OAKLAND'S MURDEROUS SUMMER

Those of you with long-enough memories will recall the time, during the Vietnam war, when the Pentagon stopped issuing the daily reports of actual U.S. deaths. Instead, they went to a system of estimation. Each evening, the news anchor would come on with a grave face and say, "Today, U.S. forces in Vietnam suffered moderate to heavy casualties," and everybody would feel bad. The next evening, however, the news anchor’s tone was lighter, and he would report (it was almost always a he, in those days), that "in scattered fighting around the Delta, U.S. soldiers only suffered light to moderate casualties." Which prompted one soldier to say, in a widely-reported remark, that he hoped if he died in Vietnam, it would be on a day of moderate to heavy casualties, since on light-to-moderate days, nobody back home seemed to care.

Thus must think the residents of Oakland, these past few years.

Unless you’re clever enough to get killed in Oakland while simultaneously living in the "right" neighborhood, or being in the "right" socio-economic class, Oakland murder victims seem to be noticed by the general public (media, most especially) in direct proportion to their relationship to the rise and fall of Oakland’s murder rate. Get killed in a year when the murder rate is dropping, and only your close friends and relatives seem to either notice or care. Get killed in a year when the rate is rising, and you find yourself part of something "larger" going on. Politicians and preachers pontificate over your plight. News anchors mention your name several times. You’ll even get your picture on one of those newspaper spreadsheets spread up on flatlands storefront windows, the paper turning gradually brittle-yellow in the sun, there for the admonishment of little children and to give them bad dreams in the night. Now, staring out at you from the past, is George Peoples. Victim No. 79. Shot on San Pablo and 31st. Your chance for immortality, at least until the Scotch tape at the paper’s corners grows weary, and pulls away from the glass.

It is all politics and perception, of course. What’s the difference between a rising and a falling murder rate? We went from 85 to 83 a couple of years ago, if I remember right, and city leaders thumped their chests and talked about how things were getting better, so we needn’t worry. In the 9th month of this year, approaching the somehow "magic" and embarrassing number of 100 for the second year in a row, we argue in the press and scramble for solutions.

The Oakland police, feeling that they must do something because, after all, they are the police, gather all their compatriots from the sheriff’s department and the highway patrol and flood the flatlands corridors of a hot weekend night. Channel Two News, giving away the secret, reports that the police are out there to curb Oakland’s murders and to shut down its "dangerous sideshows". Oh, yes. If we can’t stop those horrible murders, at least we can do something about those rowdy kids.

Members of OPD’s homicide squad, who presumably know a little bit about how murders are both prevented and solved, must have been embarrassed. Several hundred police, all cruising the same streets looking warily at the same street corner knots of saggy-jeaned Latino and African-American men, can only get in each other’s way. On International they parked a patrol car every four or five blocks so that the murderers had to walk over as far as, say, Holly or C Street to get an unobstructed shot. How inconvenient. Apparently bored, the police took to rousting the expanding cadre of East 14th prostitutes. There was, after all, some logic to this action. There are few reports of Oakland prostitutes as murderers but several, recently, of them as murder victims, so perhaps the police believe that getting potential victims off the street will prevent potential murders. At least something came of this exercise beyond some hundred arrests for DUI’s and unpaid parking tickets. Perhaps we should all, out here in the flats, ask to be put in protective custody for the weekends. Deprived of victims, the murderers might go elsewhere.

Once again, we hear the old cry that Oakland crime could be solved, if only Oakland citizens would cooperate with the police. I might, if I could find one who stopped on my block long enough to do more than place a ticket on a stray car. Mostly, they just fly through in their cruisers. They do not smile or wave or stop to chat. I am a grandfather. My jeans do not sag, and there is gray in my beard. Still, the police cannot be sure if I am a citizen to be protected or a criminal looking for my next hit, so I guess they feel they have to be careful and treat us all with the same suspicion. And as for the kids, of course…mine included…the police seem to have no doubt.

Mars…the war planet…hangs in the sky, bright and hard and heavy, peering into our front porch each night. The murderous Oakland Summer of 2003 passes on into the fall. I wish there were some bright solution, or even a clever ending to this column. None seems in sight, so I think I’ll go inside, before the shooting starts. Again.