Community searching for solutions as violence spikes during pandemic

High rates of crime, shootings and homicides have plagued parts of Bakersfield for years, but the pandemic has had an effect similar to dousing a fire with gasoline.

The sharp rise in recent violence has galvanized community members who say it must end as they search for ways to pull their neighborhoods out of an intractable spiral.

“It’s been enough,” said Xenia King, who grew up in southeast Bakersfield and started a group called Mothers Against Gang Violence last year. “We can’t grasp at straws anymore. We have to come together and come up with a solution to this problem. It has to happen now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Right now.”

But identified solutions are often underfunded and slow to materialize, advocates say, while crime, and ensuing tragedy, continues unabated.

Bakersfield Police reported a record number of homicides in 2020 — 45 dead in 43 separate incidents — and seven in 10 happened in neighborhoods east of Highway 99, according to a detailed list the agency provided. So far in 2021, eight of the nine homicides the department is investigating — all of them shootings — also happened in that area. Publicly released coroner’s reports show two homicides this year in and around east Bakersfield and one in south Bakersfield, just east of Highway 99, in unincorporated areas the Kern County Sheriff’s Office has jurisdiction over.

Much of the violence is related to entrenched gang activity, a scourge in some neighborhoods east of Union Avenue. Gang activ

ity often perpetuates subsequent incidents of violence in retaliation, according to Sgt. Robert Pair, a spokesman for the Bakersfield Police Department.

But several recent incidents in which bystanders became victims have the community even more on edge, and fearing for the safety of families and children.

A week ago, 40-year-old Sha Neva Riley, a mother of four, was gunned down while at a gathering at Wayside Park just before 7 p.m. Police said more than 100 bullet casings of various types were found at the scene.

On Thursday night, two children were caught in the middle of another shooting in a neighborhood just south of Valley Plaza mall. Police said someone fired shots at a woman and a 9and 12-year-old. The 9-yearold suffered minor injuries from glass debris caused by the impact of the bullets.

In September, two children, ages 3 and 9, were hospitalized after they were shot while the vehicle they were riding in was stopped at a red light. Police said a black SUV pulled up next to the vehicle and opened fire on a man, woman and three children.

“Action is needed. We as leaders, as activists. Our police department. Our sheriff’s department. Everyone that has a hand in running this community and keeping it safe needs to get together. We have to live here,” King said.

NOT JUST A LOCAL PROBLEM

Violent crime has spiked in cities nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic and Bakersfield fits squarely into that trend.

In addition to rising homicides, BPD’s data on shots fired shows that starting in March, the amount of gunfire in city limits rose 75 percent last year over the previous year, to 744 incidents, up from 425 in 2019. The spike continued into this year. In January, there was an average of about three incidents of shots fired each day.

The police can only do so much, Pair said.

“What we do is we hold people accountable and if we’re present we stop the shooting. But we’re not everywhere at once,” said Pair, a 20-year veteran of the force. “It’s very frustrating. I’m a former homicide investigator... I can rattle off names for three minutes of people who didn’t deserve to die but that hasn’t changed anything.”

Advocates for southeast Bakersfield say they’re trying to make change.

King said she formed Mothers Against Gang Violence over the summer as a way to bring women together to help protect children growing up in the city’s roughest neighborhoods.

“( Women) are the ones our children first see,” she said. “We spend the most time with our children. We can make a difference in our children’s lives.”

The group reaches out to mothers in the impacted neighborhoods and offers parenting support as a way to prevent more children from falling into gang activity. The goal, she said, is “to break the chain of violence.”

Wesley Davis Jr. has run a nonprofit for 15 years dedicated to improving the lives of kids and parents in the city’s most violent neighborhoods. His own son, Wendale Davis, was shot and killed in 2006 at age 16 when he drove to southeast Bakersfield to visit a girl.

His group has a facility on Chester Avenue and 8th Street with programs focused on gang intervention, mentorship and tutoring. He’s also involved with the city Safe Streets program, a partnership between law enforcement and community members.

Davis said groups like his work on shoestring budgets to do the hard work of changing communities. What’s lacking, he believes, is greater investment from local government and elected representatives.

“No one has really gone deep. No one’s really flowing resources that way,” he said.

Even school districts, he said, will use money to hire new principals or administrators before spending more on positions that work at the community level.

“We funnel the resources up high instead of down low,” he said. “We’re really not giving the real focus where it needs to be.”

The connection between community investment and quality of life in neighborhoods is real, he said.

“If I’m a 5- or 6-year-old kid, I’m going to school and I walk by homeless people, heroin needles. When I was coming up I’ve even seen dead bodies. It has an effect on the psyche,” he said. “Gang bangers with pistols in their pockets, selling drugs on the corners. You got kids witnessing this day in and day out.”

“When you see better, you want better, you do better,” Davis said.

Davis’ foundation is struggling in the wake of COVID-19. It had to cancel several fundraisers it relies on to fund its operations. The organization applied for government economic relief grants but received none, he said.

THE IMPACT OF COVID-19

Even before the pandemic, many communities in Bakersfield, particularly in the east, southeast and southern parts of the city, were riddled with poverty, poor health, unemployment and other chronic challenges that tend to create conditions where violence and gangs flourish.

A recognized index of community health and well-being by census tract in California, called the Healthy Places Index, shows that nine of Kern County’s 10 worst-off tracts are located east of Highway 99. Not only are they the worst in Kern, all 10 rank in the bottom 1 percent of census tracts statewide, the Healthy Places Index shows.

“When you look at a community that was already underserved before the pandemic and you rip the Band-aid off that, what we’re seeing is what’s going