Letter from Oakland: A Progressive City in Crisis
On October 20th, shortly after sunset, I was at my desk in West Oakland, California, when I heard that telltale, deep-throated sound — boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom — six shots, very loud, in front of my building, or so it seemed.
I crept to my window. No yelling or tires screeching, traffic passing normally. I called the police, although some of my Oakland friends say never do that, due to the Oakland Police Department’s long record of abuse, corruption and murder. After two busy signals, I got through.
I went into my hallway. A young Chinese woman, who moved into the building last year and goes by Jasmine, since she thinks no one can pronounce her Chinese name, and a friend were coming up the stairs, chatting. Had they heard shots? “No, we just parked and must have missed them.” Did they know about lying down when they hear shots nearby? “Yes, of course,” Jasmine said, laughing.
It turned out Rashad Brinson, a 28-year-old African American man, had been murdered in front of our corner liquor store. That makes him at least the twelfth person killed there in my 32 years living here. Brinson was unhoused, i.e. homeless, so he didn’t get the traditional street memorial with flowers, balloons, stuffed animals, and tea candles spelling out his name, like most young Black murder victims in Oakland. But at least we have his name.
[My neighbor] waited over two hours, while the cops marked where those 73 shells landed, to see if they wanted his eyewitness account. They didn’t. It is no longer unusual for shootings in Oakland to involve dozens or hundreds of rounds.
Brinson was killed in a drive-by shooting for no apparent reason, it turned out, which surprised me, since I assumed he was a casualty of a turf war over the crack corner a block away. Indeed, less than a week earlier, on October 15th, that corner was hit with a military-style assault in broad daylight, although no one was actually hit.
My space is on the far side of the building and I was in a storage room, so I didn’t hear the 73-round barrage fired right behind our parking lot, which must have sounded like a war. About an hour later, however, I did notice the cops had closed all three west-bound lanes of West Grand Avenue. A bit rich, I thought, until I got closer and met another new neighbor, an African American man named Jermaine, who saw the entire incident from our loading dock.
A car pulled up and out stepped a 20-something African American man with an assault rifle and a few teenagers with pistols, who seemed scared, Jermaine said. They went to the corner and started firing toward the crack corner a block away, hitting mostly cars, including one belonging to Jermaine. He waited over two hours, while the cops marked where those 73 shells landed, to see if they wanted his eyewitness account. They didn’t. It is no longer unusual for shootings in Oakland to involve dozens or hundreds of rounds.
Oakland is not unique. Murders leapt up across America during the pandemic, 30% on average. If we look at Albuquerque, Nashville and Detroit, three cities slightly larger than Oakland, which have tiny, medium and large Black populations, respectively, we see that Oakland’s 2019 and 2020 per capita murders are similar to Albuquerque’s and Nashville’s and about one third of Detroit’s. But neither Albuquerque, Nashville nor Detroit are located on the prestigious San Francisco Bay.
The killing increase is obviously driven by pandemic-fostered fear, isolation and depression, which also added to the suicide rate, and the ability to move around masked. And there are other factors, like Trump’s machismo and rejection of rule of law. Although African Americans vote overwhelmingly Democratic, some Black men support Trump; their numbers increased about 6% from 2016 to 2020; and they included figures like superstar rapper Kanye West.
Five days after those kids bullet-sprayed my street, there was a shootout at a gas station about a mile away, also in broad daylight (1 pm, October 20). It killed Desoni Gardner, also known as “Li’l Theze,” since the 20-year-old from Vallejo, 25 miles away, was a rapper. He was also African American.
Gardner’s crew wounded the man who shot him, Ersie Joyner, a retired captain in the Oakland Police Department, also African American. The station’s security cameras showed them rifling Joyner’s pockets, making it a robbery until Joyner whipped out his gun. But one of my Oakland friends thought it might have been a vendetta against a dirty cop.
Four months earlier, on June 25th, a young man was murdered on that same street behind my building, due to an altercation between a father and his baby momma’s current boyfriend, according to my neighbors who heard it. The dispute involved a child and someone getting in or out of a car, they said, although they were unsure of who murdered whom. My neighbor Hannah, an emergency room doctor and white, heard the shouting and shots and ran down to see if there was anything she could do. There wasn’t.
Within a day or two of that murder, a young man was killed six blocks away on the basketball court in DeFremery Park, where the Black Panther Party used to hold rallies. The Panthers started in West Oakland in 1966. The closest court to my building, I have been playing there for three decades almost without incident. Going to shoot around a few days later, I was surprised to see a street memorial alongside the court, although the candles were scattered by then, and I couldn’t make out the name. I called the OPD to see if they knew the names of those two young men. They didn’t.
Six months earlier, in January, four miles from me, in East Oakland, Dinyal New lost both her teenage sons, Lee Weathersby (13) and Lamar Broussard (19), within three weeks of each other. Horrific tragedies by any measure, they were especially egregious since there was no apparent motive for either murder. There were no arrests, since community members are reluctant to “come forward,” i.e. snitch, and murders are hard to solve without motives or eyewitnesses, even by the best-funded police departments. Lee and Lamar did get street memorials, however, as part of the rituals enacted by the kids, families and communities to address the trauma of losing so many, so young.
It’s not just young men. On October 6th, a 15-year-old girl was riding with her uncle when he got into altercation with another motorist. He bullet-sprayed their vehicle. She died. On January 22nd, the same thing happened to the house of LeShawn Buffin, a 52-year-old grandmother. She died.
Sure, they are casually taking a life and throwing away their own, if arrested and convicted, but they are desperate for what the killings provide: elevated status and self-expression.
Many of Oakland’s young men are extremely angry, obviously. Not mature enough to control their rage, minor disputes often trigger arguments, which easily escalate into shootings, since so many are packing guns. Sure, they are casually taking a life and throwing away their own, if arrested and convicted, but they are desperate for what the killings provide: elevated status and self-expression. It gives voice to their own immense trauma. In this way, the inner-city killings parallel America’s increasingly frequent mass shootings, although those are perpetrated almost exclusively by angry white men.
“It’s like a war zone,” said Oakland’s Deputy Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong at LeShawn Buffin’s funeral, according to the San Francisco Chronicle article of February 2nd. “We’re seeing a huge increase in the number of high-powered firearms.” The killings don’t follow identifiable trends, Armstrong said, in terms of gang violence or victims’ race or age, which is another frightening new national trend.
Random killing also increased in Albuquerque, which has a 3% African American population, ruling out that subgroup’s cultural factors. The randomness also appears to be driven by the chaos of the pandemic and Trumpian times, plus the new availability of “ghost guns.” Assembled at home and with no serial numbers, they are impossible to trace.
“She was a loving mother to her daughters and grandchildren,” said Armstrong, also African American, who was a family friend of Buffin and called her his “god sister.” “She was a caring person in the community, who would open her home to help anyone. She will be truly missed.”
Armstrong was born and raised in West Oakland, where he lost a brother to gun violence. He attended McClymonds High School, six blocks from my building, and asked to be sworn in there, a nice nod to our hood, when he was appointed Chief of Police, shortly after Buffin’s funeral.
Since joining the OPD in 1999, Armstrong has had a stellar career, both as an officer and advocate of progressive policing. An early participant in Ceasefire, Oakland’s innovative violence intervention program, he led the Stop Data Collection Project, which cut police stops of African Americans by over half, and has participated in numerous national programs and classes, and taught some himself.
