'A father, a brother, a son': Inside the rise in gun violence in California's Bay Area
When Anthony Ramsey walked out of his mother Carrolle’s home late in the afternoon of 2 April the pair gave each other a quick goodbye.
Ramsey, a 43-year-old father of four and football coach to several youth league players, had been living with Carrolle in Richmond, California, for about a year. By 9pm, he hadn’t returned, but she didn’t worry too much. Maybe he went to visit his children who live about 45 minutes away, she thought.
Around 11, her sister woke her in bed to tell her that police were at the front door. Ramsey had been fatally shot a few blocks from her home earlier that evening, one of the officers said. Carrolle fell to the floor.
“My son was living right so you don’t prepare for the shock of him being murdered,” Carrolle told the Guardian earlier this month. “It was just me and him for years until I had my daughter at 35. Even now I wait for him to come in the door.”
Ramsey was Richmond’s first homicide victim of 2020. Since his death, 17 other people have been killed in the city, just one more than had been killed by this point last year. In neighboring Oakland, 101 people have already been murdered in 2020, 27more than the total number of homicides in the city in 2019. Most of these killings involved guns, making 2020 a worrying and unprecedented period for gun violence in California’s Bay Area.
It’s a national trend. From Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to Vallejo, California, in cities big and small, incidents of fatal and non-fatal gun violence are rising.
Experts say that it is too early to draw a definitive connection between the uptick and the tumultuous events of a historic year – the pandemic, the mass protests against police killings and racial injustice, the tense run-up to the presidential election. But community advocates in Richmond and Oakland agree that the loss of safe havens like schools and community centers plays a role in the rise of shootings among young Black and brown residents. And the strategies violence interrupters, police and non-profit service providers have successfully used to drive gun violence down – like targeted interventions and court-approved search warrants – have been reduced, disrupted and slowed by Covid-19.
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The Bay Area had seen a considerable decline in deadly shootings in the past decade. Gun homicide rates fell in cities across the region, across all racial groups. The city of Richmond saw a 67% drop in gun homicide rates between 2007 and 2017, according to a 2019 Guardian analysis of homicide data. In Oakland there was a 44% decline.
The reasons for the decline were multifold, but prime among them were innovative, community-led approaches to reducing gun violence. Both Richmond and Oakland became national models for such efforts from hospitalbased violence intervention and crisis responses that operate without law enforcement to programs such as Operation Ceasefire, a violence reduction program that saw police and civilian organizations partnered to reach the small population of people that are involved in the majority of a city’s gun violence.
In both cities, 2020 started peacefully, too. But shooting incidents began creeping upward in the spring. After Ramsey was shot, a 37-year-old mother was killed at a Richmond homeless encampment, three people were wounded in a drive-by shooting, the rapper Tay Way was shot alongside two others at a corner store, and 22-year-old Erick Galeana was killed on an earlySeptember afternoon while riding in a car with a friend.
Sgt Aaron Pomeroy, the head of the Richmond police department’s homicide department, said he first noticed a rise in shootings in early April. He chalked the earliest fatalities up to “pandemic fever”. Homicides in Richmond continued to rise and peaked in July, August and September, according to Richmond’s monthly crime report. More incidents without clear motives started coming through the office, Pomeroy said, and the department’s clearance rate began to dip.
By late summer, street-level violence and acts of retaliation increased as well. In the days after Galeana was killed, there were two more fatal shootings: one the next day in Richmond and the other less than a week later in San Pablo, a bordering city. Three 17-yearolds were arrested in connection with the Richmond shooting and two young adults were arrested in connection with the second incident.
“We saw individuals who were killed and then retaliatory shootings and/or murders,” Pomeroy said. “We put in a lot of hard work to reduce crime and I still don’t think we’ve been able to figure out the root cause of the increase.”
Once shooting numbers rose, Pomeroy said, investigations into the killings slowed. From the offices that handle forensic analyses and search warrants to the cellphone companies that turn over records, staffers couldn’t keep up amid the volume of cases and remote work because of the pandemic.
Oakland was witnessing a similar rise. When the first coronavirus lockdowns were put in place, there had been just eight murders. Police said the city was on course to see record low shootings. But toward the end of the summer and into the fall, shootings exploded. Incidents included the murder of a 17-year-old football player, a non-fatal shooting of a mother and her seven-year-old daughter. And in late August, as Quennell Harris Jr was driving a friend who had just been shot to the hospital, a car pulled up alongside his car and opened fire.
Harris Jr, a 29-year-old father of three, was fatally struck. His father, Quennell Harris Sr, remembers his son as being a “rare young kid”.
“He was the life of our family,” Harris Sr said of his first-born. “Quennell’s laugh and charisma made him a kid that could change my day even if I was mad at him.
“I was in disbelief because he was not the type of kid to be in the streets. So him going to a party and not making it home never crossed my mind,” he continued.
The shootings became unsettling and unnerving, said Loren Taylor, a city council member representing East