No Due Process for the Dead, Part 2: Guilty Until

Part 2: Guilty Until

See Part 1: Allegations

See also: The price of prices at 17, about Ed McGowan

Just hours before Ed McGowan died, Mr. Polk had a talk with him. Mr. Polk was Ed's grandfather.

"I hadn't seen him in awhile," he tells me, "and I wanted to find out how he was doing. I had heard that he wasn't doing the right thing."

Still, Ed, 17, was on track to graduate from high school in a month, and he assured his grandfather that all was okay. What else could the grandfather do?

Edward McGowan's graduation portrait

That evening Mr Polk got the call. He was in East Oakland, dropping his wife off at 73rd. It was 7:30 and Ed's father was on the phone. Over on 64th Street, Ed was lying dead from a bullet wound. Quickly, Mr. Polk drove the few blocks to see his grandson a second time that day, but he couldn't get close. Ed was now evidence, Ed was off limits. They didn't move the body until midnight. He would see his grandson again two days later at the funeral home, then not again for another two weeks.

Because the police said Ed had a gun when he was killed, because allegedly he shot, not mortally, his own killer, because in the words of the rules of the California Victims Compensation Program, a victim is ineligible if he has "participated in or been involved in the crime" (sometimes it reads "contributed to the circumstances of his death"), Ed's family was denied the emergency funds available to most homicide survivors to pay for a timely funeral.

"It was a very stressful time," says Mr. Polk.

In California, there is financial help for victims of violent crime, from the California Victims Compensation Program, or Cal-VCP. In Alameda county, victims apply for that compensation at the Victim/Witness Assistance Division of the DA's office. There you fill out the forms and there your eligibility is determined.

Among the primary eligibility rules: you must be cooperating with the investigation of the crime; and you must not have contributed in any way to the circumstances that led to it. These conditions are determined by the content of the police report.

Of the 50,086 applications processed in fiscal year 2013-14, 7962 were rejected, that's just under 16%.

Tasia Wiggins is the director of the Alameda victims assistance office. She tells me that an initial rejection is not always the end of the story. Sometimes a second, fuller police report might make a difference.

"What we do is order the full police report to see if circumstances change, if that contribution (to the crime) is overcome. So we try to tell people, 'Let's do what we can, let's get that application in, even if it might be found to be ineligible.' We can still make sure we get the full police report so that a decision can be made later once we get all of the information."

In these cases, compensation, in the form of reimbursement, might come later. But for destitute families in the grip of despair at the loss of a loved one, the need for funds for a funeral is urgent.

In general, the victims compensation program in Oakland is known to be genuinely responsive to families in dire need of funds for a funeral. Rarely have I ever heard someone, even someone deemed ineligible, say they were not treated with sympathy and respect there. And when a victim is eligible, this government office is able to provide financial help with great celerity.

On the other hand, the rule that disqualified Ed's family from help punishes innocent survivors, victims, whose loved one, according to the police report, may have been engaged in something unlawful when he was killed.

If Ed had lived and been accused of possessing or firing a gun, he could have contested the charge, gotten a lawyer, gotten his day in court. But, as I have said and written before, there is no due process for the dead. In fact, even on appeal, according to the legislation that governs the program, it is up to the victim's family to disprove the evidence. Here's the wording:

At the hearing, the person seeking compensation shall have the burden of establishing, by a preponderance of the evidence, the elements of eligibility...

It reads as if the notion of "innocent until proven guilty" is being turned on its head, as if the common perception, that any young African American man killed on the streets of Deep East Oakland must have been doing something wrong, has been encoded in the statutes. If fact, according to Jon Myers, a spokesperson for Cal-VCP, it is the statutory nature of that rule that makes it difficult to change.

"Our mission is to help victims of crime, there isn't any prejudice, but we have to follow the law, and the law has certain limitations," Myers told me recently. These limitations in eligibility are also a nod toward the program's limited funds. Compensation money comes from criminal fines, but criminals are notoriously delinquent in paying up. At times the fund's balance has dropped so low that the amount of money available to victims had to be lowered. There used to be $7,500 available for funeral expenses. That figure is now $5,000.