On April 8th, 2021, Chief Armstrong was invited to Washington D.C., for the announcement of new executive orders on gun control, and met with President Biden. Armstrong succeeded the three-year-tenure of Anne Kirkpatrick, who headed the Spokane, Washington, police department and is white but was way out of her league in Oakland — for perfectly understandable reasons.
“It’s just overwhelming,” said Guillermo Cespedes, the head of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, who has a master’s degree in social work from Columbia University, according to the same SF Chronicle article. Cespedes was an anti-gang activist and city official with that portfolio in Los Angeles, which has many gangs, including Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13, the vicious El Salvadorian super-gang. “These have been the most difficult conditions I have ever worked under.”
For over a year, Oakland residents have been hearing — if not seeing, if they don’t live in the hood — their city descend into chaos: a lot more sirens, shots and helicopters. There were other indicators: stores not stocking shelves due to shoplifting, people running red lights, the respected 170-year-old Mills College, which borders on a tough hood, announcing it would close (it will continue in diminished capacity under Northeastern University, Boston), and increased attacks on Asians. For comic relief, Oakland’s entire school board was forced to resign after some members bitched out parents for pleading with them to open the schools, saying, “parents wanted their babysitters back” and “more time to smoke cannabis.”
Most Oaklanders see their city is in distress, although many are reluctant to discuss it. Why bring each other down with useless complaining? And the threat is comparatively small if you are white or if you don’t run with drug dealers or argue with road ragers. To add insult to injury, you never know where people stand on the intricate issues involved, meaning a discussion can easily slip into politically-incorrect territory.
Focusing on racial justice issues, without fortifying it with democratic successes, in a mixed and egalitarian community like Oakland, pushes people to tribe up and displace their grievances onto the “other.”
On a few occasions, I have been criticized for opining on the affairs of my hood because I am white. Skin color, speech and other cultural attributes do form large parts of our first impressions of each other, but to privilege them above the overall relationship or our ethics or insights, or to value racial categories and histories more than shared humanity and equality is a big mistake, I feel.
I learned this philosophy from my neighbors growing up in New York City across the street from Grant Houses, one of the tougher projects in Harlem, and playing in the Harlem Little League, during the riots of the summer of 1964, and in the Pop Warner football league, where I was the only white kid. I have also called West Oakland home for almost half my life, which provided me some unique experiences: mostly fun, a few harrowing, many revealing.
Politically correct self-censorship proved problematic when Trump’s China-insulting and race-baiting triggered unprecedented attacks on Asians. Residents of Oakland’s large Chinatown endured a rash of robberies, beatings and a few murders.
In July 2020, a 32-year-old Vietnamese-American man, Quoc Tran, was shot in neighboring “Vietnamtown” when his driving annoyed a handsome, 25-year-old Oaklander with a long rap sheet. Tran died from his injuries 16 months later. In March 2021, Pak Ho, a 75-year-old man originally from Hong Kong, died two days after being shoved down during a robbery by a man whose arrest record indicated he targeted elderly Asians.
Significantly stranger, Lai Dang, a 58-year-old man of Chinese heritage, was murdered in cold blood seven blocks from my house in broad daylight on January 11th for no apparent reason. Surveillance videos and witnesses indicate a father and son were driving through West Oakland, stopped to urinate, spotted Dang and shot at him, ran him down and killed him. Literally: Open season on Asians. They were arrested four days later in Tracy, 50 miles from Oakland, and held without bail.
That the anti-Asian assailants were almost entirely African American men was usually omitted from news reports or statements by representatives of the Asian community. Excluding racial descriptors is an understandable attempt to limit implicit bias or the fear some Asians have of African Americans, while allowing Asian spokespeople to maintain people-of-color solidarity. But it puts potential victims at a disadvantage doing threat assessments, everyone was already talking about the races of the individuals involved, and to pretend that is not an import fact is a fantasy. Some of the attackers also appear to have mental health issues.
Along with discussions about inadequate health care, institutional racism, endemic poverty, and pandemic-driven isolation, job loss and school-dropout rates, we need to broach the subject of Black Lives Matter. Considered the biggest activist movement in American history, Black Lives Matter helped inspire fantastic changes in corporate, media and overall culture, in America and around the world. In Oakland, most residents readily adopted its tenets, joined marches and posted BLM signs on their properties or vehicles. But there were also negative repercussions: reduced police services, the partial destruction of downtown, increased tribalism.
Focusing on racial justice in a mixed and egalitarian community like Oakland, without fortifying it with democratic successes, pushes people to tribe up and displace their grievances onto the “other.” A problematic position in general, this is more dangerous in Trumpian times, given the racialized fearmongering of Trump and many Republicans. Moreover, once othering is established, it can be applied to internal divisions.
“If multiculturalism can’t work in Oakland, with so many activists and artists of all races and mixed races, as well as the immense number of social services and political organizations, what hope is there?”
Othering people from different hoods, gangs, races and social classes is one factor fomenting Oakland’s murder spree. Another is: after a prosperous period diminished the need for gangsterism, a new generation of thugs are taking the opportunity to accrue power. Then throw in political upheaval, which put the police on their back foot and reduced their morale and leg work along with funding. Last but not least, a scofflaw spirit is sweeping America, from ex-president Trump on down.
“If multiculturalism can’t work in Oakland, with so many activists and artists of all races and mixed races, as well as the immense number of social services and political organizations, what hope is there?” I’ve heard a few Oaklanders say, or something like that. Indeed, Oakland has to take a leadership position in this regard, given it is one of the most racially-mixed cities on the planet, with a 29% Black, 27% white, and 21% Latinx population, according to the 2020 census, and it has so much talent and is comparatively wealthy.
The 16% of Oaklanders who are Asian are disadvantaged by their large number of recent arrivals and English-limited elderly, and their lack of thugs or martial artists, who could help with community defense. Ad hoc accompaniment of old people shopping and patrols soon began, but Chief Armstrong asked them not to arm — one man was arrested for brandishing a weapon at attackers — and said the OPD could provide protection. Many Asians fear it can’t, however, and that “Oakland has become the wild West.”
Local newspapers with limited budgets, like The Oakland Post or The East Bay Times, were slow to cover Oakland’s civic collapse, although the latter has done excellent longform reporting on the OPD, as has Berkeley’s left-centric Pacifica Radio station, KPFA. Colorful crime stories out of Oakland have long made Bay Area or national news but the new, unprecedented levels were not emphasized until recently. When I began mentioning the rash of murders around my building, a few friends dismissed it as typical — “Oakland bats last against the gentrifiers,” as one put it — but some longtime neighbors said it is the worst they have ever seen.
In November, Rebecca Kaplan, a liberal council person and Oakland’s vice mayor, was talking up her initiative to cleanup illegal garbage dumping, which is a notorious blight across West Oakland. Then she moved on to the huge homeless crisis. While both are terrible, they hardly compare to the slaughter, although all three can be connected through the “Broken Windows Theory.”
Some progressive pundits and friends of mine blame the OPD for not doing enough to investigate crime in the hood, despite the 10% budget cuts, and for retaining bad officers. In fact, the OPD remains under the Federal supervision imposed in 2012, as part of the 2003 trial of a gang of corrupt cops. In 2016, the department was rocked by another massive scandal, when over a dozen officers were found exploiting a young, woman-of-color sex worker. That precipitated three police chiefs in one week.
