SEVEN MURDERS IN A SINGLE WEEKEND
You could see this one coming, of course.
During the late mayoral campaign, Jerry Brown made a great issue
of stating how much the crime rate had come down since he became mayor of Oakland.
During the various debates I waited…patiently…for someone to ask the most obvious
question: what, exactly and specifically, had the Mayor and his staff done to bring
the crime rate down? I never heard the question asked, and so I never heard it answered.
This is also the type of question that big-city news media generally ask of city
officials. But Jerry Brown doesn’t hold press conferences, and the Bay Area media
doesn’t seem to care enough to force him to do so, and so we’re left without details
on the Mayor’s anti-crime policies. In the absence of facts, we can only conclude
that the downturn in Oakland crime over the past several years was merely blind luck.
Last weekend, our luck ran out.
Seven murders in a single weekend.
Chief Richard Word called for the community to be more cooperative
in bringing down the level of violence in Oakland. Presumably he was talking in part
to Oakland’s African-American youth, who have been the people most affected by the
violence. But why should we expect these young people, now, to be cooperative with
the police, when the publicly-stated policy of the mayor and other city officials
has been to run these young folk out of town?
For the past year, to the tune of one million dollars in overtime
pay, we have set our police out to break up the late-night weekend social gatherings
of these same young African-Americans. We did it because our leaders called the "sideshows"
dangerous and violent. Oakland, of all places, should know the difference between
what is dangerous and violent and what is merely annoying. We could have tried to
work out a solution with the sideshowers themselves, but we didn’t. Now we are all
paying the price.
Seven murders in a single weekend.
On Cinco De Mayo night, just after dark, I turned south on International
off of Seminary and ran into a sideshow. This one was primarily Mexican-American.
A couple of police cruisers had just arrived, and the crowd was driving them off
with thrown bottles. I had not seen bottles thrown at police cars on E. 14th Street
since the riots in the summer of 1966. The sideshows started out as social events.
They started out as young people begging for something to do in a city that largely
ignores them. They did not start out as anti-police. But by our policies, we have
made them so. And so we are paying the price.
Seven murders in a single weekend.
For several months, Councilmember Nancy Nadel has been quietly
holding community meetings to try to find a solution to the violence and shooting
deaths around the Center Street area. Last winter, an Oakland police sergeant told
one gathering that some of the violence was caused by the "disorientation"
of people returning to West Oakland from jail. I thought that was an odd term to
use, and asked the sergeant what he meant. He said that West Oakland was changing
so rapidly…many of the old families were being moved out and a whole new group was
taking their place…that these returning criminals were feeling lost, and were increasing
their violent activities in order to hold onto their old home territory in the only
way they knew how. He didn’t use the term gentrification, but that is what he was
talking about. He wasn’t looking for excuses for violence. As a good police officer,
he was looking for causes. We should listen.
Everything has consequences, even neglect. And during the four
years of the Brown Administration, we have followed a policy that has pretty much
neglected the lesser-income neighborhoods and peoples of this city. Some of us thought
it was cute and clever. Some of us didn’t care. Some of us thought that if nobody
said anything about it, we could get by. We didn’t.
Seven murders in a single weekend. It’s catching up with us, and
difficult to ignore.
So what are we going to do, friends?