Perspectives

Crisis in our back yard

Oakland’s enormous crime spike

By Tommy Owens
From the February 2007 Print Edition

            From January 1 to December 31, 2006, Oakland and its beleaguered police department endured a bloody year. Approximately 148 people were murdered in Oakland last year, 57 percent higher than in 2005. Similarly documented in New Orleans and other cities, this is a massive jump in violent crime within a very limited time span. The enormous spike in violence represents both a failure of administration within Oakland’s city government and a failure of Bay Area political activism to rectify the problem.

            San Francisco Chronicle writers Philip Matier and Andrew Ross detailed the troubling account of how the city of Oakland does not even have sufficient funds to keep afloat its criminal fingerprint unit. The backlog of fingerprint cases is sent to the crime lab DNA unit, which takes approximately three months to analyze DNA samples — an eternity for any police force. As a result, many of the violent crimes which occurred in 2006 are still unsolved and may remain so. Needless to say, this must become a political issue.

Presidential candidate John Edwards’ signature campaign issue in the last two years has been American poverty. But do not expect to see him in the Bay Area discussing poverty’s relationship to Oakland’s murder rate anytime soon. It’s not an attractive political issue for him. To Edwards and many other liberals (including the mayors and city councils in northern California), raising Oakland’s minimum wage and providing health care to the city’s uninsured would be more important than enforcing the laws. Edwards is dead wrong in his priorities for good government.

            All sides and actors in this issue need better information. The facts of this issue need to be publicized. Local representatives and community leaders misunderstand urban violence and, therefore, prescribe inefficient or unhelpful antidotes. According to another article in the Chronicle, large numbers of Oakland’s 2006 murders occurred at specific times of the day and in specific places. Most victims, 34 in total, were killed on a Saturday. Many of them were on street corners between 8 p.m. and midnight. Also, 17 murders occurred as a result of gang violence, and 20 took place because of drugs. It would make sense, therefore, to get these numbers out to the police and to community members. Why not double Saturday-night patrols between 8 p.m. and midnight in violent areas? 

To be clear, Oakland does not need martial law or an authoritarian police force to enforce its streets. But its police department does need more financial assistance from Sacramento (and perhaps from Washington, for that matter). It needs its tolerant and “progressive” neighbors (from San Francisco to here at Cal) to come to its rescue when it cannot house, educate, and mentor its 15- to 22-year-old residents. It needs an honest, accountable criminal and social bureaucracy that is more concerned with statistics and results than window dressing and appeals to human emotion. Most importantly, it needs the buck to stop somewhere. Last year, however, Oakland’s mayor was engaged in a battle for California attorney general and was more concerned about political battles in Sacramento than about the gang wars of East Oakland.

Also interesting to note is the role of students in this lack of participation in Oakland’s affairs. Why isn’t the murder rate in Oakland a political issue here at Cal? Surely it is more important than some of the “issues” that have captivated the campus community recently. 

Does climbing up an oak tree to protest its demise have a greater societal benefit than teaching an underprivileged child to read? Does getting naked in front of California Hall to protest sweatshops constitute a good use of your time — instead of volunteering for a youth-mentorship program? Perhaps Chancellor Robert Birgeneau could spend less time on overturning Proposition 209 and more time sending buses of his students to his neighboring city in order to volunteer, mentor, and tutor disadvantaged children. Teaching them about their academic future is a long-term investment in preventing them from committing crimes.

One has to wonder about the end-game of Berkeley’s much-heralded “political activism.” Has it ever yielded concrete results? It probably helped spike interest in the anti-war protests of the 1960s and 1970s. But is life better in Berkeley and its neighboring cities because a small, vocal minority likes to put bumper stickers on their cars or participate in rallies? The result of the 2006 midterm elections was quite clear: Washington failed at good, efficient, honest government. Might we say Oakland’s government did so as well? Unfortunately for the city of Oakland and its beleaguered residents, this is a scandal that Bay Area political activism has completely ignored.

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