Be that as it may, the primary person addressing Oakland’s killing crisis is Chief Armstrong, who now opens press conferences with over two minutes of silence, one second for each lost Oaklander. “We can be vocal about certain things, but I just don’t understand why this community cannot be vocal about 100 lives lost,” Armstrong said on September 21st, on the occasion of Oakland’s 100th killing in nine months, almost as many as the entire previous year.
“We can scream and yell about anything the police department does wrong but, in this time, we can’t speak up about what’s plaguing all of us — and that’s gun violence.”
On July 10th, between 60 and 200 people joined the OPD’s march, “Stand Up for a Safe Oakland,” around Lake Merritt, the large lake which serves as the town’s centerpiece and site of its intercommunal Sunday promenade. The small march ended up at a lake front park, which became Black Oakland’s weekend gathering spot and street fair during the lockdown. It was also where seven people were shot, one fatally, three weeks earlier during Juneteenth, the celebration of liberation from slavery, which President Biden declared a federal holiday that day.
Also on July 10th and at the lake, the Anti-Police Terror Project had organized a car caravan and barbecue. Shouting ensued.
Oaklanders responded to the anti-Asian violence with a 1000-strong, mostly-Asian showing at a park near Chinatown on February 13th. Black activists joined with their Asian counterparts, especially after the March 16th mass murder of six of Asian women and two others by a white man in Atlanta, Georgia. But Asian and Black activists broke over whether to support or defund the police.
It is not lost on the kids or gangbangers as well as Chief Armstrong or many Asians that last year there were dozens of BLM marches, which attracted tens of thousands of people and crisscrossed Oakland, to protest the brutal police killing of George Floyd thousands of miles away.
The root cause of inner-community violence is institutional racism, poverty and poor services for kids of color, which can’t be solved by additional police, according to proponents of BLM tenets. Indeed, Albuquerque, Nashville and Oakland have one officer for every 550 to 625 residents, while Detroit, where the murder rate is three times Oakland’s, has twice that, one cop per 300. Hence, we have to switch our policing, education and social work, according to defund-the-police supporters, and accept some collateral damage until it takes effect.
Oakland’s murder rate will almost double in 2021, from its record low of 72 in 2019, a level only last seen from 1998 to 2001 or in the ’70s. Although mortality peaked in 1992, with 165 killings, comparing the crack epidemic to today is like contrasting apples and oranges, given Oakland’s recent renaissance. The 2010s were probably the city’s most prosperous decade since the ’40s, including for many low-income locals — if they weren’t displaced by gentrification, of course.
Along with pushing up rents and homelessnes, gentrification brought hundreds of new businesses, many of them restaurants, which provided jobs as well as places to get a decent bite. There were also scores of new music venues and art galleries, welcome outlets for local artists, including those driven here by the much higher rents in San Francisco, which has been occupied by overpaid techies. The first Friday art crawl, started in 2006 by the Art Murmur gallery association, blew up over five years from a few hundred to over 20,000 attendees. The majority were Oaklanders enjoying each other’s company, but the bridge and tunnel crowd’s copious eating and drinking, if not art buying, turned it into a cash bonanza.
Gentrifiers can be disgusting and destructive, of course. Unscrupulous house-flippers preyed on impoverished families. High rents exacerbated the homeless crisis. Foodies drove up taco truck prices. Black families were forced out to distant suburbs, like Tracy or Vallejo, where they sometimes felt like foreigners. I had to bitch out white new home owners, on a couple of occasions, for whining about petty thievery which bordered on racism. Didn’t they look around before plunking down a half a million dollars, say? Other times, it’s tone deafness. Two blocks from me, in the opposite direction from the crack corner, is a brewery and pub called Ghost Town after the nearby neighborhood. Alas, Ghost Town didn’t earn its moniker by having a quaint, old graveyard.
It is not lost on the kids or gangbangers as well as Chief Armstrong or many Asians that last year there were dozens of BLM marches, which attracted tens of thousands of people and crisscrossed Oakland.
Oakland hasn’t become a hot art market, except for a couple established galleries, like the nationally-known Creative Growth, which features artists with developmental disabilities. But the galleries often have work by, and a few are run by, people of color. Ditto the scores of vendors with tables, booths or trucks that feature everything from art and handicrafts to fashion and food. There are also performers doing music, magic, juggling or “fire arts,” since Oakland is home to many organizers and enthusiasts of the world-famous desert festival, Burning Man.
A buddy of mine from art school, who is also a West Oakland neighbor, Richard Felix (white/Jewish), sets up large canvases and pots of paint, which attract Black middle schoolers from Ghost Town, only a few blocks away, alongside white suburbanites and tattooed-piercers. Indeed, those six blocks of Telegraph Avenue had become a fantastic monthly carnival, impressing even seasoned world travelers, until the pandemic shut it down.
In the last decade, West Oakland became imminently livable. Once a food desert, it now has Mandela Foods, a Black-owned, collectively-run, organic grocery store in its 12th year, and a new supermarket, Community Foods, started by Brahm Ahmadi, a street vendor turned food activist. There’s also haute cuisine, like Korean fusion or Middle Eastern or the unfortunately-named but airy and pleasant Ghost Town Brewing.
Oakland also has a burgeoning film scene, which I tried to cover and support in the magazine, cineSOURCE, which I started with some friends in 2008 (see cine-source.com).
After Oakland’s decade-long boom, I assumed it could endure the pandemic. I was inspired walking around Lake Merritt on March 26, 2020, which I covered in the cineSOURCE article, “Oakland in the Time of Corona”. My fellow strollers were Black, white, brown and even Asian, which is not always the case; they were straight and LGTB, bolstered by Oakland’s large lesbian community; some were even bridge-and-tunnelers. Surely, we were creative, resilient and tolerant enough to handle Covid-19, I thought. Alas, the Oakland promenade didn’t include a few critical groups.
Although the vast majority of Oaklanders masked up, helped their neighbors and eventually got vaccinated, the economic shutdown and switch to online teaching hit poor Black kids especially hard, feelings aggravated by political upheaval. As amazing as BLM’s achievements have been in white-dominated towns, industries or police departments, the combination of illness, poverty, protest and reduced police services proved catastrophic for Oakland.
Protests have been popular in Oakland since 1946, when a city-wide strike by 146 different unions, against discriminatory hiring of African Americans, shut the city down. By nightfall, however, it had become a party, with union officials getting bars to put their jukeboxes on the street, where interracial dancing ensued.
Oakland was long been known for its adventurous, artistic and activist working-class types, typified by its premiere native son, author and socialist Jack London. During the Depression and war, it attracted poor Blacks from Texas and Louisiana and poor whites from Oklahoma, a rugged and less-educated population, which fed the Black Panthers, on one hand, and the Hells Angels motorcycle gang, also based in Oakland, as well as the police force, on the other.
In the ’60s, there were demonstrations against the draft and for Huey P. Newton, a co-founder of the Panthers, who was from West Oakland and convicted of involuntary manslaughter for killing a cop a mile from my house. More recently there were large protests against the murder of Oscar Grant by a BART (subway) cop, in 2009, and during the Oakland Occupy, two years later. In addition to outraged activists and sympathetic liberals, recent demonstrations have attracted rowdy young men who are Black, and sometimes associated with gangs, or white, and sometimes associated with Black Bloc, an anarchist movement, or suburban hooliganism.