Still, eligibility in some cases has been expanded, first to allow non-violent felons and victims on probation to be eligible. More recently, eligibility has expanded to cases of sexual assault where the victim was a prostitute. Technically in such cases, the victim could be seen to have contributed to the circumstances that led to the assault, and to have been committing a crime when it happened. The program didn't feel comfortable with this designation. They had some wiggle room on such eligibility decisions.

"We had already recognized this problem internally," says Myers, "so it wasn't automatically 'you are out of luck.'" Recently Cal-VCP changed the regulations on sexual assault so that prostitutes are no longer ineligible if they get assaulted on the job.

But Myers says the ineligibility of families like Ed's would be tougher to change, that statutes can only be changed by an act of the legislature.

And so, innocent survivors continue to suffer for something the police say their loved one did. And maybe it is true, maybe their son or grandson has done something stupid, something to put himself in a place of great danger. But his mistake would seem already to have been paid for in the harshest and most painful way.

It is Tasia Wiggins who usually delivers the bad news that an Oakland family like Ed's is ineligible.

"Those are the hard calls," she says. "But if there is an eligibility problem, we're not gonna make them wait, because the bottom line is, they need to know what they can count on."

What most of the families can count on is being forced to go out into the community to ask for help at the worst time in their lives.

"It's tough to see," says Myers. "But I see it all the time, a car wash to fund a funeral."

Ed's family members gave what they could. The family did a GoFundMe campaign that brought in a little money. Catholic Charities donated a small sum, but it still did not add up to the amount needed to bury Ed. It would be two weeks before Ed's funeral. It was already a time of uncertainty.

"The wait didn't make it better," says Mr. Polk.

Despite the two-week wait, Ed's funeral at the Chapel of the Chimes in Oakland was a very full and loving tribute. He had a lot of friends and a big, loving family. Two cousins of his spoke about how they and Ed had all been born within a year of each other, and had been excited to turn 18 together. An uncle had flown in from Georgia. He talked of his regret at not having known Ed better. He promised to work harder to get to know his family members in California. A young man in a wheelchair said he'd been shot ten years ago. He begged the young people to put the guns down. One of the preachers told the story of the Prodigal Son, but focused on a different lesson than one usually takes away from that story. I took his lesson to heart. A singer sang a gospel song called "I Wish You Were Here." Another, older preacher said that God is a good God and never fails us. He said that violence among young men represents a "grave situation." He said there are many paths a young man could choose in Oakland that look bright, "but there is the devil, Satan." Then he read from the Book of Job about the hope of a tree in its tender branches. Later he read from the Book of Proverbs about trusting in the Lord: lean not on your understanding.

Ignore this

She said, What do you do? 

And as I always do, I hesitated, then mumbled something about being a writer, hoping she wouldn't hear me and would let it drop.

No luck.

What kind of writer? she asked.

Obituaries from lesser-known funerals in Oakland

"Failed," I mumbled. Then, in a moment of optimism, "Failing." But she didn't hear. So I said the usual: "I write different things, whatever they will let me." I was feeling particularly insecure that morning, so now that it was underway I made sure to say I write "features, long articles, for magazines." I said that in the last few years I'd written mostly about Oakland (A Unified Theory of a Tough Town), about violence in Oakland (Guns Down, Don't Shoot), about the aftermath of violence (No Escape, No Surrender), about the survivors of homicide victims (I still sleep with his shirt under my pillow) and about people who have been shot (Unwounded in Afghanistan, shot in East Oakland), about their attempts at recovery, what they go through, how they make it (Until You Bleed). Also about people in Oakland trying to create peace, trying to prevent violence. (Seeking the courage to change; A new way out)

We were in Oakland.

Immediately she said, Oh, this women got killed kind of near where I live trying to protect her children.

