A VIOLENCE DIALOGUE
Oakland having been such a violent place
for so long, the city ought to be one of the leading national experts on the causes
of urban violence, and its possible cures. But if such expertise is present somewhere
inside Oakland City Hall or at the Oakland Police Department headquarters further
down Broadway, its not being shared with the rest of the citizens.
At the very least we’re being kept in the dark.
Somewhere around the beginning of last year, perhaps before, we began noticing a
significant jump in what you might call “message tagging.” There are two distinct
types of graffiti “tagging.” One of them we’ll call “arts tagging,” just for the
sake of this discussion. It’s the kind of thing you commonly see on water towers
and old freightcars and freeway overpasses–those enormous, multicolored letterings
where the visual impact appears to be as important as the words themselves.
“Message taggings,” on the other hand, are the scrawled names and messages that you
see showing up on any free spaces–particularly the sides of buildings–where individuals
or groups appear to be marking their territory or putting out information to other
groups. Most of these writings are incomprehensible to the average person walking
by, but it doesn’t take much expertise to know that a scrawled signature put up one
day–and then a line drawn through it a few days later–is an ominous sign.
Whether there’s a cause and effect here I don’t know, but, right at the end of the
year, following the rise of “message tagging,” we saw an explosion of violence in
Oakland.
Around the first of July we had our 39th homicide–a man found stabbed to death in
an International Boulevard and 57th Avenue motel known for its nearby prostitute
trade. That put the city on a pace for around 80 murders for the year. That pace
continued through the end of September, when 15 year old Michael Cole, Jr. was shot
to death in the 1200 block of 30th Street, the city’s 61st homicide.
That number has some significance, since it surpassed the “goal” of 60 homicides
set by newly-hired Police Chief Wayne Tucker back in late February. Hoping for a
significant reduction in killings in the city from the 88 in 2004, Mr. Tucker told
the Tribune last winter that "if we (hold) it to 60 that would be great.
I think getting homicides reduced that much would be encouraging not only to the
city, but to the men and women of the department. It would show what commitment and
hard work can accomplish."
I’ll reserve comment about a police chief who thinks 60 people murdered in a city
is “great.”
In any event, between the end of September and the end of the year, there were 33
more murders in the city, a three-month pace that would have put us at 132 homicides,
if it had continued through the entire year.
But it’s not just the number of killings that took place near the end of the year
that’s disturbing, it’s the manner in which they occurred. In mid-December, 39 year
old Jason Graham, 27 year old “Bu” Dixon, and 23 year old Sean Scott were shot to
death in a triple homicide in the 2600 block of 68th Avenue, not far from Eastmont
Mall (where, coincidentally, the Oakland police have a substation).
The next day, at 9 in the morning, 32 year old Darcel Lewis was shot and killed on
International Boulevard not far from the East Oakland Youth Development Center on
83rd Avenue. A day or so later, if memory serves me, a gunman followed another man
into a convenience store across the street from where Lewis was killed, also in broad
daylight, shooting him several times in front of witnesses, but not killing him (I
can’t find anything about this incident in my newspaper records, but I remember seeing
it on the television news; unlike murders, Oakland shootings don’t usually make it
into the Tribune).
The proliferation of message tagging, the 68th Avenue triple homicide in mid-December,
and the two daylight shootings near 83rd and International a couple of days later–one
of them a homicide–suggest a turf war of some kind, possibly over drug territory.
And, in fact, East Oakland residents have been complaining that during the summer
of 2005, they began to see dealers set up crack-selling activities on neighborhood
corners where they had never been seen before, many of these dealers identified as
people who were not from that community.
Are we, then, in the midst of a drug war in Oakland? I don’t know, but it would be
nice if city or police officials let us know–exactly–what they think is going on.
One of the problems in getting accurate information on the exact nature of Oakland’s
violence, as always, is politics. Mayor Jerry Brown is running for California Attorney
General in the June Democratic primary, and so every bit of official information
coming out of the city administration these days must be sifted through the sieve
of whether or not it will help–or hurt–his chances against Los Angeles City Attorney
Rocky Delgadillo. Problems must be minimized, accomplishments puffed up, and blame
shifted in order to buck up Mr. Brown’s law-and-order credentials.
And so we have Oakland Tribune columnist Peggy Stinnett writing this week
that Mr. Brown “admits much still needs to be done in the area of public safety,
and progress is slow because of the requirements of the ‘Riders’ agreement that arose
from that police scandal in West Oakland.” (Blame)
Or the San Diego Union-Tribune noting last March that Oakland,
under Mr. Brown, is, among other things, “concentrating more police in problem neighborhoods.
… Brown said Oakland's get-tough policies are paying off. Robbery dropped 12 percent
last year compared with the previous year. Murder was down 23 percent…”
"Look, I have a record of reducing crime," the Union-Tribune quoted
Mr. Brown as saying back in March. "Not only that, I live in a high-crime area,
where I walk the streets. I deal with it. I get people arrested."
Really? That may sell in San Diego and Sacramento, where they don’t have access to
the facts. But tell that to the Oakland citizens who live along the high-crime, high-violence
corridor of International Boulevard southeast of the Fruitvale, or deep in those
patches of Dogtown and Ghost Town in West Oakland where the drug dealing proliferates,
and the mothers mourn for their dead sons. Something is stirring there, ominous and
troubling, and all the sunny boasting and blame-shifting coming out of the mayor’s
office won’t cover that up.
Oakland needs some straight talk and some serious, adult conversation on this recent
explosion of violence in our city, where it’s coming from, and where it may be leading.
And we need it soon. Our lives depend upon it.