On May 29th, during Oakland’s first march protesting George Floyd’s murder, those two male cohorts and a smattering of women broke hundreds of windows and looted at least a hundred stores across downtown Oakland and in neighboring Emeryville, where the malls have more goodies. One of my radical friends was gleeful as she insisted it was a legitimate expression of rage, a minor inconvenience for shoppers, and an insurance write-off for stores. But the looters also broke into small, Black-owned businesses, according to my research and an article cowritten by my friend Aqueila M. Lewis-Ross for Oakland Voices, a respected site.
Alas, neither they nor other BLM spokespeople seem to find the sweet spot between aggressive activism and sophisticated civil society development, an error in the time of Trump, I believe.
Some marchers tried to stop the looters, I was told by the Palestinian-American owner of The Twilight Zone, a large smoke shop on Broadway, Oakland’s main march route, who had over a $60,000 of glass cases and inventory smashed. Some marchers also came back the next day to help him clean up, he said.
Unfortunately, a year and half later, downtown Oakland, which the city has been struggling to revive for 30 years, remains partially boarded up. Those boards are covered with magnificent murals by local artists, which are sometimes toured by tourists, but many businesses are not coming back; some people have moved out; and that one night of destruction — almost all the other dozens of marches were completely peaceful — ended some much-needed jobs.
One Black Lives Matter march I attended was organized by the Oakland Black Officers Association, then headed by Armstrong. It consisted almost entirely of people of color, in contrast to most of Oakland’s other BLM marches, which were often largely white, and had elegantly-dressed women in front belting out gospel. Armstrong didn’t speak at the central police station on 7th and Broadway, where the marches often ended, but the officers who spoke did an artful job of explaining their competing concerns.
Alas, neither they nor other BLM spokespeople seem to find the sweet spot between aggressive activism and sophisticated civil society development, an error in the time of Trump, I believe. Indeed, the general discourse of the Black Lives Matter movement was suffused with talk of white people in blanket terms, without the balancing spirit of equality and goodwill established by King and Obama as well as Lincoln and Jefferson.
All humans are created equal; judge not by color of skin but content of character; there are not two Americas. In addition, defining people through DNA is a slippery slope; shame is not a stable motivator; and multiculturalism is about accepting people from groups you don’t like, not just allies.
“All Lives Matter” is considered racist for good reason. Who is to tell anyone what to call themselves? The BLM organization started in 2012, long before the national movement. And “All Lives Matter” was adopted by racists in a mimic-and-ridicule game.
But, of course, all lives do matter. And that would have been a better name for the movement by virtue of its emphasis, right in the name, on building a cooperative community instead of protecting one tribe. All lives matter would have better modeled equality, in contrast to fetishizing privilege or adjudicating racism. If organized by African Americans, it would have implicitly conveyed the message “Stop murdering Black people” and tacitly included Black-on-Black violence.
Most BLM activists do not mention, let alone emphasize, Black-on-Black violence, as far as I know. They seem to feel that broaching the subject in the same breath as state violence would be a copout, whataboutism or straight up racism. It is certainly true that everyone fights with their family and neighbors more than strangers, and those commonplace crimes need increased investigation and abatement by the police and community.
Nevertheless, Black-on-Black violence does kill massively more people than the police. And it has played a major role in traumatizing both African Americans, who have lost a horrific number of family and friends per capita, and police of all races, who fear a well-armed, trigger-happy citizenry. In 2009, an African American parolee, trying to evade arrest and automatic return to prison, killed four officers within as many hours in East Oakland, surely shocking even the most enlightened cops.
The longstanding confrontation between police and African Americans is a direct result of slavery, systemic racism and endemic poverty, but it is often aggravated to an extreme by the need of both parties to obtain respect in the moment of confrontation. While policing is based on respect, so is the self-esteem of many men, and some women, who have little else.
Growing up as a white kid in Harlem, I have been mugged over a dozen times. Hitchhiking as a hippie through thousands of miles of redneck country, I was stopped by cops dozens of times and jailed a few. Along the way, I learned to respect the powerful players, be they muggers, cops, gangsters, border guards, convicts or rednecks, while maintaining a semblance of dignity. Groveling invites abuse from deranged machos of any profession or race.
Even a minor gesture can escalate an average traffic stop or thug encounter into suicide by cop or mugger. If we research the interactions leading to cop killings, I think we will often find some trigger of disrespect. Indeed, that is also what leads to most Black-on-Black murders. Yes, American laws and culture entitle us to speak our minds, but it is ill-advised to play disrespect chicken with deranged machos.
Most BLM activists do not mention, let alone emphasize, Black-on-Black violence, as far as I know. They seem to feel that broaching the subject in the same breath as state violence would be a copout, whataboutism or straight up racism.
The flats of Oakland were thought to be pretty tough in the 1970s, when I was living in hippie San Francisco. But I knew and visited a couple there, an enormous, ripped Black guy named Wetback, who was from a California border town, favored red bandana headbands and had done time — although he didn’t mention it much and our chats were more about Buddhism, fitness and weed — and his young, white girlfriend, Donna, the daughter of a police officer. They seemed to accord both sides respect, while enjoying the already-developing, hipper side of Oakland.
If you treat people with basic respect, typified on the street by a glance and nod in passing, they will often return the courtesy. When confronted by thugs or muggers, if you honor them with warrior status, while remaining calm and respectful, as difficult as that might be, you usually get a pass. If not, just hand them your wallet, while politely asking for a few buck refund to get home or buy milk. One time, I stepped into my corner liquor store on a Saturday at midnight, a massive mistake, I realized upon seeing it was full of severe-looking Black men. When one said loudly, “How’s it going?” and I responded at a similar volume, “Slick as a dick,” I won a wry smile from him and some of his crew.
Oakland did have a corrupt white mayor in the early ’60s, John Houlihan. A nationally-known expert on urban issues and a liberal Republican, he presided over the construction of the Oakland Museum and other major projects but had to resign during his second term for embezzling. He served two years in prison.
Oakland had a large Ku Klux Klan chapter until 1924, and racist sympathizers long after. In the ’60s, the OPD was only 2% Black, notoriously harsh, and its officers often tormented and sometimes killed men of color, which inspired the formation of the Black Panthers in 1966.
Huey Newton’s innovative tactic of police monitoring consisted of following patrol cars, observing their stops at a legal distance, advising detainees of their rights, and standing by with legal long guns, in case problems arose. Until California repealed open-carry a year later, neither side fired a single shot. Respect.
There was a cabal of corrupt cops, the Riders, which preyed for years on West Oaklanders. After I moved here in 1989, I often saw Black men face-down and spread-eagle on the pavement during cop stops. As part of the OPD’s 2003 settlement for the Riders’ abuses against 119 plaintiffs, who received almost $11 million total, it was put under federal management.
Despite these correctives, some of my Oakland friends suspect there are still bad cops, the court-appointed monitor is benefiting somehow, and the nine-citizen police commission, which was established in 2016 and can discipline officers, direct policy or sack a chief, is still mired in Oakland’s old patronage political system.
On the other hand, Oakland is in Northern California, a center of progressive politics, environmental beauty and immense wealth. In addition to state assistance, Oakland has an enormous number of not-for-profits, faith-based social services, art organizations and political-activist groups. Although Oakland is the most income polarized of any Bay Area city, with a substantial number of hill dwellers in large houses with bay views, they often help with the philanthropies.
