UNDERCURRENTS: IT'S PAST TIME FOR OAKLAND TO CONFRONT VIOLENCE

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, it's 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" 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 a.m., 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. =85 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=85"

"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.