It was the highest profile killing of the year so far in Oakland. As I had just said, I had been covering Oakland's violence for years. So, Yes, I said, I had heard about it. I knew what was coming next.

It was awful, she said.

"Really awful," I said. "Horrible. They all are."

But she was gainfully employed, she said.

"Yes," I said, "some of the victims are but you don't always hear about it. But it is probably true that most of them aren't. Still, their killing causes a lot of emotional turmoil for families."

Then, I didn't say:

First of all, because you happen to have read that she was gainfully employed, doesn't mean no other victim was employed. What it means instead is that something about her situation existed outside the norm, that the circumstances of her killing represented a particularly dramatic scene, and so received more attention in the media than other killings here. Frank whathisname on Chanel whatever probably even went to her house, as he tends to do when a victim's demographics are unique.

I hadn't felt like talking in the first place, and certainly not about my work, so I let the conversation end. I felt angst but not the energy to lay it out for her, to point out what might be, on her part and on the part of so many of us, unspoken assumptions, to point out her own essential commentary on the other victims in Oakland who presumably were not, as she called it, "gainfully employed," but, perhaps, somehow, I don't know, ungainfully employed, or whom she assumed were engaged in some illegitimate activity when they were killed. What that commentary was and what those assumptions were I will let you imagine.

I hadn't the energy it takes to be the asshole again, the one who turns someone's simple, kindly and genuine sympathy into a potentially racist attitude about victims of violence in Oakland and elsewhere in America. Not that her assumptions are necessarily far off the mark.The problem is the effect of the assumptions, the lack of outrage or sympathy that follows. 

A study by California Partnership for Safe Communities of homicides in Oakland in 2011 and 2012, showed that about 70% of Oakland's victims have felony criminal records, frequently for violent offenses. Violence leads to violence, no question about it.

Obits, study, notes

The study also showed that 84% of victims in Oakland were male. 78% were African American. Over two-thirds were between the ages of 18 and 34. What it did not show is that there are rarely articles in the press about the suffering of their families, that there are rarely politicians present at their funerals. That Frank and his colleagues might not be paying much attention to their killings and the aftermath and neither are we. I am partly responsible for this in Oakland, because I have failed to create change with the stories on this blog. I indict myself for what I didn't say that day and for what I have failed to do here.

Oakland's new-ish Mayor, Libby Schaaf, is actually making a small gesture to be egalitarian in her official response to individual homicides. She is presenting a letter of condolence and sometimes a small care package to the family of each victim here. I was there for the beginnings of this small program, even helped with the shopping one Sunday morning as we picked up paper plates, tissues, pens and pads, as we shopped for the living and the dead. I went with her staffer and crisis intervention specialist, Marilyn Harris, to deliver the packages and the letters. (Visitations) My research so far shows that no other mayor in America is doing anything like this.

But the city-wide and nationwide pattern continues, the one wherein killings that lie outside the usual demographics, or killings of better-known men within the demographics, stir our passion and hold our attention and sometimes lead to community action. While the majority of killings end as mere news items.

Just recently a killing of a basketball prodigy in Patterson NJ inspired people there to work for change, which is great. But I continue to wonder what would happen if all homicides caused the same passion.

I continue to wonder what it means that they don't.

"I signed up for a hard job" - Oakland Mayor Schaaf on a city's responsibility to families of homicide victims

Had a good conversation with new Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf last week. We met Friday, late in the day, for coffee (me) and very spicy hot chocolate (her) at Bittersweet Cafe downtown. She was very nearly on-time, which I appreciate, and not at all rushed once we got to talking. The interview was wide-ranging and much of it will appear as a Q&A in the March issue of Diablo Magazine. 

Mayor Schaaf and her staff had already indicated to me, a couple of weeks earlier, that she was determined to develop some kind of consistent outreach to the families of each homicide victim in Oakland. She's been getting advice on what this ought to look like from Marilyn Harris, whose son Khadafy Washington was killed in Oakland in 2000. Marilyn has since then dedicated her life, her days and nights, to supporting the survivors, mostly mothers, of the killed, in the crazy, in the impossible days right after the killing, when there is so much business to attend to, and very little will to do so. 