Indeed, Oakland is rich and talented enough to fix its problems, according to my neighbor Jermaine, who was raised in a Chicago hood by a drug-addicted mom. The gang war he witnessed from our loading dock comes from increasing lawlessness, he told me. Heading Jermaine’s fix-it list are the homeless encampments, which are common up and down the West Coast but over the top in Oakland, where they include fully 1% of the population. Although aggravated by gentrification, the homeless camps only started after the Occupy movement established that camping in public spaces would be tolerated and distributed tents.
Many of the town’s biggest camps are in West Oakland. While they provide a release valve for society’s rebels or outcasts, they are rife with addiction, theft, sex abuse and the dangerous tactic of torching rivals’ tents, according to my friends who work with the unhoused as activists, social workers or firefighters, or who live nearby.
Oakland never burned during the nation-wide riots of the summer of ’64 or ’68, the latter because the Black Panthers advised against it. By the time Vice President Kamala Harris was born here in ’64, it was becoming a remarkable multicultural and artistic city
Oakland never burned during the nation-wide riots of the summer of ’64 or ’68, the latter because the Black Panthers advised against it. By the time Vice President Kamala Harris was born here in ’64, it was becoming a remarkable multicultural and artistic city, the center of the Bay Area Figurative Movement (of painters), with a world-class art school, California College of Art.
Times were tough for Oakland’s proletariat, due to downturns at the port and in many industries. Nevertheless, most residents still had access to elevated opportunities for friendships, education (the University of California at Berkeley is four miles down Telegraph Avenue from downtown Oakland) and employment. When the Rodney King riots erupted in Los Angeles in 1992 and spread to San Francisco and Berkeley, there were no riots in Oakland.
America’s history of slavery and ongoing racism are important subjects for study and debate, especially when contextualized within America’s democratic evolution, but making it the centerpiece of Oakland’s current catastrophe belies the obvious. Indeed, critical race theory can sometimes sound like a conspiracy theory — a monstrous unaddressed evil is sabotaging society — which is problematic in Trumpian times, when so many Americans believe his Big Lie about election fraud and other conspiracy theories.
In point of fact, Oakland has been a “chocolate city” for sixty years, having birthed the Panthers in 1966 and, in 1977, elected its first Black mayor, Lionel Wilson, another McClymonds High School graduate. He served for 14 years, the second longest in Oakland history. (Panther co-founder Bobby Seale ran for mayor in ’72 but lost in a close race). And there have been two more Black mayors: Elihu Harris, 1991 to ’99, and Ron Dellums, 2007 to ’11.
While whites continue to hold the vast majority of power and African American Oaklanders dropped from 47% in 1980 to 29% today, many people of color became city employees, entrepreneurs, politicians, professionals, artists, and professors, as was the case with Newton’s brother and Harris’s parents. They also became cops.
Ersie Joyner, who was still recovering two months later from the six gunshots he received in October, emerged from poverty in East Oakland to become a respected officer. He was involved in a police shooting a decade ago, for which the department paid a wrongful death settlement of $75,000, but he claimed he was confronting an assailant about to commit a murder. Not only did Chief Armstrong and Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf praise Joyner highly after he was shot, he was an early advocate of defunding the police.
“My whole entire career I have been taught, I have trained, and I have worked towards eliminating gangs,” Joyner told a reporter from The Guardian in 2019. “That has failed miserably for us for decades.” For most of the last decade, Joyner led Ceasefire, Oakland’s anti-violence program, which is known nationally and was instrumental in reducing Oakland’s murder rate.
What Chief Armstrong is calling for — for Oaklanders to take to the streets and internet to militate against the slaughter — did happen in 2006, after murders jumped to 145, 20% over the previous year. Pastors, politicians and teachers walked the streets to send a strong personal and public signal. My graphic studio submitted a proposal for an ad campaign using photos of funerals and street memorials and the slogan “Murder is fun for the whole family,” although it wasn’t funded.
Little of that ilk has been organized of late, save for the OPD’s small march in July. I’m guessing activists assume such efforts would cast aspersions on last summer’s hard-won reforms, hand critics a wedge issue, and be of little use, due to ongoing systemic racism.
There is also the class question. Middle class African American families, from which many activists hail, famously give their kids “the talk,” about what to do when harassed by cops. Often left unmentioned is their more frequent lectures on thugs and gangs. Indeed, they have to fight harder on that front, since some of their kids like to prove themselves by running wild. Caught between those two mortal threats, they are understandably reluctant to get involved in gang abatement.
Defunding a police department, or reforming it and redirecting some monies, is direly needed in jurisdictions which militarized or failed to integrate their police or increase social services. But that doesn’t really describe the OPD, which has long had some innovative practices, including collaborating with activists and therapists, but has struggled to fund its police for decades.
When the famously liberal but pragmatic Jerry Brown served two terms as Oakland’s mayor in the 2000s, between his four respected terms as governor, he tried to expand the force by 100 officers. Many Oaklanders of color liked Brown and voted for his additional-police ballot measure, but the measure funding it was defeated. With 681 officers today, the department is about 50 officers below Brown’s hoped-for levels 15 years ago.
OPD was docked $14 million during BLM Summer, with another $22 million lost from pandemic-related tax revenue drops, equaling five and seven percent of its budget. In the meantime, OPD’s case-solved rate went from a half to a third, although Armstrong did shift six detectives to homicide, and he recently claimed the department had cracked ten murder cases. OPD fields up to 2000 911 calls daily, one of the highest calls-per-officer rates in the country. After hearing the shots that killed Rashad Brinson, I called 911 three times before getting through.
Although the city shifted another $18 million to social services in June 2021, it did allocate $38 million for more police academies, i.e. classes of recruits, to cover the perennially low levels and the many officers who are now quitting. One academy will graduate in January 2022 and another in May. A big problem, however, is those recruits, an Oakland friend recently told me, since the vast majority are not from Oakland, let alone its inner city.
Be that as it may, the OPD has been comparatively well integrated for decades and now includes some Asian officers and members of the city’s artistic community. Jinho Ferreira (Black/Latinx), who rapped as “The Piper” while an OPD officer, also wrote the well-received, one-person play, “Cops and Robbers” (2012), which examines its opposing protagonists notably sympathetically.
Police killings, especially those resembling executions, instead of fog-of-war errors, are criminal, culturally corrosive and incendiary offences, naturally alienating people from authority and society and fueling the anger of volatile young men.
According to the Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, Oakland-connected cops killed 102 people from 1970 to 2015. Of the 93 victims that could be racially identified, 97% were of color and around two thirds Black. But those police murders are still small, by factors of 30, 40 or more, compared to inner-community killing. Indeed, in those 45 years, over 3000 Oaklanders of color were killed by each other.
Moreover, fratricide is more difficult to process psychologically than outsider aggression since it hits in the home. While external enemies can be criticized aggressively and publicly, as demonstrated during BLM Summer, internal oppressors are often downplayed or denied. Then the repressed anger is transferred to a more palatable opponent, hiding the injury and making it harder to heal.
The Oakland Occupy drew denizens from all walks of life and hoods to fruitful encounters and discussions in front of the mayor’s office.
