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

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

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