Marilyn has told me that when her son was killed, she never heard a word from anyone with the city government, and that if she had received even a sympathy card, it would have made a difference. Among the many emotions families of homicide victims experience, along with self-recriminations, emptiness, fear and shock, is resentment and bitterness toward the authorities, and toward the community. This civic wound needs to be healed or the rift will widen and the families will be lost to us forever. A gesture from the mayor, if it is thoughtful and humble, will help to begin, just begin, that healing. 

This is an excerpt from my conversation with Mayor Schaaf on January 9, 2015, where we talk about this issue:

Jim O'B: As mayor, I'm wondering how you see, what is a city's responsibility to victims of violence and to families of homicide victims.

Libby Schaaf: I think the first thing the city owes them is to do everything within its power to prevent violence from happening in the first place. And whether that is trying to ensure that children have a caring adult in their live, particularly the children that don't have parents in their lives, whether it's to provide places where children feel talented and good and productive and smart, that they see that there is some bright future for them

JOB: But what about in the aftermath, once it's happened. You can't prevent everything, its a city, there's going to be violence and there's going to be killing, and does the city government, does the mayor, have a responsibility to the victims, once it happens?

LS: Absolutely.

JOB: What is it?

LS: As Mayor, I think you know, that I'm committed to responding to particularly the family members of every victim, particularly homicide victims, with compassion, with an apology that your government was not able to keep your loved-one safe, and with a sense that you are not in this alone, that there is help, and there is support and there is a community around you. And to some extent, the immediate family needs that, but I certainly found, as council member, often the whole neighborhood needed that. As a council member several times I led healing circles, for the neighborhood, after an incident happened. And we had crisis counselors available, and I'd always walk in the room and make them move the chairs so it wasn't the government facing the citizens, but rather that we all sat in a circle, and everyone had a moment to share how they felt, and that also this neighborhood had its own opportunity to ask questions about the investigation, about the incident, directly to the appropriate people in the police department, recognizing that a traumatic effect like that is like a pebble in a pond, the ripples extend far, far out.

JOB: I always say, "that bullet ricochets." It hits not just the family but the street, the neighborhood, the city...

LS: But I don't know if you remember when I came to the Khadafy Washington Foundation event, and I gave Miss Marilyn (Marilyn Washington Harris, founder) a pebble, and I said that just as violence has these rings that spread out, so does kindness and compassion, and so it is certainly my hope, as mayor, when I, on behalf of the city family, express love and compassion and caring, for the families of each and every homicide victim, no matter what the circumstances of that death were, it was a loss to that family, and they deserve to feel that compassion and empathy for the grief, and so it's my hope that that too creates the ripples that spread through the city.

JOB: It will make a difference, especially if you come at it without fear, without guilt, but saying "we love you, we are sorry," and then getting back to work trying to prevent these things. It'll be hard sometimes.

LS: It will be hard, I'll be honest with you, I'm very uncomfortable with funerals, I'm very uncomfortable with death and loss.

JOB: Well, you shouldn't be doing this personally anyway...

LS: Well, I signed up for a hard job, and if I can't be tough for my city, who can?

Oakland's tainted geography

YOU CAN LIVE A RICH LIFE in Oakland and never be directly affected by its history or its troubles. Even if the violence might occasionally seep into your consciousness, depending on where you live or work, your image of the city can be dominated by its hills, by the tall redwoods in its parks, the innovative cafes of Piedmont Avenue, or the relatively new gleam and bustle of Uptown on a Friday night. Inevitably, at its restaurants, you will encounter a racially mixed crowd of Oaklanders. Thirty-nine percent white, 31 percent black and 25 percent Latino, Oakland is nothing if not integrated in its public places and at public events. But it remains segregated in its neighborhoods, whose contrasting lifestyles create a tainted geography that informs and influences life here.