Oakland’s Black community has hundreds of churches, large and small, and their pastors and parishioners do a fantastic job. I have seen them hand out food, provide medical services, set up a community recording studio, and even save the elderly parishioners living next door to my building from a fire, before the arrival of the fire department. But to address our current crisis, which is aggravated by the two major crisis of our era, the pandemic and Trumpism, they don’t have much street cred.
For that, the organizers of an “Oakland United Against Violence,” or similarly-named march, concert or social-work symposium could turn to Oakland’s many famous rappers, or Alicia Garza, a founder of Black Lives Matter (who was born in Oakland but moved to wealthy Marin County and returned at 27), or Angela Davis, the internationally-known thinker, professor and friend of the Black Panthers, or Boots Riley, the brilliant indie rapper turned filmmaker, who shot his scathingly satirical debut feature “Sorry to Bother You” around Oakland in 2017.
Many of Oakland’s creatives and entrepreneurs have the skills to organize concerts, clinics or neighborhood fitness or media centers, preferably located on or near crack corners. Or to contribute fresh ideas. The Oakland Occupy drew denizens from all walks of life and hoods to fruitful encounters and discussions in front of the mayor’s office. Alas, Mayor Jean Quan, a woman, Asian and longtime activist, was unable to find a way to channel that energy or hybrid it with city services.
“Blindspotting”, another excellent Oakland indie feature, which builds an interracial bromance into a political and operatic epic, was written by and stars Oaktown homies and old friends, Rafael Casal and Daveed Diggs, the latter fresh off his New York star turn as Thomas Jefferson in “Hamilton”. Filmed largely in West Oakland, also in 2017, they set their white cop’s murder of a Black man on West Grand and Adeline, my corner. Alas, there have been no police murders here in the last three decades, while well over 150 of my neighbors in a few block radius have killed each other.
“Blindspotting”, “Sorry to Bother You” and other recent films artfully address police killings and institutional racism, but when it comes to Oaklanders butchering each other, it’s slim pickings. Nevertheless, there were a couple of spectacular, low-budget films wading into the subject, notably “Licks”, which is slang for the corner liquor stores the film’s protagonists like to rob, and “Everyday Black Man”, by my friend Carmen Madden.
“Licks” was directed in 2012 by Jonathan Singer-Vine, a white, Jewish twenty-something from Berkeley whose Oakland friends, some living deep in the hood, obviously loved the project and worked incredibly hard on it. With a largely amateur cast, they produced a striking, professional film which delves deep into thug life.
Singer-Vine made the proprietor of his “lick” Black for story telling purposes, but the vast majority of corner liquor store owners are Arab-Americans, often Yemeni, which typifies Oakland’s advanced multiculturalism. Due to the demand for credit and prevalence of alcoholism, Blacks are disadvantaged running liquor stores in their own communities, but Yeminis are Muslims whose culture discourages drinking. A friendly, well-adjusted group, but also quite traditional, even though many of their grandfathers immigrated in the ’70s, the Yemini-Americans are also very well-armed.
For thirty years, I have known the members of the extended family which owned and worked in my corner lick, where Rashad Brinson was killed in October. Indeed, their saga is central to local gossip, giving me a leg up at local gatherings. In addition to brandishing weapons to defend themselves on many occasions, they have shot a few assailants, and one, Willy, accidentally shot himself (he survived).
“‘Licks’ is so studded with the N-word and local slang, like ‘whip’ for car, as to be almost unintelligible,” I wrote in my 2017 review of the film for cineSOURCE. “[I]ts denigration of women — many of its protagonists are pimps, although they adore their mothers and grandmothers — makes it almost unwatchable.” But also accurate, it seems.
When Singer-Vine finally found a distributer, the suits wouldn’t release “Licks” unless he cleaned it up — the commercial wing of the PC police. He refused, hence its four-year delay before appearing on Amazon Prime in 2017. “Licks” still hasn’t gotten proper promo or viewing, even around Oakland, despite its insights. As is commonly known, as well as well researched, people respond to honest stories about their issues.
In contrast, “Everyday Black Man”, shot in Oakland in 2009, was by a woman about men. Madden, who is African American and grew up mostly in Oakland’s suburbs, started as an actress and became an accomplished teacher, writer and director. “Everyday Black Man”, her first feature, tackles the even thornier subject of corruption among community leaders. Although the story follows another Black lick owner and his hiring of a Black Muslim man, who turns the store into a front for drug dealing, Oaklanders knew Madden was referencing the murder of Chauncey Bailey.
Oakland is cursed by the California conundrum of being rich, beautiful and liberal, which makes its poverty, ugliness and repression more grotesque. That very quality, in fact, drives its disadvantaged to more extreme anger, envy and ambition.
A well-regarded reporter and the editor of The Oakland Post, Bailey was killed downtown in 2007 by a paid assassin with a long gun. He was about to publish another article exposing the criminal activities of the owners of the once-popular Your Black Muslim Bakery. After the hit man turned state’s evidence, they got life without parole.
Many of Oakland’s progressive elite also oppose full freedom of speech, if it reflects poorly on a disenfranchised community. Almost 20 years ago, Ron Dellums, the first Black congressperson from Northern California, who was also an anti-war activist and socialist, and the mayor of Oakland in the late ‘00s — as well as a West Oaklander who attended McClymonds — led the campaign to cancel “Gentlemen of Leisure”, a proposed television show.
The show was based on “American Pimp”, the critically-acclaimed 1999 documentary about West Coast pimps, many from Oakland, by the Hughes brothers, who are Black. To have been shot in Oakland, the show was supported by Madden and other creatives and would have been a feather in the cap of the city’s fledgling film business, perhaps even paralleling what “The Wire” (2002–8) did for Baltimore.
But “Gentlemen of Leisure” would not have looked good for the airbrushed Oakland Dellums and other city elders were trying to sell gentrifiers to revive Oakland’s tax base. (Mayor Brown said he would build 10,000 dwellings, Mayor Dellums 100,000.)
Oakland is cursed by the California conundrum of being rich, beautiful and liberal, which makes its poverty, ugliness and repression more grotesque. That very quality, in fact, drives its disadvantaged to more extreme anger, envy and ambition. As the poorest of the fabulous cities by the bay, Oakland is an automatic loci of crime, simply because ambitious poor people will always sell two very popular services and products: sex and drugs. As painful as that is for my more bourgeois or politically-correct neighbors to contemplate, it requires in-depth exploration through research, sociology and art.
Prostitution has long been a popular profession in semi-matriarchal societies, where it is not as stigmatized, and all oppressed groups are semi-matriarchal, since the men are injured, removed or absent. In addition, many tribes are semi-matriarchal, including in West Africa, traditions which helped African Americans endure the destruction of the family during slavery.
The “talented tenth” of Black men rebuilt their personal patriarchies through hard work, the arts or professions, but the less skilled looked to boom towns, like Oakland during World War II, to become fully vested family men. As those jobs waned, they suffered, while women joined the workforce and sometimes earned notable success. The revival of matriarchal traditions is largely why out-of-wedlock births are now hitting historical highs among African Americans and why the lure of becoming a gangster, with increased sexual opportunities, is so attractive.
It is no surprise, therefore, that Oakland became the center of Northern California’s enormous legal as well as illegal marijuana industry, which is mostly white owned (even though the legacy busines until 1980 was largely Black and Latino). Oakland has Harborside, one of the biggest weed stores in the world, Oaksterdam University, the world’s first cannabis college, and many related classes, services and stores, from supplies and equipment to dispensaries and manufacturing.
