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

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.” 

- See more at: 

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

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

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