Idealists with Wary Eyes

Despite their idealism, most of the people I've met who work in Oakland's violence prevention community are clear-eyed about the city and its people. They're not cynical. They believe change is possible. But they're wary, leery, and it would be difficult to fool them or play them, the way some social workers are susceptible to being played. Certainly, there are Pollyanas and careerists who work in violence prevention. But more so there are hardened veterans of the City's bloodshed, people who have seen too much to be fooled, and who have seen too much not to try to change things. I have an article coming out in the April 2012 issue of San Francisco Magazine about three of these people. It's a long piece, but some passages didn't make the final version. Here's a short one, about how some of the violence prevention workers relate to the OPD:

They were realists. Many were former victims themselves. Some were former perpetrators. But, in general, they believed in cops. On the streets, they might keep their distance from the OPD, but they knew the officers and detectives and captains personally, and if sometimes they could get frustrated with it, they did not resent or hate the force. Probably they understood what it was up against better than any other civilians.

      They also understood its limits, which I first began to see when gunfire broke out at a funeral I attended in East Oakland and police descended on the neighborhood like crows on a barren hayfield. Crows with machine guns. There were helicopters overhead. If I was impressed with the quick and overwhelming response, the looks on the faces of the neighbors, a combination of anger and powerlessness, suggested something else. And when I looked again at the long police picket lines and the police lights flashing up and down the block, the place seemed not so much under police protection as under siege. In East Oakland, cops were suspect. They were hated. They could make arrests, but that was where their impact on attitudes and lifestyles in Oakland ended.

Gang Homicide Study's Surprising Results

In January, the CDC released results of a study of violent deaths among gang members in five U.S. cities, including Oakland. The others were Los Angeles, Long Beach, Oklahoma City and Newark. Some of the findings were unsurprising: most gang-related homicide victims are young, male, and most are members of an ethnic minority. Most killings involved guns and occurred in public places.

Among the findings that might surprise you was one that also reflects something people in Oakland's violence prevention community have been telling me for two years now, that gang killings are not necessarily about drugs or money or turf. Sometimes it's even personal, the results of a dispute between young people who are immature and armed.

From the report:

The finding that gang homicides commonly were not precipitated by drug trade/use or other crimes in progress also is similar to previous research; however, this finding challenges public perceptions on gang homicides (5). The public often has viewed gangs, drug trade/use, crime, and homicides as interconnected factors; however, studies have shown little connection between gang homicides and drug trade/use and crime (5). Gangs and gang members are involved in a variety of high-risk behaviors that sometimes include drug and crime involvement, but gang-related homicides usually are attributed to other circumstances 

Here's the CDC Summary:
Gang Homicide Study Highlights Need for Unique Prevention Strategies

Here's the report as published in the Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report of 1-27-12:
Gang Homicides - Five U.S. Cities, 2003-2008

The CDC's conclusion: more prevention is needed, especially among young people, to discourage them from joining gangs in the first place. Gangs don't provide protection from the violence; being in a gang is incredibly dangerous.

In 2010, a Strange Statistic

Until last year's 110 murders, homicide numbers in Oakland had fallen for five straight years. In 2010 there were 56 fewer killings than there had been in 2006. But to most Oakland residents it still feels like we are experiencing Prohibition-Era levels of violence.

In December of 2011, Urban Strategies Council, who do a ton of serious and fascinating research about Oakland, released an analysis of homicides in the city in 2010. Probably the delay was due to the difficulty in getting information from the understaffed Oakland Police Department. Here are a few of their findings:

In 2010 there were 90 homicides in Oakland.
74 people were shot to death.
68 people were killed on a street or a sidewalk.
51 were killed either in Deep East Oakland or West Oakland.
86 victims were men.
70 victims were African-American.
None were white.

The Wound Dressers' Wounds

Many of Oakland's wound dressers, those who tend to the victims and survivors of violence, and those who work the streets to keep the peace here, carry scars of their own, or still-open wounds.They don't talk about it much unless they have to, or unless it becomes relevant to a situation, but their work is forever confronting them with reminders of their grief. 