From the sprawling flatlands where the preponderance of violent crime occurs, you can look up and see the trees and big houses of the hills, but not the steep roads that wind and swirl through pines and stands of invasive eucalyptus. Many flatlanders probably can’t imagine the dizzying journey up.

Grand and abandoned in Oakland. Pic: JO'B.

From the ridges and high windows of the hills you can see the flatlands. It’s easy to comprehend their layout, the straight avenues, the diagonal byways, the waters of rambling Lake Merritt, the Alameda County Coliseum blight and the runways of the airport. But you never have to go in there if you don’t want to. Freeways tower over the flatlands and carry you swiftly past, or haltingly, depending on the time of day, to San Francisco, to Berkeley, to white suburbs to the east and north, or south to San Jose. Today the ground level roadways Oaklanders used to take, like MacArthur Boulevard, demarcate borders between two supposed forbidden zones, the hills off limits to flatlanders, the flats alien to hill dwellers.

Before she became mayor, Jean Quan represented a City Council district that reflects Oakland’s peculiar geography. Not only did it flow into some of the bloodiest streets on the edge of flat East Oakland, but it also included the most highly populated part of the white, upper-middle-class Oakland hills, known as Montclair. Quan knows Montclair’s people and its attitudes well. She knows there is very little social connection between the two Oaklands, “a tale of two cities,” she calls it.

“Some people in Montclair,” she tells me, “haven’t been below MacArthur Boulevard in twenty years.”

No doubt they are afraid to go too deep into East Oakland. What happened to Caheri Gutierrez happens in East Oakland regularly: bystanders in the crossfire are hit every year. In 2011, three of those East Oakland bystanders were very young children. All three died. When that happens, when a homicide victim is under the age of 17, the reaction of the city tends to be louder and more intense than if the victim is in the wheelhouse of urban murder: an African-American male age 18 to 39. When the victim is a child, more of the general population pays attention to the event, for a longer time. A realization dawns that the city is not only killing children but is giving birth to men who will kill children. For a time, the whole city cares about the violence that is mostly isolated in its eastern and western flatlands.

Still, ask how a shooting or a homicide in the flatlands affects a person in the hills and you will be met with a pause and then usually a rather abstract response: People in the hills are “progressive,”   they care about the problems of the flats. Or an economic response: The city’s violent reputation suppresses property values. Or a political response: People in the hills voted solidly in favor of a parcel tax to fund citywide violence prevention. But the effect remains impersonal, never real or raw and dirty like in the flatlands.

Some hills, Oakland. Pic: JO'B.

One way a killing elsewhere affects Oaklanders who live outside the most violent parts of the city is in the fear that circumscribes your world. You exit a popular restaurant near Lake Merritt, but feel afraid to stroll the shore because a week ago there were four shootings nearby. You live on the edge of the forest, but never venture east. Neighborhood merchant associations hire private security firms to patrol their streets, parents bar their children from watching the news, Montclair considers the possibility of seceding from Oakland.

Increasingly, fear is the one thing the two sides of Oakland do have in common. As the size of the police force has fallen, there have been fewer arrests, slower response times to emergency calls, and a decreased police presence all over the city. Crime is up, and not just in the usual places, but in the hills as well. If violent crime keeps mostly to The Deep and to the western neighborhoods near the port, burglaries and robberies have become common even in the hills.

Libby Schaaf grew up in Montclair and now represents it on the City Council. She says the scary part is not necessarily the increase in crime in the hills, but the brazen nature of it — doors are kicked in, shots fired. She says the proliferation of online bulletin boards that spread word of each crime soon after it happens has made people more aware of the dangers than ever before, and this awareness has led to greater fear.

“I’ve lived in this city my whole life,” says Schaaf, “and I have never until this last year heard of people actually moving out of the city because of their fear of crime, and this year I have heard several instances of it.”

An episode from her childhood gives a sense of how sweet life can be in Oakland, and yet how enduring the city’s troubles have proven. Schaaf says she was blissfully ignorant of any problems in Oakland, until as a young girl she went to Washington, D.C., for a national Girl Scout conference. When she said she was from Oakland, someone asked if she was scared to live there. That was thirty years ago.

