KILLINGS SURGE IN OAKLAND, AND OFFICIALS ARE UNABLE TO EXPLAIN WHY

OAKLAND, Calif. -- The names of friends and family members killed in
this city over the last two years come easily to Rob Wilson, a rangy,
dreadlocked 17-year-old gang member.

A brother was shot to death in a drug deal in 2005. Oakland police
officers killed a cousin in a shootout last year. Gang members shot
down a friend in March.

"It used to be I would just hear about somebody getting shot, but I
wouldn't know them," said Mr. Wilson, who is known as Deka and who
pulled up a pants leg to show a bullet wound from a shooting last
year. "Now, it's getting closer and closer to me, these deaths."

The shootings are part of a cresting wave of violence in Oakland,
which recorded 148 homicides in 2006, a 57 percent increase over 2005
and the highest number in 11 years. As of last week, 43 people had
been killed in 2007, fewer than the 60 killed over the same period
last year, but still far short of a turnaround.

Law enforcement officials and community organizers in Oakland are
hard pressed to explain the rise, particularly since homicides in the
two other big cities in the Bay Area, San Jose and San Francisco,
have not increased substantially.

Possible explanations include large numbers of violent parolees
returning from prison, increasing gang violence, the availability of
guns, a growing methamphetamine trade and police recruitment
shortfalls. But some of those factors also exist in San Francisco and
San Jose, which has a comparable number of parolees and, arguably, a
larger and longer-standing gang problem than Oakland.

"We're trying to make sense of it," said Officer Roland Holmgren, a
spokesman for the Oakland Police Department. "But it's irrational."

The variable and somewhat mysterious homicide rates in the Bay Area
mirror a national pattern in crime data for 2006 released earlier
this month by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The data show
killings increased significantly in some cities, including Atlanta,
Baltimore, Philadelphia and Washington, and decreased in others,
including Dallas, Los Angeles and Miami, with no definitive
explanation for the differences.

Many criminologists and law enforcement officials are debating
whether the violent-crime data signal a significant national trend.
In a report, "A Gathering Storm -- Violent Crime in America," the
Police Executive Research Forum, a professional organization of
police chiefs, warned last year that violent crime increases were
"the front end of a tipping point of an epidemic of violence not seen
for years."

Among other factors, the chiefs blamed a decline in federal spending
for a decrease in crime prevention and community policing programs
and for a dip in police staffing.

Many criminologists, however, question whether the recent increases
in killings are large enough, widespread enough or consistent enough
to be considered a trend. And even those who do discern a pattern say
that they are often unable to explain why it is happening or what
policing strategies would be best to use.

"There are a thousand different stories competing against each
other," said Frank Zimring, a criminologist at the University of
California, Berkeley. "When you put all the dots together, instead of
knowing more, we know less."

Murders rose 6.7 percent in 2006 in cities with more than a million
people, but in the nation's three largest cities, New York, Los
Angeles and Chicago, violent crime either declined or held steady. In
cities with populations from 250,000 to 500,000 violent crime
increased 3.2 percent and murders rose 3.7 percent.

"Two years does not a trend make, but two years can be the beginning
of one; we just don't know yet," said Joel Wallman, a criminologist
at the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation in New York City. "Some of
these are such small changes, and the timeframe of the trend is so
short that it's very difficult to determine whether this is a real
trend or just random noise."

Junious Williams, the chief executive of the Urban Strategies
Council, a group in Oakland that studies urban poverty and crime,
said the increase in homicides was prevalent in many predominantly
African-American cities. Over the last five years, African-American
suspects accounted for 65 percent of Oakland's killings, according to
a study by the council, and 77 percent of victims.

"Most of the cities experiencing increases in homicides have black
pluralities, if not majority black populations," Mr. Williams said.
"Here in Oakland, the majority of the crimes are being committed by
young brothers."

Poor educational opportunities, high unemployment and a criminal
justice system that reinforces criminal behavior have led to an
"honorific culture" akin to that of the Wild West for many inner city
black communities, said a Harvard sociologist, Orlando Patterson.

Respect for traditional social norms was on the decline, Mr.
Patterson said, in the face of a growing hip-hop culture that puts an
emphasis on street credibility for respect.

Some criminologists argued that the recent increases signified that
the historic declines in crime in the late 1980s and 1990s had
bottomed out after abnormally high levels in the wake of the crack
cocaine epidemic. Tougher sentencing guidelines, widespread
incarceration and the subsiding crack trade have run their course,
these criminologists say, and without those overriding factors, crime
rates are returning to more natural, regional levels.

"Even the kind of crime we're seeing now is nowhere near what we were
seeing in the early 1990s," said Jack Riley, a researcher at the RAND
Corporation, a research organization in Santa Monica, Calif.

Whatever the debate nationally about a crime trend, many people who
live and work in Oakland are seeing more death at their doorsteps.

Jordan Murphy, 18, barely made his high school graduation last week,
having been mistaken for a rival gang member and shot in the thigh in August.

Tony Alcala, 17, survived three bullets, one in the stomach and two
in the back, when he was shot last year. The police told him later
that two of the men who attacked him had been arrested, and a third
gunman had been killed by gang members sympathetic to Mr. Alcala.

Dr. Javid Sadjadi, an emergency room doctor at Highland Hospital,
Oakland's main public trauma center, said doctors there treated 425
shooting victims last year, some of them several times.

"We're starting to see the same people getting shot several times in
several different incidents," Dr. Sadjadi said, recounting a
14-year-old shooting victim who died recently after being admitted to
the hospital, his third admission for having been shot.

Dr. Sadjadi recalled one day last summer when the hospital treated
more than 10 victims of shootings.

"We're also seeing much younger patients," he said. "Last year was a
record for shooting victims who were youths between the ages of 14 and 17."