Here's an example of what I'm talking about: 

There are teams of intervention specialist in Oakland, who take to the most dangerous streets, at the most dangerous times. You can see them on International Boulevard at 85th, on Fruitvale, in West Oakland's Campbell Village. They wear white jackets. They station themselves or move in small groups to engage the street. Many team members have been in trouble themselves in the past. They know the signs of tension, how to listen to the street. They know ways to keep the peace, to at least, as one of them said to me one night on International, move an angry person past the impulse to retaliate violently. Get them past that first impulse, and a lot of times they won't do anything.

Seven years ago outreach team leader Ron Wysinger's son was killed in Oakland. His step-daughter was shot and killed on International Boulevard in the spring of 2011. One Saturday night barely half a year later I walk with him up the Boulevard. It's a cold night and for a while we stand, hands in pockets, in the florescent glow coming through the plate glass window of a busy corner market. Wysinger talks to a few customers who come and go. We watch the action in a lot across the street where drugs are being handed off and paid for.

There's a Latino block party in full force somewhere down 85th and the entire neighborhood vibrates with heavy bass lines and relentlessly cheerful accordion music. This used to be an African-American neighborhood, but for the last few years, as the black population of Oakland has decreased, it's become more ethnically mixed.

There's not much happening at 85th, so we make our way up toward 92nd, Wysinger ducks into a bus stop kiosk. Overlooking the crowded bench is a bright yellow movie ad featuring the whimsical snout of Miss Piggy. The kiosk air reeks of alcohol. He offers his card to a young man and asks him if he's looking for work. But the man is too drunk to understand much. A well-dressed kid walks by us and we all agree he is too young to be out walking. We enter a poorly-lit stretch of the boulevard. It takes us to a point right across the street from the East Bay Dragons motorcycle club clubhouse. This is the precise spot where Wysinger's step-daughter was killed a few months earlier. I look at him but his face is expressionless. He walks, says nothing. He has a picture of her pinned to the lapel of his jacket. 

While The Killers Sleep

As we set out, the killers are still asleep. They stay up all night. I imagine them playing video games in the wee hours and smoking a tremendous amount of weed. They sleep past noon but the march commenced at just past 11 a. m. On a loud speaker someone said, "If you have a family member who was murdered and you'd like to be in the front, please see me." The day was sunny and the marchers owned the boulevard. Police cars blocked cross-traffic for the first few blocks. Below 25^th, East Bay Dragons on their motorcycles quietly took over traffic control. Sometimes you see them leading funeral processions of the killed. Three days later someone would walk up to their clubhouse forty blocks south of here and shoot one of them dead. I don't know if he was working traffic control that day, but we all appreciated their help. 

 

There were hundreds marching, chanting, singing, praying for less bloodshed in the city, and slowly we snaked our way toward the lake and beyond it, City Hall. Oakland's homicide rate had dropped for five straight years. In 2010 there had been 56 fewer killings than in 2006, but some of us still felt it like a visitation of the plague. To us and to the rest of the country it seemed like Oakland was suffering Prohibition-era levels of violence. The goal today was to say it mattered, to publicly and en masse refuse to accept gunfire and bloodshed as a part of every day life in Oakland. It was nice that the members of this diverse crowd had given up their Saturday to march. 

 

A few blocks south of the staging area, International is pure Latino. Men in cowboy hats jaywalk. Here in the Twenties the boulevard becomes a mixture of African American and Latino just before it gives way to Southeast Asian. And so at first we pass Dos Hermanos Bar and the Mitchell Hotel (advertising "TV"), and then come to Phuong Dong Sea Blue Cafe and Karaoke Bar and the Khmer Snooker Lounge (since burned down). Along the way there are scattered, sturdy, if rather run-down Edwardian-style houses turned apartment buildings. Asian children watch from behind windows. Their parents and grandparents come into front yards and cheer, take pictures and shoot video. 