Indeed, retired-Captain Joyner now runs the Joyous Recreation and Wellness Group, a cannabis edibles manufacturer, located in an unmarked warehouse four blocks from my house. Since the cannabis industry, which started legalizing in the US in California, in 1996, is still not permitted banking services, its workers often carry large amounts of cash. This led some journalists to speculate Joyner was not a random robbery victim.
With Oakland an ongoing prostitution and drug center, people assume some of its police simply must be on the take, an opinion which increased after the OPD’s spectacular sex scandal of 2016. That imbroglio was made even more memorable when Mayor Schaaf, who had been special assistant to Mayor Brown and took office the previous year, fired three police chiefs in one week.
Captain Sean Whent had been doing a decent job for three years, according to “The Force” (2017), a documentary by Emmy-award-winning Oakland filmmaker Peter Nicks, which has some good clips on Armstrong. Nicks’s previous film, the acclaimed “The Waiting Room” (2012), was about the emergency room at Oakland’s main hospital, Highland, which is known nationally for gunshot surgery. (I was waiting for treatment once when a young Black man was wheeled in, bleeding but bragging into his phone, “I was shot, I was shot.”)
With Oakland an ongoing prostitution and drug center, people assume some of its police simply must be on the take, an opinion which increased after the OPD’s spectacular sex scandal of 2016.
Unfortunately for Nicks, he wrapped principal photography just before the story broke about a suicide, a murder, dozens of cops, and a 17- and then 18-year-old woman of color with an hourglass figure, known by her assumed name, Celeste Guap. As it happened, Ms Guap’s mother was an OPD dispatcher and had many friends on the force, including Officer John Hege, who helped her escape an abusive husband and was beloved by Guap. They were devastated when Hege was one of the four cops killed that same day in 2009.
Coercion by powerful figures and child sex abuse were issues raised by Guap’s lawyers to win her $1 million dollar settlement from the city, and they remain her talking points today, but the actual affair was probably a bit more, well, Oakland.
The story starts with a white, increasingly-disturbed rookie cop named Brendan O’Brien, whose Latina wife committed suicide, after they argued about his possible affair. But her family thinks he killed her, and ex-OPD detective Mike Gantt agrees. Indeed, he was pushed off the case by department brass protecting their own, he says, and he filed a related claim against city officials. The intricate evidence was reported at length in The East Bay Express, by Darwin Bond Graham and Ali Winston, but the facts remain somewhat ambiguous to me.
O’Brien was exonerated and went back to work. A year after his wife died, he encountered Guap on International Boulevard, the Latinx neighborhood where she liked to sex work, since her family is Nicaraguan. Guap was being harassed by her pimp and hailed a passing patrol car. “He saved me,” she said of O’Brien, although he didn’t bring her to one of the many related social services or turn her over to a guardian, as recommended by Oakland’s progressive sex trafficking directives. Meeting again two weeks later at a taco truck, no less, they started dating. She was 17, he mid-20s.
Whether the relationship was coerced or consensual, we won’t know until Guap does a podcast, book or movie, but there must have been some romance, given the rumors and fantasies that started flying. Indeed, Ms Guap became the object of rapt attention of dozens of police officers from departments around the Bay Area, an adulation she evidently enjoyed.
After a months-long, half-bromance, half-serial orgy, O’Brien killed himself after Guap threatened him — during a drunken phone call from Puerto Rico, where she was vacationing — that she would reveal she was screwing lots of cops. Instead, O’Brien’s suicide note brought that to the attention of authorities.
As soon as Schaaf heard, she fired Whent. But when she tried to replace him with a lieutenant captain, it came out he recently had an extramarital affair. When her second appointee realized he wouldn’t fare well in the spotlight and resigned, Schaaf took over managing the department herself, through the mayor’s office. Eventually, her staff recruited Anne Kirkpatrick from Spokane, whom Schaaf must have hoped would help with the OPD’s testosterone problem.
The scandal was enormous, even involving cops from as far as Livermore and San Francisco. Yet the OPD only expelled four officers, suspended seven, and left a dozen unidentified. The released version of the department’s long internal report, completed in 2019, is over half redacted. Eyebrows shot up again when officials running the flawed investigation were promoted, and two incriminated officers stayed on the force. They had had sex with Guap and texted lascivious notes to fellow cops, but after she turned 18.
Guap’s mother told a retired cop who was a family friend about the abuses, but he didn’t report it. Alameda County filed numerous charges, but almost all were eventually dropped.
The OPD’s 2016 sex scandal is one back story illuminating an aspect of Oakland’s descent into violence. Another is the Black Panthers.
The Panther’s three founders, Newton, Seale and late-arriving but brilliant and already-published Eldridge Cleaver were visionary, hardworking and innovative. In a spectacular bit of political theater, they took over the California capitol, in Sacramento in May 1967, brandishing their trademark long guns. As well as providing inspiration and ideas to Black people across America and then the world, they started a children’s breakfast program, newspaper, medical clinic and other essential services. Along the way, they were confronted by relentless attacks from authorities and infiltrators but also Newton’s proclivity for violence.
After two juries failed to reconvict Newton on appeals of his cop-killing conviction, he was freed in 1970. Picked up from San Quentin Prison by his close friend, Bert Schneider, a Hollywood producer in a white Cadillac, he was driven to a heroes’ welcome in Oakland, where he hopped on a car, stripped to the waist and exhorted revolution. Newton proceeded to tour the nation, China and elsewhere as America’s most acclaimed revolutionary. After another arrest, for allegedly murdering two women, he fled to Cuba but returned and was found innocent again.
In 1980, Newton earned a PhD from U.C. Santa Cruz with his easy-to-research thesis “The War Against the Panthers”, although, by that time, he had long been a gangster. Vying to become Oakland’s top pimp daddy, he took up residence in a fancy penthouse overlooking Lake Merritt and the Oakland court house, where he spent so much time. Even while maintaining his grueling schedule of writing and public appearances, he led a hard-nosed crew which allegedly extorted protection money from bars and other businesses, ran coke, to which he became addicted, and pimped some Panther sisters.
“I probably would have killed Huey myself,” remarked his erstwhile-best-friend Seale. Newton was finally murdered in 1989, about a mile from my building, a few months after I moved in. It was considered a standard Black-on-Black attack until it came out he had been killed by a member of a rival revolutionary group, the Black Guerrilla Family, in a coke deal gone bad.
Although Newton is honored in many books, classes and murals around the country, not a single monument was erected in his home hood of West Oakland for fifty years. When the Panthers held rallies at DeFremery Park, the crowds were mostly white kids from Berkeley and San Francisco as well as the Oakland hills. The Black middleclass families, of which there were many in West Oakland’s beautiful Victorian houses, opposed the Panthers’ sex and drug use as well as radical politics, and struggled to keep their kids away.
A friend of mine, Rick Moss, told me how the mother of a friend of his stridently blocked their attempt to join the Panthers’ San Francisco chapter in the ’70s. As the director of Oakland’s African American Museum and Library, Moss mounted a Panther show in 2016 to commemorate their 50th anniversary but edited out Newton’s “posturing and showboating.”