“I just had no idea what they meant, I grew up in the Montclair hills, I grew up on the edge of the forest, and the only thing I could think of that was negative about where I lived was the deer sometimes ate my mother’s flowers in her garden.”

She remembers a book about Oakland that her parents had around the house. She loved the title, Oakland’s Not for Burning, and wholeheartedly agreed with its sentiment, but she'd never read the book.

The title Oakland’s Not for Burning is a kind of paternalist admonishment of the city’s minority population. The book is a 40-year-old apologist memoir of white fear and a failed federal attempt to assuage the stirring masses in Oakland’s poorest neighborhoods. In the mid-1960s, in the aftermath of the Watts riots, there was concern that Oakland, a city of increasingly frustrated, destitute and displaced minorities, would be next to erupt. Something needed to be done for these people if they were to be kept calm and peaceful. Oakland’s Not for Burning was written by the man the government sent to Oakland to try to coordinate its effort to head off any violence. Those efforts were centered on a grant for the city’s port and job training to prepare minorities for the new jobs it would create. It was a valiant effort in noblesse oblige, doomed to failure by politics, union racism and bureaucracy. A few hundred jobs were created, very few at the port, which used much of the federal grant money to further automate and containerize, thus eliminating jobs.

While poor neighborhoods in Washington, D.C. and Detroit burned, Oakland never erupted. But things were heating up. The Black Panthers were born. In another decade, the drug kingpin Felix Mitchel would rise to exploit the crack epidemic. The Black Muslims appeared and for a time they thrived. The bitterness and cynicism at the heart of all three enterprises would serve to further separate white from black, flatland from hills. Even as the city’s political structure evolved from conservative to liberal, its authoritarian police force became more hated and distrusted in the minority communities. Decades later, in crime-ridden, violence-ridden parts of Oakland, the police still are seen as failures, at best.

“Particularly in the African-American community,” says Oakland Police Captain Paul Figueroa, “there’s this sense that police come in, they stop guys, they don’t find anything, and the dealers are still out there. So there’s this real sense of ineffectiveness.”

The rise in crime across neighborhoods, the shortage of police and the need to patrol the authentically violent areas of the city continue to pit the hills against the flatlands in a fight for services. Worse than that, says Figueroa, is a perception he’s encountered in the hills that it is people from the flatlands who are coming up there to rob and terrorize them.

Councilwoman Schaaf responds to their fears with neighborhood meetings about crime. They are well attended.

“I held a town hall about crime in Montclair,” says Schaaf. “I thought I had chosen a large enough venue to hold it in, a school auditorium. Three-hundred and fifty people showed up, they stood for two hours, they sat on the floor, they crowded in the doorways, literally there was no more space that people could be squeezed into, that is how upset people are about crime in this city.”

She invites to the meetings salesmen of home video surveillance systems to give presentations. You can monitor your property live, receive alerts when the system detects movement. You can more easily identify intruders. That’s one way to react.

Figueroa understands the trauma of being robbed or having your house broken into, but he knows that what’s happening in the flatlands is worse.

“The disastrous effects of violence and losing someone to a homicide are just severe, and severe for a long time. Being burglarized, although super, super upsetting, after some of the other things I’ve seen, I’m able to maybe keep it in perspective a little more.”

Like Schaaf, Figueroa grew up in Oakland thirty years ago. Only he grew up in East Oakland, near High Street, then as now a magnet for mayhem and violence.

“It hasn’t changed that much,” says Figueroa, “the epidemic of speeding cars continues, the loud music, in that area of High Street there’s a lot of narcotics.”

The shooting, the killing, the short- and long-term aftermath of each act of violence, are part of what shaped Figueroa, of what led to him becoming a cop. When Figueroa was 10, a beloved neighbor, father of his best friend, was shot and killed while walking his dog. Figueroa says the killing cast a pall over a once relatively normal, happy, active block, a pall that took years to lift. As a cop now, he sees it every day, the lasting and widespread effect of each individual killing or shooting. It becomes the muck Oaklanders must push through every day, the encoded trauma.