 

I keep to the outskirts of the crowd, neither marcher nor reporter, but something in between, too skeptical to march, too reluctant to report on this because I know it will make little or no difference. The walk finishes and the marchers gather under the bright sun at Frank Ogawa Plaza to hear speeches, rap music and bad poetry.

In view of the rally, at a little maze of tables set up under the linden trees just to the north of the plaza, local organizations are stacking up pamphlets and propping up posters, preparing to ask for donations, to recruit volunteers, to spread the word. From the tables you can hear the cheering, the prayers and chants for peace, rap music and bits and pieces of speeches, but business is slow in the shade. Under the trees are representatives of a handful Oakland programs that sit on the cutting edge of the Boston Miracle and Chicago Cease Fire model, the latter profiled in the 2011 documentary, “The Interrupters.” It’s a 24/7/365 prevention machine geared to keep violence from originating, or to keep what violence has happened from escalating, or to heal the wounds inflicted.

Much of this front-line work is done by victims, or former victims, by survivors of the killed, even by former perpetrators, original gangsters (OGs) making amends with a blessed vengeance. Their veteran status, and their wounds, give them authority; there are places here where a scar speaks louder than chants at a rally.

That afternoon elsewhere in Oakland, after the square has been cleared, two men are shot. One of them dies.

Trauma Cache, Part 2: Oakland's Moneyball Approach to Public Safety

Castro Street, West Oakland

There are plenty of veterans of Oakland’s troubles -- survivors of assaults, survivors of the killed, formerly-incarcerated Oaklanders making amends -- out there addressing our abundant, sometimes hidden hoards of trauma.  (See Trauma Cache,Part 1: The Calendar and the Killing.)

Some are with city government, others work out of nonprofit organizations dedicated to violence prevention and supported in part by Measure Y, the city program approved by a public vote, which funds anti-violence efforts among Oakland’s youth. 

In Oakland, even as the dark urge wins battle after battle, the number of police officers continues to diminish, down now from just over 800 in early 2010 to fewer than 700 today. 

And so, as I heard Police Chief Batts say at a fundraiser early this year, the work of non-violence organizations to inject the idea of peace into a community accustomed to violence has become more crucial than ever, more crucial than planned.  Meant to supplement, to complement police work, meant to lay a seed of peace for the future, the non-violence programs, whether they know it or not, whether they want it or not, are taking on a far more urgent role in protecting Oakland than originally envisioned.

Leaning house, West Oakland

Because they are undervalued, because they are accustomed to supporting themselves through fundraising, because they have lower overhead than a police department, and because the salaries of non-profit workers are far lower than police officers, broke Oakland can afford to support non-violence organizations.  

Think of it as the Moneyball approach to public safety.

(See the trailer for Moneyball, the movie, starring Brad Pitt, coming this September) 

Baseball's Version

Moneyball, as most who read this will probably know, is a term used to describe the Oakland A’s method (emulated by a few similar organizations) of fielding a competitive team despite its own penurious (think: Scrooge) ownership and despite the need to beat rival teams willing and able to pay unimaginable salaries to numerous superstar players. 

Theoretically, in addition to finding and developing its own younger, and therefore cheaper, talented pitchers and position players, the A’s seek out “undervalued” veterans: seemingly mediocre players with particular, undervalued skills; good athletes with a history of injury whom they gamble will finally stay healthy for an entire season; or superstars at the ends of their careers who might have one good or great season left (see Frank Thomas).  All this in the hopes that some combination of these affordable, undervalued players will become a winning team. 

To an extent, the approach worked, culminating in an appearance in the American League Championship Series of 2006.  All through the early Oughts, the A’s fielded fun-to-watch teams who won a lot of games, including, of course, a record-breaking twenty-in-a-row in 2002.

No championships, though, and in recent years, the downside of Moneyball has become evident, as injury-prone players get injured, once-great veterans fail to recapture their youth (see Mike Piazza), and the A’s organization seems incapable of drafting and developing its own superstar position players.  Although they are still very good at identifying and developing pitchers.  No question they know pitching.