Of course, the Oakland chapter of the Panthers was under constant attack by FBI double agents, through its notorious Cointelpro program, as well as by pseudo-revolutionaries, hustlers and local cops, which put them under immense pressure and fomented paranoia. Nevertheless, Newton was egregiously violent. Indeed, his revolutionary hero status and gun-slinger style — which Cleaver captured in his iconic portrait of Newton sitting on an African wicker throne, holding a spear and a gun — contributed to African American gun culture, which ballooned in the ’70s and led to thousands of deaths.
A small mural of Newton appeared on a West Oakland side street in 2017, but it hardly compares to the deluxe, bronze bust of him without a shirt — Newton liked to strip to the waist to show off his prison pecs and play the rock star, even though that is an odd pose for a radical thinker — which was dedicated in October 2021. Organized by his widow, Fredrika, the golden statue sits in the wide greenway in the middle of Mandela Avenue, a block from where Newton was murdered. Oakland also named the nearby 9th Street Dr. Huey P. Newton Way.
Would Newton applaud Oakland’s new radicalism or lawlessness? Or would he recognize the US is under attack by entirely different revolutionaries, the Republicans and conspiracy theorists
Before the statue was placed, its stone plinth and accompanying sign were defaced by graffiti tags and the words “fraud” and “fuck you.” Fredrika didn’t call the police, which community members are loath to do, but the community did identify the young male taggers, who apologized, saying they didn’t know what the rock was for. They also helped with the cleanup.
Except for its proximity to where Newton was murdered, the plaque does not reference his gangsterism. While he achieved many successes and wrote a substantial body of work, including the plaque’s quote — “I think what motivates people is not great hate, but great love for other people” — actions speak louder than words in ethical instruction.
Some of my Oakland friends, as well some radicals, rappers and thug culture aficionados, or actual thugs, are expressing renewed reverence for Newton in statements, songs and T-shirts. But is he an appropriate hero for young Oaklanders? Imagine hearing Newton revered while growing up but learning his unexpurgated biography in college, say, especially if you lost friends or relatives to gun violence. As with the great writer Gertrude Stein, another larger-than-life Oaklander with feet of clay (she was revealed to have collaborated with French Nazis), we have to examine our heroes and forbearers honestly, just as our woke friends are doing with Columbus and Jefferson.
Would Newton applaud Oakland’s new radicalism or lawlessness? Or would he recognize the US is under attack by entirely different revolutionaries, the Republicans and conspiracy theorists who are threatening democracy and whose policies are decimating poor communities, white as well as Black. Indeed, poor whites are plagued by opiate and amphetamine addiction, the deaths from which doubled during the pandemic to over 93,000, and the anti-vax movement and QAnon conspiracy theorists, which have led to tens of thousands of unnecessary Covid deaths.
Back in Oakland, there are so many car break-ins on some streets, residents pot their trees with broken glass. Graffiti bombing is rampant, with celebrity taggers coming from out of town. A few Black men have taken to wearing their pants so low around their thighs, a prison style proving thug bona fides, they could serve as runway models for the fancy underwear they now wear. There are enormous “side shows,” street parties attended mostly by African Americans, involving automotive performances, like doing “donuts” or “ghost riding the whip,” where drivers walk alongside their coasting vehicles. Side shows tie up traffic and sometimes trigger violence.
“My whole entire career I have been taught, I have trained, and I have worked towards eliminating gangs,” Joyner told a reporter from The Guardian in 2019. “That has failed miserably for us for decades.” For most of the last decade, Joyner led Ceasefire, Oakland’s anti-violence program,
The latest innovation by Oakland gangsters is brazen assaults by large groups, like the gang of 50 found burglarizing buildings in West Oakland. On November 19th, stores around San Francisco’s premier Union Square were looted by a “flash mob” wielding crowbars, smashing glass cases and teargassing security guards. A day later, the high-end Nordstrom store in the Oakland suburb of Walnut Creek was swamped by 80 “shoppers” who suddenly metamorphosed into smash-and-grabbers. On NPR on December 20th, California Attorney General Rob Bonta explained how the thieves coordinate on social media like crime syndicates and sell stolen goods in online markets, which are failing to police themselves.
Similar attacks have transpired from large Home Depot stores to small marijuana dispensaries, despite increases in security personnel and Bay Area counties joining to share information and policing duties. And they are spreading across California and the US.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, well-armed caravans marauded across Oakland and two people, who attempted to mount a defense, were murdered. Retired-OPD sergeant Kevin Nishita, who is Japanese-American but has an interracial family, was working as a security officer for a KRON 4 camera crew, covering a flash mob smash-and-grab, when gunmen tried to steal their cameras. Nishita intervened and was shot to death.
Twenty-eight-year-old Erik Davis, an African American from Los Angeles who had lived in Oakland for a few years and was known for his affable personality, was also shot and killed for confronting brazen thieves, this time those breaking into cars in a public setting. Indeed, it was 3 pm, Thanksgiving Sunday, on an avenue alongside Lake Merritt, a hundred yards from the city’s popular promenade.
Over Thanksgiving weekend, well-armed caravans marauded across Oakland and two people, who attempted to mount a defense, were murdered.
Those two murders, combined with the rob-mob attacks, two bullets fired directly at police, and the Thanksgiving weekend’s tsunami of 911 calls brought OPD to a fever pitch that required calling in off-duty cops. “We were entirely overwhelmed with the staff we had, even by bringing in those officers,” said Barry Donelan, the OPD union’s president, who is white. He also wrote an op-ed piece in The East Bay Times warning how low morale threatened the force with complete collapse.
Mayor Schaaf, for her part, thanked serving officers profusely on camera, offered new recruits a $50,000 signing bonus, and said she would petition Governor Gavin Newsome, another Jerry Brown acolyte, for more resources. Around December 10th, she appealed for more state police and technology, including license plate readers on freeway ramps.
Vice Mayor Kaplan, meanwhile, developed and is leading the push for MACRO (Mobile Assistance Crisis Responders of Oakland), the city’s response to clamors for police alternatives, which will be run through the Fire Department. With an emphasis on recruiting community members with lived experience, it intends to provide “an effective civilian response option,” according to an October 20th press release. A friend of mine, who used to live in West Oakland and does body work, herbalism and activism, applied and is looking forward to working for MACRO, if accepted.
Despite the murders and robberies, Oakland’s always-multicultural, often-hipster and sometimes-marijuana-fueled party continued. The week after Thanksgiving, I attended my first First Friday art crawl since the pandemic. Now organized by Oakland First Fridays (.org), it restarted in October. As usual, it was fun, intercommunal and occasionally visionary, with some great people, performances and art but a fraction of its once-enormous crowds.
Race is a large part of the American story. But making it the central theme impugns our robust multiculturalism and egalitarianism, which is especially strong in Oakland, a young city with less hierarchy and racism and more artists, activists and intermarriage than Albuquerque, Nashville or Detroit, say. Despite the gangsters among our police and radicals, as well as illicit-activities entrepreneurs, Oakland’s recent renaissance and current crop of artists and progressive politicians and cops suggest we can solve our killing-each-other problem.
As well as prevent the murder of more Rashad Brinsons, Lai Dangs or John Heges, Oakland could provide guidance to other communities. For that to happen, however, even more Oaklanders will have to join their neighbors across cultural, racial or class lines, and develop even more innovative methods in education, social work and the arts, as well as policing. Lecturing or arresting will not mollify enraged neighbors willing to seek satisfaction through the barrel of a gun, we have to inspire and offer amazing alternatives.