Cities seek solutions to surging homicides
Bay Area: Pandemic blamed for communities’ sense of hopelessness
Eighteenyearold Demetrius FlemingDavis sat in the middle seat of his friend’s truck, riding home through East Oakland when the gunfire started.
Police believe a nearby pedestrian was the intended target. But a bullet flew into the truck as it traveled down International Boulevard, striking the teenager in his head. Panicked, the driver swung around a corner, found patrol officers and requested help. Paramedics arrived and pronounced FlemingDavis dead at the scene.
It was April 10. The lanky, churchgoing high school student, known for charming teachers and solving math problems in his head, was Oakland’s 41st homicide victim of the year. That toll would climb to 65 by the end of June — and drive a 36% increase in Bay Area homicides through the first six months of 2021.
While two other Bay Area cities saw their homicide percentages jump notably be
tween the first halves of this year and last, it was Oakland that propelled the region’s 15 most populous cities past a 24% national surge in homicides since 2021 began.
“It’s very frightening,” said FlemingDavis’ cousin, Kaya MolandGordon. “It’s just crazy what this world has come to.”
According to a Chronicle analysis of police data, Oakland accounted for threefourths of the region’s rise in homicides. It’s part of a grim trend that criminologists attribute to the pandemic and its warping aftereffects: job loss, economic pressures, school and facility closures, the impacts of a ruthless disease.
“This is a community that was already underemployed, unemployed, impoverished, who are now hit by a huge economic impact,” said David Muhammad, executive director of the National Institute for Criminal Justice Reform. “This kind of desperation and devastation that happened in the neighborhoods certainly has contributed mightily to the increase.”
Like COVID19 itself, the pandemic’s effect on homicide rates has been strongest in Oakland’s lowerincome neighborhoods.
The Oakland Police Department divides the city into five districts: So far this year, homicides have risen most in Area 5, which encompasses much of the flatlands below Interstate 580. The area had seen 24 homicides as of July 4, a 71% increase compared with the same period in 2020.
Area 5’s homicide rate so far this year is roughly 27 per 100,000 residents. Meanwhile, Area 2, which contains many of the city’s wealthier northern neighborhoods, had a homicide rate of 8 per 100,000.
Muhammad pointed to what he considered another factor driving violence in Oakland: Once the shelterinplace orders clamped down last year, 32 contractors whose job is to directly intercede in gun violence — 10 outreach workers, 10 interrupters and 12 life coaches — were relegated to remote work, taking them off the street for months.
Muhammad said Oakland is slow to classify the nonprofit employees funded through its Department of Violence Prevention as essential workers.
Public records obtained by The Chronicle also show a reduction in services by Ceasefire, a violence reduction program housed within Oakland Police Department. In 2019, the program held four callins — meetings among law enforcement, community organizations and people identified as potential perpetrators of, or targets in, future shootings. Last year, the city held only one such meeting.
“To this day, there hasn’t been the level of intensity and inperson intervention as there was prior to the pandemic,” Muhammad said. His organization provides technical services for Ceasefire.
In Richmond, violenceprevention efforts continued during the pandemic, said Sam Vaughn, program manager at the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety. He submitted letters to designate each of the city’s outreach workers as an essential employee the day before the lockdown began last year.
Nonetheless, Richmond saw homicides escalate — particularly in June, when a shooting killed three people at a house party on Dunn Avenue. Homicides rose last year as well, a trend Vaughn links to economic strife and despair from being isolated at home. He cited a string of tragic incidents related to the decline in mental health, including a murdersuicide.
“Nobody was really built to be locked up for a year,” he said.
This year, he added, many shootings appear to stem from neighborhood feuds and scoresettling.
Richmond Police Chief Bisa French agreed with Vaughn that last year’s homicide rate was largely fueled by the pandemic, while many of this year’s shootings appear to be reprisals. She further noted that although some cities are more affected than others, the violence appears to be regional: When her department analyzes ballistics, it finds the same guns are being used for shootings in Richmond, Antioch, Oakland and other areas.
“I think it is symptomatic of a larger problem: access to firearms, access to travel, the interconnectedness of the different cities because people ... are being priced out of areas they may have grown up in,” French said.
At the same time, trust in the police has eroded in many cities — a phenomenon that Muhammad called “a legitimacy crisis” for law enforcement. French observed signs of it when she worked on the Fourth of July.
“The amount of pushback that we received, just trying to enforce the law, was very concerning for me,” she said. “It was almost like people were daring us to do something about the crimes that they were committing . ... And then everybody brings out their phones and they’re just waiting for us to take some action to get on camera. It’s hard to work under those conditions.”
Overall crime in California cities decreased last year by an average of 7%, owing largely to decreases in robberies and larceny thefts, according to a June report by the Center on Juvenile and Criminal Justice. Lead author and senior researcher Mike Males said the singleyear spike in homicides statewide, while a “big increase,” hasn’t approached record levels of the early 1990s.
Rather, homicide rates are now similar to what they were in 2012.
Oakland may be on pace to meet or exceed the mark it reached nine years ago, when 126 homicides were recorded by the state Department of Justice. Homicides in the city declined in the years after that, dropping to 69 in 2017.
But through July 11 of this year, Oakland police were already investigating 68 deaths as homicides.
On the day FlemingDavis died, two other people were killed in the city. The three deadly shootings all took place in the eastern flatlands, the epicenter of gun violence in Oakland, but also the area most starved for jobs, grocery stores and other forms of economic investment.
East Oakland residents also request the most emergency services: Three hours after FlemingDavis’ death, at 10 p.m., the city’s 911 system had 98 calls pending from residents east of Fruitvale Avenue, compared with 41 from neighborhoods west of that dividing line.
Over the next three months, the violence continued. A June 19 shooting at Lake Merritt killed one person and wounded seven. A chaotic July Fourth included seven shootings — one fatal. That night, police also found a man dead from bluntforce trauma.
Officers have yet to arrest a suspect in the slaying of FlemingDavis, and MolandGordon feared that with each new loss, the memory of her cousin would start to fade. She built an altar for FlemingDavis in her bedroom filled with mementos: childhood photographs, incense, roses, a troll doll and a high school graduation cap with tassels.
A photo at the very top shows FlemingDavis hovering over the ocean, clouds at his back, the horizon thin as a wire. Sunlight streams through the venetian blinds and glints off the image. MolandGordan occasionally sits below it and talks to her cousin. She said she can feel him listening.