Intersection, Oakland

Life & Death & Moneyball

Think of the police as the superstars who make a lot of money, and why shouldn’t they?  Pretty hard job they do.  Danger every day.  Elaborate training required.  Lots at stake.  (Of course, the current dispute between the City and the police is not over salaries, but over how much the officers organization should pay into its own pension plan.  Absent a 9% payment, the City says it can’t afford to hire more officers.)

Non-profits, like YouthAlive!, in Oakland, tend to work where they can find cheap or donated space, often their equipment is old computers, metal desks, flip charts and magic markers, thumb tacks and their own cars.  Usually they do get reimbursed for gas.

Diet Rite Cola sign, West Oakand

Training Comes with a Bullet

You might say that non-violence work requires less training than police work.  Technically, perhaps. 

But training also comes with a bullet. 

Working in Oakland programs that deal with the various stages of a life touched by violence, there are victims of drive-by shootings, mothers of the killed, even formerly incarcerated gang members. 

Gutierrez & the Kids

Caheri Gutierrez, who lost her face in a drive-by shooting in 2008, works, with her colleague Robert Watts III, in a program called Teens on Target, where high school students in violent Deep East Oakland learn to cope, where they learn how to tell the stories of their lives and their community.  These students then go into the middle schools to work with younger kids exposed to violence, to share stories and ideas about coping, about finding solutions other than violence. 

The idea is to give these kids an alternative to the path of the gun, to the path many of the adults and many of the older children, in their neighborhoods and families have been taking for decades now.  Sometimes it is the only path, and violence the only solution, these young people have seen.

(Read the full Caheri Gutierrez story, I Might Have Some Hope Here)

Grant & the Gangs

For those who have entered the life already, there is the Measure Y Street Outreach team, led by Kevin Grant, who committed crimes in Oakland and got sent away to Federal prison for 17 years, only to become, in the years since his release, one of the most persuasive and compelling voices of non-violence in California. 

Grant and his colleagues take to Oakland’s most dangerous streets at the most dangerous times of the night to engage young people who have the potential to do harm.  He approaches them with an insider’s instincts, a gang-veteran’s credibility, and a passion for peace in their lives.  When he talks to them about the failure of the life of the gun, he tends to make a lot of sense.  They tend to listen to him.

Dan Simmons & the Returned

Some do, anyway.  Others don’t hear or don’t heed the message Grant brings.  They get arrested, get sent away.  Many, probably safe to say most, who return after a period of incarceration are unskilled, uneducated, unwanted.  A return to the kind of life that got them into trouble might be the only choice they see. 

As part of Oakland’s prisoner re-entry program, city-employee Dan Simmons, a veteran of incarceration, now with a masters degree and a mission, and his colleague Emilio Vann, along with Grant, work to introduce people out on probation or parole to the possibilities of a lawful, peaceful existence.

Simmons works with the OPD and Alameda County Probation and Parole offices to coordinate Call-ins.  Call-ins are meetings between, on the one side, the police, the DA, the United States Attorney and other law enforcement organizations and, on the other side, Oaklanders identified by their records and affiliations as most likely to commit violence in their communities. 

(Read an in-depth report on an Oakland call-in: A Violent Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum) 

These meetings, held at City Hall, are business-like and even polite, but very intense.

First, the police and the government attorneys promise vigilance.  We are watching you, even the FBI is watching you now: commit more acts of violence, and you will be sent far away for a very long time, we promise. 

Then Grant talks to the participants (read about Grant's talk in "It's over, you lost").  He shows that he understands their lives, then helps them imagine a different path, all the while acknowledging the difficulties they face in trying to leave behind the life of the gun. 

Then the law enforcement people leave the room, and Simmons invites representatives of local non-profits and local businesses to speak.  They offer job training, legal and spiritual aide, actual jobs. 

Then case manager Emilio Vann works tenaciously for months to keep the participants on track.

