San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Gun violence in Oakland higher than pre-pandemic
On Nov. 28, Oakland recorded its 118th homicide this year — a 22% increase over the same period last year, and the second year of a shocking reversal to a near-decade’s worth of declines to the city’s murder rate. With a month still left in the year, Oakland’s death toll from homicide has already eclipsed every year since 2012 (though it’s still well below the highs of the 1990s).
The Chronicle examined data from the Oakland Police Department and other local law enforcement agencies to see what it can tell us about the current gun violence crisis in relation to the city’s history, as well as just how much larger its pandemic-era homicide increase has been relative to other major U.S. cities. We also spoke with community leaders and violence prevention researchers to understand the factors driving the surge and who it’s affecting most.
Oakland is part of a nationwide pandemic-era gun violence crisis
Oakland is far from isolated in this crisis. Nearly every major U.S. city has seen large surges in homicides since the pandemic, an increase that’s continued this year.
“We sometimes call it the pandemic within the pandemic,” Brian Malte, director of the California-based Hope and Heal Fund, told The Chronicle.
Experts say that the large homicide increase across the U.S. stems from a few primary factors. One, the pandemic greatly increased economic inequality, which is a strong predictor of gun violence. Two, it greatly exacerbated mental illness and substance abuse issues, also risk factors for gun violence involvement (though the vast majority of people with mental illnesses never commit violence). Three, group settings that normally provide community support to young people at risk of involvement in gun violence, like schools, closed their physical spaces.
Additionally, gun sales have soared in California and nationwide since the pandemic began, with many new first-time buyers, according to data from the California Department of Justice. Owning a gun makes someone both more likely to commit a domestic violence homicide and more likely to be a victim of a shooting.
Oakland’s homicide rate has increased more than that of most other major cities
While the factors listed above may help explain the major homicide jump seen across cities nationwide, experts are still piecing together why some cities have seen larger increases than others. For instance, Oakland’s homicide increase so far this year compared with the last pre-pandemic year, 2019, is higher than the increase in most major U.S. cities. Only Austin, Texas; Fort Worth, Texas; and Columbus, Ohio had bigger jumps, among the 20 largest U.S. cities.
Malte said that in the years before the pandemic, several California cities, including Oakland, had dramatically decreased gun violence with the help of violence intervention groups like Youth Alive! and Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice. Once the pandemic began, those groups’ ability to work with at-risk youth in person was compromised.
“I don’t know why the (homicide) increase in Oak
“We sometimes call it the pandemic within the pandemic.”
Brian Malte, director of Hope and Heal Fund
land is larger than other cities,” Malte told The Chronicle. “I would say to you, L.A. has had huge increases. Stockton, huge increases. Oakland, huge increases. Those are cities with very evolved strategies that had been driving down gun violence until COVID.”
Anne Marks, executive director of Youth Alive, said the pandemic has made it next to impossible for her organization’s staff to do the kind of direct, interpersonal violence intervention that helped drive down the Bay Area’s gun homicide rates by 30% from 2007 to 2017. “None of us could do our work,” she said. “Or we could do our work, but not in the way our work works.”
For instance, one of the organization’s flagship programs, Caught in the Crossfire, directly focuses on youths who have recently been shot and are recovering in the hospital. Trained specialists that have also experienced gun violence visit the hospital and speak at length with the young person about how they can recover from the incident and get their life back on track. But for the first year of the pandemic, Marks noted, rules around hospital visits made this program impossible. And now, with masking and other strict rules about social interaction, it’s “just weird,” she said.
The Rev. Damita DavisHoward, manager of the Oakland Police Department’s Ceasefire strategy, a violence intervention program coordinated by the Oakland Police Department, agreed that the pandemic has made it harder for violence intervention groups to function optimally. But she expressed optimism about the future as these groups learn to work around pandemic-era restrictions. “If anyone knows how to do this, Oakland does,” Davis-Howard said. “Oakland was the place that did an excellent job at executing a strategy that really had an impact on people’s day-today lives.”
Low-income Black and brown Oakland youth are getting hit the hardest
The reduced operation of organizations like Youth Alive, as well as the impact of other pandemic-era stressors that drive up violence, are most acutely felt in the poorer regions of Oakland — where homicides are concentrated in the city.
“Obviously these (risk factors) disproportionately impact poor communities of color,” Marks said. “That’s where schools came back last, where job losses hit hardest, where stressful jobs, essential worker jobs, are concentrated.”
While one of the wealthier parts of the city, Area 2, saw a significant jump in homicides this year, many of these shootings happened at or near clubs and did not necessarily involve Uptown residents, Marks said. And even so, the overwhelming majority of homicides are happening in East Oakland, where many of the city’s lower-income and Black and Latino residents live. Area 4, which encompasses a significant portion of East Oakland, saw homicides triple from 2019 to 2021, from nine to 27 deaths. Area 5, deep East Oakland, has consistently had the highest share of homicides in the city of any area since 2019, accounting for 34% to 42% of total homicides in the city depending on the year.
Overall shootings are up far more than homicides
To look at how the pandemic has affected other types of gun violence in Oakland, we also looked at data on shootings that weren’t classified as homicides — including shootings categorized as assault with a deadly weapon, shootings at occupied and unoccupied buildings and vehicles, and accidental discharges.
Across the board, we found, shootings in nonhomicide categories have actually increased far more than homicides overall. Each category of shooting is up this year by over 100% across the board compared with 2019 — except for homicides, which are up by 70% over the same time period.
John Pfaff, a criminologist and law professor at Fordham University, said he has observed this discrepancy in other U.S. cities as well.
“For the amount that shootings went up, homicides should’ve gone up a lot more than they did,” Pfaff told The Chronicle. “Some studies indicate that one reason homicide has dropped is that medical care has gotten better — a homicide becomes an aggravated assault because hospital care has gotten better. But this was not a year for that story. Our hospitals were not ready to take in victims of shootings. If anything, we should’ve been less effective at stopping murders than before.”
Pfaff said he can think of two other likely explanations. First, the number of new gun owners meant that people committing shootings could be less accurate overall, and thus less “effective” at harming people with their firearms.
Another possible explanation, Pfaff said, is that police were underreporting shooting incidents before the pandemic, partly because lower crime rates made departments look more effective. With increased scrutiny of law enforcement and a burgeoning movement to defund the police following the death of George Floyd, police agencies may benefit from crime appearing high so they can make a case for more funding.
“Before you wanted crime to look low, but now you want things to look worse,” he said. “I think there’s a political aspect to crime data reporting that doesn’t get the appreciation it deserves. There’s this idea that police are kind of the objective purveyors of what’s going on. But they’re not.”