“There was this funk, this depression,” says Figueroa, “that just set over the neighborhood for a long time, and I’ve seen that in my career over and over again, and often times I try to describe it to people, because I’ve lived it. And what I’ve seen in my experience, is that you get homicide-homicide-homicide-violent-act, even burglaries can certainly be as traumatic for somebody, and so you get that trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma, and the funk, that we were eventually able to pull out of, it’s difficult when you stack trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma.” 

- from Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story
          an Amazon Kindle Single available for .99
          Also available as an audiobook at iTunes and audible.com

A sub-100 year: what history tells us

2013 is coming to an end and some in Oakland want to, if not celebrate, then find hope in the city's homicide number for the year, which will be that rarity since the early 1970s: fewer than 100. Maybe this is the beginning of a change that will be permanent. No question, it will have been a far better year for the city than 2012, when over 130 people were murdered here. 

Of course, tell that to the families of the nearly 90 dead in 2013:

Oakland's Civic Trauma; 
Cold Bodies, Cold Analysis, Chilling Irony;  
Read About Today's Killings, Then Forget;  
OPD Chief on Young Murder Witness;  
Death Like a Public Bus.

No one has ever told me how or when we will know that we have genuinely shed our murderous character as a city. It's important to remember that the homicide numbers have fallen below 100 here and there (see this brief history of the homicide rate in Oakland), and that politicians have touted those numbers as progress every time, and that eventually, usually quite quickly, the numbers have surmounted 100 again, sometimes by a lot. As recently as 2010, there were 95 homicides. Then in 2011, there were 110. In 2012, 131.

And anyway, as I wrote back in June of 2011: 

The human urge to squeeze the trigger never checks the calendar. Perhaps grasping for hope when they’re down, or out of morbid shock when they’re up, like now, we tend to pay too much attention to the daily and weekly violent crime numbers in Oakland. We assign them too much meaning.

Quan’s Objection

Certainly politicians and the newspapers do. Precisely one year ago, then-mayoral-candidate Jean Quan reacted defensively when I suggested to her that violence should be a priority of the next mayor. “We’ve brought the murder rate down,” she said.  

That was in June 2010, and so far there had been 37 homicides in the city, 6 fewer than June 2009, a modest number, and a more seemingly significant 24 fewer than June 2008. 

The Calendar and the Killing

The calendar year 2010 ended with 13 fewer homicides than the year before -- 100 vs. 87.

But what does it indicate, that in the twelve months since Quan’s objection to my suggestion -- mid-June 2010 to mid-June 2011 -- there have been 100-plus homicides, at least six more than between mid-June 2009 and mid-June 2010?

What does it mean? 

Nevertheless, in daily news reports of homicides, habitually reporters insert the current year’s number of killings-so-far alongside the total from “this time last year.” These numbers shouldn’t bring readers much hope, as in 2010, or, in the case of June 2011, when we have already suffered 51 homicides, deeper despair.

              - From Trauma Cache, Part 1: The Calendar and The Killing

Again, I hope the 40 fewer homicides from last year to this really is the result of police re-organization or Ceasefire or whatever else the politicians will tell us has turned the tide. But it will take time, it will take years, maybe even generations, to know if we have gained some peace. There were 3 homicides as the calender turned, 2 in East Oakland, 1 in West Oakland.

Death like a public bus

A telling quiet hangs over Oakland this week. With the funeral of 8-year-old Alaysha Carradine behind us, and the killing of 66-year-old Judy Salaman fading into the past, there are no more victim profiles in the local news, or calls from our city leaders for change, for action, for something to be done to prevent further violence in Oakland. 