Tammy Cloud & the Shot

Shots are fired anyway.  220-plus shootings so far this year.  Last year we had an average of three per day.  (See: even I can’t resist the urge to compare years. See, again:,Trauma Cache, Part 1: TheCalendar and the Killing.)  On one particular day last year, there were eleven incidents of gunfire reported.  Guns are aimed and triggers are pulled and people are wounded.  Many survive.  

Intervention Specialists like Tammy Cloud, from a program called Caught in the Crossfire, meet the victims, often when they awaken at their hospital bedsides.  They do two crucial things: first, they encourage the victims and their friends and family to consider foregoing violent retaliation, to consider breaking the bloody cycle; secondly, they don’t leave.  Instead, they work with victims for the long-term, to help them deal with the emotional trauma that comes in the wake of an assault, and to make their way back into a life not dominated by anger, by fear, or by confusion and depression. 

(Read about Cloud at work in Until We Bleed & Youth, Alive) 

Miss Marilyn & the City

Some die.  Mostly in East Oakland.  But not exclusively.  Many die in less-populated but long-besieged West Oakland.  Some make it to Highland Hospital before they die.  They leave behind in their loved ones an emptiness, something bottomless, an absence of hope, of reason, of whatever current runs through us that urges living and survival. 

Into this grim void step Marilyn Harris and Fabian Martinez of The Khadafy Washington Project.  Harris started the Khadafy Washington Foundation for Non-Violence after her only son was shot dead in the summer of 2000. 

You might remember a series of jarring billboards, 31 of them, visible off of Highway 580 and all over West Oakland, where Harris lives and where Khadafy was killed.  On the billboards, alongside a large picture of her handsome son, who had just graduated from McClymonds High School, blared the stark, confrontational, resonant question: Do You Know Who Killed Me?

For going on eleven years now Harris has spent her days, and often her nights, and sometimes into the early mornings, at homes, at hospitals, at fresh crime scenes, bringing comfort and the very beginnings of healing to the parents, the spouses, the children of homicide victims in Oakland. 

I’ve written a lot about the work and impact Miss Marilyn has on lives in Oakland, so I won’t go into great detail here about all she does for the families of the lost, all the practical things, how she provides a clear eye during their time of shock, all the heavy lifting of the spirit, how she comes to them with an example, with the promise that life goes on.   

Read about her work here, and here and here. 

The Hope

At first glance, the work of Harris and Gutierrez and Cloud, and of Simmons and Grant and Vann seems to speak to a grim reality: hatred and the hopelessness of the gun are part of us.  And certainly each of them is a realist.  They have seen too much to be otherwise.  But what they’ve seen, what they have endured, has not made them cynical.  The energy and even joy you often see in them as they work indicates their hope. 

For sure each of them works in the moment, the urgent, frightening, depressing moment, but always with an eye to a more peaceful future Oakland.  More than any numbers that rise or fall, they carry on their shoulders the despair of the city and demonstrate the real hope we cling to. 

If they are less a fiscal burden to the city than the police, they are also undervalued, like a light-hitting first-baseman with a high on-base-percentage.  Still, even if the Moneyball approach makes sense for a cash-strapped baseball team trying to win games, I’m not sure it will work for a cash-strapped city trying to save lives and to change lives. 

And this worries me too: the best of the A's Moneyball teams were fun to watch, and they won their share of games, but, again,  they never won a championship.

Empty chair, abandoned station

Trauma Cache, Part I: The Calendar and the Killing

Backwards graffiti, 16th Street Train Station, West Oakland

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, six 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, reporters habitually 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. 

Portraits of the Barely Living

Notwithstanding that unhelpful habit, there is some really fine coverage here of Oakland’s violence and its impact; there is plenty of good writing and reporting and people should read it.  Scott Johnson’s Oakland Effect blog always delivers a good combination of hard reporting and even harder witnessing of the toll of violence on the living. Recently, the Bay Area News Group has had its reporters go beyond the daily litany of shooting, death, community silence, “Police request anyone with information call Crime Stoppers,” to put together a valuable series describing in part what happens after the violence, and what life is like for the survivors of the killed in Oakland. It amounts to a necessary, cumulative portrait of what the killing does beyond the sudden, brutal taking away from us of one person at a time forever.  

