Oakland: Federal Ammo Running Short for War on Crime

OAKLAND, Calif. - Around 1 p.m. on Monday, Aug. 8, Maria Teresa Ramirez was pushing a red plastic car with her 3-year-old son Carlos Fernandez Nava along International Boulevard in East Oakland, Calif. As Ramirez and her son drew close to a group of men standing outside a pizzeria near International and 64th Avenue, gunfire erupted from a passing car, striking Nava and two men on the corner. While the older men, the intended targets of the shooting, lived, Nava was fatally wounded by a bullet that passed through his neck. The murder, the 67th of 2011, sparked outrage. In a city where only a quarter of all murders are solved, police received a flood of tips and within a week arrested two men now charged with Nava's death.

Oakland and crime are interwoven in the popular American consciousness. The city with the highest violent-crime rate in California is where Nancy Reagan gave her famous "Just say no" advice to a group of the city's youth in 1982, when crack cocaine was tearing Oakland's black and brown communities apart. With an official unemployment rate of 15 percent—almost double the national average—more than 100 murders annually for six of the past seven years and a violent-crime rate of 15.3 per thousand, which leads California cities, the East Bay's largest city is no stranger to bloodshed.

Over the years, the federal government has poured millions into various anti-crime programs to stem the tide, ranging from blank-check grants for the war on drugs to intervention programs that combine law enforcement threats with job and educational opportunities.

Now doubts about the effectiveness of those programs are colliding with concerns about what impact federal budget reductions will have. Oakland is a place where urban America is confronting two questions: Does the federal government know how to help fight local crime? Can it afford to?

From War to a Dangerous Peace

Oakland's contemporary shape cannot be understood outside the historical context of World War II–era labor migrations. Work at East Bay shipyards and the Oakland Army Base drew tens of thousands of black migrants to the Bay Area. Their history of voluntary and forced migration is critical to Oakland's present. Drawn initially by economic opportunities presented by the war industries, black migrants were, after the war, left high and dry in the overcrowded, redlined neighborhoods of West Oakland as the region around them—in a very planned execution of classic California sprawl—saw new suburban tracts in East Oakland replace both orchard land and the factories that had paid decent working-class wages. East Bay real estate agents also played a critical role in establishing and enforcing racially exclusive housing covenants that for years shut black homeowners out of many neighborhoods in East and North Oakland, not to mention the affluent hillside areas.

However, it wasn't until the federally financed construction of the freeway complexes in the 1950s and the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system in the late 1960s and early 1970s, coupled with the Center City project that razed blocks of old downtown Oakland for high-rise development through the late 1960s and 1970s, that this dynamic became directly destructive. All three projects forcibly displaced black renters, homeowners and businesses from established neighborhoods—in the case of BART, literally ripping up 7th Street, the heart of black West Oakland and a renowned mecca for musicians on the West Coast. Roughly 10,000 people were displaced from West Oakland by the freeways and BART, shifting them into formerly majority-white neighborhoods in North and East Oakland that were already experiencing white flight. As people of color arrived, that process of exiting accelerated, with 163,000 white residents leaving Oakland from 1955 to 1966, out of a city of roughly 360,000 people.