Backwards graffiti, abandoned 16th Street Station, Oakand

And yet, the city suffered three homicides last week. Three men were killed, ages 18, 22 and 43. As far as I can tell, OPD hasn't held a news conference to discuss any of the 3 killings. No council member has met with the neighborhoods. Unfortunately, these victims were of the gender, the ages, and were killed in the kinds of places where to the outside world, even to Oaklanders from outside their world, death is thought to cruise the streets like a public bus. It makes its regular stops. We hear its noise only as it passes. But we don't ride that bus and so we don't pay much attention to it, and it moves on.

This is a question I find myself asking several times a year: what is the thought process, what are the assumptions we're making, that lead us to shrug off killings like those that occurred last week? What specifically about those killings fails to cause the outrage, despair and anger we express so publicly when the victims fit a different profile? And if we were to feel similar outrage, despair and anger with each Oakland killing, instead of treating 97% of them like a passing bus we'll never ride, would things change?

See: Oakland's Civic Trauma
See: Read about today's killings, then forget

 

Oakland's Civic Trauma

City-wide, Oakland doesn't tend to dwell on its homicides. We have a habit of profiling the victims, so that if they are young African-American men killed late at night in East or West Oakland, we read about the shooting, maybe feel bad for a moment or two, give a brief sigh for a mother who has lost her son, then, in part because we think it possible, even probable, that the victim had done something wrong to put himself in peril, we forget. (Most of us do, but not everyone. See: Miss Marilyn.) 

If the victim doesn't fit our profile, if he or she is very young, or very old, or killed at work, or white, as has been the case with four of our most recent killings, we linger a little longer, the news outlets publish stories on the victim's life and character ("Slain Oakland Pet Sitter was Beloved, Watchful" - sfgate, July 25, 2013), our leaders express their outrage publicly, they call for change ("Oakland Leaders Call for Crime Crackdown" - sfgate July 26, 2013), for new violence prevention strategies, they meet with residents, attend funerals, take up collections in support of the survivor. 

But, again, with the bulk of our killings, we seem to sigh then shrug and move on. At least we think we move on. But in reality, each killing, even the ones considered run-of-the-mill to everyone but the family of the killed, digs us deeper into a civic trauma that affects daily life in ways we might not even notice: we become used to avoiding parts of the city that scare us; we become ever more familiar with the tension strangers cause; we feel a little less proud of, a little less confident in our otherwise beloved city. With each killing, there is a traumatic effect that begins with a victim's inner circle, then radiates out to a street, a block, a neighborhood and beyond. It is difficult to heal, even if you are trying to heal it. If you ignore it, or deny it, it probably won't ever go away.

Oakland Police Deputy Chief Paul Figueroa grew up near High Street in East Oakland. Here he describes how, when he was a kid, the killing of one person changed him and his close-knit neighborhood and how, as a police officer, he continues to witness the ongoing, cumulative effect of Oakland's persistent troubles with violence:

The shooting, the killing, the short- and long-term aftermath of each act of violence, are part of what shaped Figueroa, of what led to him becoming a cop. When he was 10, a beloved neighbor, father of his best friend, was shot and killed while walking his dog. Figueroa says the killing cast a pall over a once relatively normal, happy, active block, a pall that took years to lift. As a cop now, he sees it every day, the lasting and widespread effect of each individual killing or shooting. It becomes the muck Oaklanders must push through every day, the encoded trauma.

“There was this funk, this depression,” says Figueroa, “that just set over the neighborhood for a long time, and I’ve seen that in my career over and over again, and often times I try to describe it to people, because I’ve lived it. And what I’ve seen in my experience, is that you get homicide-homicide-homicide-violent-act, even burglaries can certainly be as traumatic for somebody, and so you get that trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma, and the funk, that we were eventually able to pull out of, it’s difficult when you stack trauma on top of trauma on top of trauma.”

                         From Until You Bleed: The Caheri Gutierrez Story

                         One young, wounded woman's quest to heal herself and her city, Oakland

                         A Kindle Single by James O'Brien

                         Readable on any device

                         Soon to be available as an audio book from audible.com

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

                                         

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