What the Survivors Find

The killing keeps on killing. As I’ve written elsewhere, that bullet that kills, it also ricochets. The lasting impact of violence comes in the years of grief and pain and bitterness the living endure, in the trauma we cache away, that seeps out like bad medicine from some malevolent time-release capsule.  The lasting impact comes also with how those angry, despairing, lost walking wounded affect the community, or worse, the next generation.  If we ignore them, we ignore ourselves.

Not much the police can do about that, even if they had as many officers as they would like to have. 

Addressing the impact of violence and loss on the living is an imprecise, necessarily intuitive, always difficult process.  There are no templates for healing a grieving our wounded person.  There are no definitive checklists of symptoms of their grief, no precise timelines or confident prognoses for their recovery. 

For many, faith and family help.  

But many survivors get no outside help at all.  Fortunately, some find great stockpiles of fortitude inside themselves; they discover strengths they’ve never needed before and likely never imagined they’d possessed.  In these strengths they find the resources to make their own comeback. 

What I’ve witnessed in covering the aftermath of violence in Oakland is that those victims who go on to help and comfort subsequent victims usually seem the most healed themselves. .

Empty chair, abandoned station, West Oakland

Coming up: Trauma Cache, Part 2: A Moneyball Approach 
to Public Safety 

Undefined Hatred in Oakland and Ireland

Then: Irish party fight

In early 19th Century Ireland rural farmers and farm workers, generally referred to as "peasants" in those days, would form secret societies, or parties, which sometimes would turn to violence for the purpose of resisting abuse by Protestant landlords.  Sometimes they fought each other, sometimes for no apparent reason.  In some ways, they were like the gangs and turf groups of Oakland and other urban places in America today.

Here, a character in a contemporary story by Irish novelist William Carleton describes the problems with the parties, with the vagueness of their mutual hatreds, the senseless violence they commit, and how they passed their hatred from generation to generation.

The writing is a little old-fashioned, but clear, and the joke of the title of the story, "The Party Fight and Funeral," is that whenever there's a party fight, inevitably follows a funeral.

I read it last night, and it reminded me of what many thoughtful people in Oakland have told me about the nature and depth of our own troubles:

I believe you would find...difficulty in ascertaining the cause of the feuds from the factions themselves. I really am convinced they know not, nor, if I rightly understand them, do they much care. Their object is to fight, and the turning of a straw will at any time furnish them with sufficient grounds for that.  I do not think, after all, that the enmity between them is purely personal: they do not hate each other individually; but having originally had one quarrel upon some trifling occasion, the beaten party could not bear the stigma of defeat without another trial of strength.  Then if they succeed, the onus of retrieving lost credit is thrown upon the party that was formerly victorious.  If they fail a second time, the double triumph of their conquerors excites them to a greater determination to throw off the additional disgrace; and this species of alternation perpetuates the evil.

These habits, however, familiarize our peasantry to acts of outrage and violence -- the bad passions are cultivated and nourished, until crime, which peaceable men look upon with fear and horror, lose their real magnitude and deformity in the eyes of Irishmen.  I believe this kind of undefined hatred between either parties or nations is the most dangerous and fatal spirit which could pervade any portion of society.  If you hate a man for an obvious and palpable injury, it is likely that when he cancels that injury by an act of subsequent kindness, accompanied by an exhibition of sincere sorrow, you will cease to look upon him as your enemy; but where the hatred is such that, while feeling it, you cannot, on a sober examination of your heart, account for it, there is little hope that you will ever be able to stifle the enmity which you entertain against him.
                                          --William Carleton, The Party Fight and Funeral, 1852 

Now: Oakland crime scene

El Camino de Regreso

The bi-lingual newspaper Visión Hispana has published a (very) short version of our Caheri Gutierrez story en español:
El Camino de Regresso

Caheri in Her Own Words

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