This was great.As an Oakland native it made me sick to my stomach because it was real. I dont have all the answers but there has to be one
What has to happen is that the value of human life in these neighborhoods needs to increase again. As it is right now, You can assault/shoot/murder somebody in Oakland and there's a 1/3 chance that the police will solve it (the OPD has around a 30% case clearance rate). In many cases, unless there are exasperating circumstances (i.e. a kid gets shot/killed) the cops don't make much of an effort to clear a case (in part because the OPD is stretched really thin right now). That reality of the OPD indirectly affects the reality in the streets. Residents in neighborhoods like Seminary know for a fact that their lives are factually not worth as much as lives in other places... take San Jose for example, which has a nearly 100% case clearance rate. What this actually translates into is that you have people
from other cities coming into Oakland (and to a lesser extent Vallejo) to do what they do because they couldn't get away with it in their own cities but they can here. Three people from Stockton were responsible for over 100 armed robberies in Oakland last year... they were driving back to Stockon after every robbery which is how they avoided detection until they got caught a full seven or eight months after they had started. In other words, the streets of Oakland are attracting more than just people from Oakland... the perception inside and outside of Oakland is that nobody gives a fuck about what happens in these neighborhoods. It's more than just violent crime too... there's tons of illegal dumping from out of town companies/people and it's mostly out of towners who are going into these neighborhoods to buy drugs and pick up prostitutes.
Kids from these neighborhoods internalize the belief that their neighborhoods aren't worth giving a fuck about and as a result they don't feel any meaningful sense of neighborhood pride... crime is just something you deal with that doesn't ever disappear. Kids in these neighborhoods think seeing people get murdered/robbed/raped/stabbed is normal, and in a fucked up way it is. You have a culture being perpetuated where crime is something not worth taking a stand against because "it's going to happen anyway". This is not even getting into the impact of police corruption... generations and generations of racist police fuckery on the part of OPD stemming back to the 1940's has trained people who are from these neighborhoods to be wary of the people who are supposed to be on their side, even in the rare instance that they
are on their side. When crime happens, there's often two conflicting attitudes towards the police that simultaneously hold true:
a) The police won't solve the crime anyway so why bother working with them
b) The police are often worse than the criminals so I don't want to be involved with them
The conflict is that the police won't solve the crime without help from the neighborhood, but the neighborhood won't help them because they fear them (and often rightfully so). When they don't solve the crime, for the people in the neighborhood it affirms what they already believed (that the police wouldn't solve the crime anyway) so in many ways it's a self-perpetuating belief that happens to be rooted in a history where the police were quicker to fuck with these neighborhoods than they were to help them. What can't be ignored, though, is the existence of a third attitude:
c) If I work with the police the criminals will attack me next
And this is where the case clearance rate comes in. If the residents of these neighborhoods actually believed that working with the police resulted in the criminals getting arrested, they wouldn't have as much to fear from the criminals. The reality is that the vast majority of the time these cases don't get solved, so why would your average resident of a shitty neighborhood put their life on the line when there's a good chance it will come back on them? They won't.
I'm not a supporter of the OPD, but I can see that the crime situation in these neighborhoods won't improve until the OPD repairs not only their clearance rate but also their relationship with the neighborhoods. Even bigger than the crime problem though is the neighborhood culture problem... you could place Seminary in San Jose but you'd still have the same culture of desensitization. A lot of the adults in these neighborhoods have fully adjusted to that culture to the point where that
is who they are... the best they can do for their kids in that situation is to attempt to protect them
from the crime, but they can't protect them from the mindset that's allowing crime to happen to the extent it does (which they're more than likely passing down to their kids). If people want to see real change in the hoods of Oakland, you have to show these kids that there's more to life than what's going on in the hood. They need more than people telling them that a life of crime will land them in a grave or in jail... they need to be constantly exposed to a different lifestyle the same way middle class and upper class kids are exposed to a middle/upper class lifestyle all their lives. The real problem is that the vast majority of these kids from the hood will never get a middle class or upper class education to be able to live that lifestyle, and that education isn't just in the classroom. The vast majority of the parents of these kids won't strive to give their kids that education because it wasn't given to them and they were never exposed to other lifestyles themselves. Maybe 10-15% of kids from the hood will be given that opportunity and will be able to move up... 85-90% won't. It's not about the money, it's about the mindset... look no further than at some of the fiscally wealthy rappers who are products of these neighborhoods who raise mentally impoverished kids who aren't equipped to be successful in life.
Sorry for the wall of text, but that's my honest answer to the question.
