PRIORITIES
It was one of those obscure issues you run into
in the back-end of the City Council agenda, when the chambers have all but cleared
and the stray staff members are packing away their binders and papers and waiting
patiently for the adjournment call, and the only ones who seem to be paying attention
are the Sanjiv Handas of the world.
And yet, if you want to understand how Oakland—with its great resources and pretenses
of progressive politics—seems often more like a barrel rolling uncontrollably down
a hill than an adult city systematically facing its most serious problems, then the
recent debate over the proposed contract amendment with the Oakland Zoo is one you
would have wanted to watch. Particularly in the midst of this bloody summer, when
murders are fast approaching the 80 mark and though many want to get their share
of television and print media time, no-one seems to actually have the answer as to
how to stop the carnage or even appreciably slow it down.
Two years ago, the city and the East Bay Zoological Society reached agreement over
the operation of the city-owned Knowland Park and Zoo, for which the city supplies
a considerable public subsidy. As part of the agreement, the Zoological Society said
they would provide one free zoo admission day a month for Oakland residents, with
the targeted population being the low-income Oakland young people whose families
can’t normally afford the zoo’s admission price.
Surprised that you live in Oakland and never heard about the free zoo admission day?
Don’t be. It has yet to be implemented.
Earlier this month, more than a year after the zoo-city agreement was fully executed,
the Zoological Society requested an amendment which would implement a different free
admission program. In a letter to Council requesting the amendment, City Administrator
Deborah Edgerly wrote that “Society has not yet implemented the one-free day per
month program. Rather, after evaluating the potential impact and logistics of the
one free day, Society developed an alternative approach, which it believes could
better meet Council’s desires to reach Oakland children and youth and families who
might not otherwise have access to the Zoo.” Edgerly recommended Council adoption
of the “alternative approach.”
Council was not pleased. While they did not seem to think the new program was necessarily
a bad idea, several members wondered why no implementation of the free day program
had taken place in more than a year, with Councilmember Nancy Nadel asking why the
normal contract compliance reviews by city staff had not caught the Zoological Society’s
failure to provide the free day.
Details of the zoo’s original, unimplemented proposal are not important to our discussion,
nor is the new proposal, or reasons why staff let this whole thing go for a year.
Let us assume, for the sake of this discussion, that everybody—city staff, Zoological
Society members, and City Councilmembers—all want to implement some form of free-day-a-month
entrance to the zoo targeting low-income Oakland young folks, but have just not yet
worked out the proper way to make this work.
It is not, after all, a city priority, and in the scheme of larger city concerns,
it is a small thing, indeed. No kid from the Fruitvale or Dogtown, after all, is
going to pull a nine mil out of his drawer and walk out and spray bullets at someone
on the corner because he can’t go up to the zoo to see the elephants and giraffes.
The problem is that all of these small things add up, pebble upon pebble, each one
with its own logic and its own excuse, until they eventually become an enormous mountain
of delay and inaccessibility squatting down upon the flatlands of this city, and
over which the young people of these communities find it increasingly harder to climb.
And so the city closes down the wildly popular Festival at the Lake. Or announces
that hip hop music will no longer be played for recreational skaters at the Oakland
Ice Center on the theory that hip hop attracts young people who are prone to violence.
In the midst of blistering heat waves the city cracks down on young people opening
fire hydrants for relief, but meanwhile Oakland’s once-impressive citywide recreation
program is in a shambles since the Harry Edwards days. What happens to these dreams
so long deferred? Langston Hughes once wrote a chillingly perceptive poem about that,
ending with the verb “explode.”
My cousin, Betty Reid Soskin of Richmond, writes in her blog this week “If we can
agree that there is much profiling of youth of color in innercities—largely from
inequality rising from abject fear of not only the adult population—but of the police
as well, then we have a place to stand while we debate the issue.”
“In a study done in Hennipin County, Wisconsin, a few years ago,” she continues,
“it was discovered that the first encounter most young black and brown men had with
the justice system was not for drug use and/or possession at all, but through traffic
violations. … Teens would earn (often legitimately) a speeding ticket or some other
offense. They'd be without employment so had no way of paying the fines... In a few
months that fine would double—then triple—and eventually a warrant for their arrest
would be issued. … Meanwhile, the seduction of getting a few rocks of cocaine to
sell as a way of getting out from under their traffic problem jump starts their street
career.”
“Hennepin Country addressed the problem.” Soskin goes on, “by … [creating] a program
of amnesty that would give young people a clean start, would expunge minor violations
from their records, to see what might happen. The results were dramatic. Where they'd
expected a few hundred to turn up, they were faced with thousands, and a breath of
fresh air blew through the country as the percentage of people outside the law
was suddenly decreased by a significant number.”
Soskin concludes by saying such a program would be successful if implemented in Richmond,
where murders are close to the half-hundred mark already this year.
If you wonder why I am so skeptical of Senator Don Perata’s sudden Road-To-Damascus
conversion to the area’s anti-violence crusader, this is one of the reasons. For
several years, Mr. Perata and Mayor Jerry Brown have vied to be the area’s law-and-order
leader, with the easy target being participants in the East Oakland sideshows. While
the city blocked plans for sideshow alternatives (“it’s not the city’s job to provide
recreation for these people,” Councilmember Larry Reid often said), we ended up with
Mr. Perata’s U’Kendra Johnson Law, which allowed police to confiscate cars for thirty
days solely on the word of the police officers that the driver was participating
in a sideshow (this led, most famously, to police towing away the van of a basketball
coach who they said was playing his music too loud while taking some his players
home after a game to East Oakland, loud music being one of the police “evidences”
that a sideshow is taking place). More ominously, the sanction and encouragement
of public officials like Mr. Perata and Mr. Brown over the past five to six years
has allowed the official and undisguised creation of what Oakland police call “sideshow
zones,” areas of the East Oakland flatlands and lower hills where police are allowed
and proud to enforce traffic laws more vigorously, and repressively, than is done
in other areas of the city. Rather than reporting crimes solved, the police involved
in these events post information of the hundreds of cars towed and tickets given
out.
“It was discovered that the first encounter most young black and brown men had with
the justice system was … through traffic violations,” the Wisconsin study told us.
“Eventually a warrant for their arrest would be issued [and] the seduction of getting
a few rocks of cocaine to sell as a way of getting out from under their traffic problem
jump starts their street career.” Is that what is happening in Oakland now?
I hope that Mr. Perata is successful in his newly-released, highly-publicized, nine-point
program to “help combat recent homicides and street violence in Oakland and Richmond,”
I truly do. But I think what is needed to accomplish that is more than the adoption
of a few new and recycled programs, many of which have good intention, and have been
successful in implementation in other areas. What is needed, in Oakland and in Richmond,
is a change in our priorities, what we think is important, and what we pay attention
to.
“I'm hoping that we might soon stop looking at the problem,” my cousin concludes
in her blog entry, “and start looking at the kids.” Right on, as they
used to say, in another time, and another context.