer couched her proposal as an antidote to living in a city -- Oakland -- with incompetent leadership. Fair enough. To secede would free Montclairians from submitting their tax dollars to be mismanaged by Oakland’s city government. It would also free it from being tainted by Oakland’s crime statistics, which keep its real estate values down in the single-digit millions. Actually the median house price in Montclair is closer to $600,000. Seceding from Oakland would keep Montclair from being positioned technically east of Downtown Oakland, and the shame of occasionally being characterized as being in “East Oakland.”



Although I do not live there, I would like to start a petition drive in favor of the secession of Montclair from Oakland, and I would like to suggest that the people of Montclair perhaps broach the idea of annexation with the leaders of Piedmont. You could be called East Piedmont.



* Not that I spend that much time in other cities. Some time, though. I travel, and I pay attention. But I can’t really say with complete authority that I wouldn’t encounter the same ethnic and racial mix at public places in L.A. or Atlanta, or Newark. I wouldn’t in San Francisco, of course. San Francisco isn’t even chronologically mixed. Sometimes when I’m at restaurants in S.F. I wonder what they have done with all the people over 40. I start to feel a bit paranoid. Everyone is noticeably young, the boys carefully unkempt -- this in Oakland, too -- while the girls, who have clearly put some effort into how they look, seem perfectly fine with this. Anyway, public San Francisco never comes across as integrated, while public Oakland does.




** You can’t define yourself by yourself. Something unwanted will always insist you are not entirely who you have been trying to think you are. Working for months on this serious project about violence in Oakland, I’ve so far been unable to convince a magazine to agree to publish any related piece. I've gotten thoughtful responses, but no interest in assigning a story, yet. However, recently I did get an email from an editor asking me to write a feature about cupcakes. I need the money and I like the magazine so I said Yes, but, despite the crushing, frightening things I’ve witnessed or learned in six months on the death beat, the cupcake assignment forced me to adjust my view of myself as a serious person working on stories of consequence. Also I’m worried about my weight...