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| Many young black men in Oakland are killing and dying for respect
Meredith May, Chronicle Staff Writer
Sunday, December 9, 2007
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Along with the Christmas trees and family gatherings, there's another end-of-the-year ritual in Oakland - a candlelight vigil for the murdered.
The body count is woven into the civic consciousness here - a number chased by homicide inspectors, studied by criminologists, lamented in churches, reported by journalists. Every mayor leaves City Hall on broken promises to quell the violence, and the killings continue. An additional 115 have been killed this year, putting Oakland on pace for another gruesome record.
In the last five years, 557 people were slain on the city's streets, making Oakland the state's second-most murderous city, behind Compton.
Most victims are young, black men who are dying in forgotten neighborhoods of East and West Oakland.
A handful of their killers, speaking from prison, describe an environment where violence is so woven into the culture that murder has become a symbol of manhood.
The inmates say the only difference between these neighborhoods and prison is the absence of walls. The same hierarchies apply - the meanest rise to the top. It's a survival skill that ensures ownership of drug corners, a sense of self-worth, female attention and protection from attack.
Experts fear that the neighborhoods are only getting more violent. There are entire blocks without a single two-parent family, where drug dealers have become the predominant male role models, and children fend for themselves in crowded, chaotic homes where they are routinely exposed to drugs, sex and guns.
Criminal families are on their third and fourth generations. Grandparents - the ones who have historically stepped in to help raise fatherless boys and instill a sense of right and wrong - are dying off.
Back in the 1980s, drug dealers who first brought crack cocaine to Oakland used to hide their activities from their parents because it was shameful, but now it's a full-blown family business, said Michelle Gandy, a private investigator who interviews murder defendants for Alameda County court-appointed criminal defense attorneys.
"The kids today recognize that their parents are in it, too, so there's this hopelessness," she said.
Increasingly, the young murder suspects coming to the station for questioning seem to lack basic morality, said Sgt. Tim Nolan, who has been investigating Oakland homicides for 17 years.
"There are more and more families where there's less and less structure," he said. "Talking to these suspects day in and out, there's a higher percentage today with no sense of right and wrong. It's frightening, but we are creating super-criminals."
All it takes is a look, a put-down or a lost fight, and bullets fly. Disrespect has become the No. 1 reason to kill.
Killings have been concentrated in these neighborhoods for so long that revenge killings continue for decades. There's a six-degrees-of-separation phenomenon that happens after each death: The killers and their victims can typically trace a relationship through family, friends, schools or prison stints.
That's why Oakland murders are rarely random. More often they are the result of historical battles between crews who hold Mafia-like influence on blocks and drug corners.
"Many people who live there rarely leave Oakland, let alone their block, so their disputes take on epic proportions," said Nolan.
Witnesses are cowed into silence because snitches have been known to disappear. Nearly half of all murders in Oakland go uncharged for lack of a willing witness, so a shooter knows he has about a 50-50 chance of getting away with it.
"Murder is hardly ever a whodunit in Oakland," said criminal defense attorney William Du Bois, who has been representing Oakland homicide suspects for nearly three decades.
Because witnesses won't testify, certain Oakland neighborhoods have an abnormally high per capita rate of killers walking the streets. They are known, feared, and have an incredibly toxic influence on impressionable young boys aching for structure.
"In these neighborhoods of concentrated poverty, all the doctors, lawyers, pharmacists, architects and postal workers have left," said Richard Miles, chief executive officer of Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Bay Area.
"The kids have nobody but drug lords to look up to."
For this report, The Chronicle conducted prison and telephone interviews with five convicted Oakland killers, reviewed the court files of 60 murder trials, listened to police interrogation tapes and talked with homicide inspectors, district attorneys, family members, criminal defense lawyers, forensic therapists and criminologists.
The inmates who spoke to The Chronicle hoped that their stories would dissuade younger generations from following in their footsteps. Their stories, and those told in the court files, show that Oakland killers share many characteristics.
They are young. Most killed before their 25th birthday.
A majority grew up without a father - he was either murdered, incarcerated or abandoned his children.
Mom is typically absent, too, either because she's working several jobs for minimum wage or because she's also lost to the streets through drugs, prostitution or prison.
Many of the convicted killers were quasi-homeless in grade school, moving every 90 days on eviction cycles, or bouncing between friends' and relatives' homes, where they slept on recliners and couches and floors.
Inside the home is pure chaos. Typically, they live with a third-generation relative, an elderly grandmother or aunt, who also opens her home to several other wayward relatives. They all pile into one home, bringing their boyfriends and girlfriends and their children. There's no particular person in charge, no house rules, and people come and go.
Often it's in these houses where young boys first learn how to hold a gun, how to break a rock of cocaine into dime and nickel bags for sale.
Without parents to help them mature, the mental world of these young killers stays stuck in an infantile, egotistic state, said forensic psychologist Shawn Johnston, who has conducted more than 15,000 court evaluations of adult and juvenile criminals in 15 Northern California counties.
"What keeps us from killing each other is empathy, and we learn it from bonding with parents who pick us back up when we get hurt or teased as children," Johnston said. "Without it, you get guys who live in a constant state of protecting the fantasy that they are the most important thing this side of the Milky Way. And because they don't have empathy, they will shoot or stab to protect their illusion."
Teachers who work with these boys in the Alameda County Juvenile Justice Center say the first thing they do is stock their classrooms with food, to help their students concentrate. Young boys fend for themselves in the absence of structured mealtimes - grabbing what they can from a fast-food restaurant or a corner liquor store when they can scrape together or steal some money.
There is an equivalent of a mafia in Oakland's ghettos. Some kids are born into families that "claim" streets. Children in these families are expected to put the family's gang wars above anything else - they skip school when the turf wars heat up and the gang members are expected to stand out on the streets in a show of force.
"Everyone in my family was in the game - my mother, stepfather, brother, cousins," said Donte Osborne, 28, who is serving a 15-year sentence in Corcoran State Prison for second-degree murder.
"I caught a dope case when I was 10 years old and sold to a decoy," he said. "I adapted to my surroundings. It's not like I wanted to do it, but if I didn't, I would have been left out of my family."
Without anyone in charge of their moral development, young boys come up with their own rules. When they get in disputes, they don't have the ability to resolve them because no one has ever taught them how to manage anger and stress other than with fists or a gun.
In this world, challenges cannot be left unanswered. A boy who is jumped, robbed or insulted and doesn't respond is labeled "soft," or a "punk" or a "bitch." He becomes prey. Once he is perceived as weak, the attacks keep coming. He loses not only his honor, but his friends and his personal safety, until he fights back and wins - sometimes via homicide.
"It doesn't matter how bad your circumstances are, at a cellular genetic level you know it's not supposed to be this way and you're pissed off with no way to ameliorate it," Miles of Big Brothers Big Sisters said.
A majority of the men studied by The Chronicle had criminals in their families. Most had juvenile records, the majority for selling or carrying drugs. Many developed their own chemical habits and a little more than half dropped out of school.
Their role models are the drug dealers on the corner who have the cars, clothes, girls, money and most of all - respect.
"In a dysfunctional environment, it's prestigious to be a gangster, and it inspires you to act the same," said convicted killer Ivan Kilgore, 32, who is serving a life sentence in California State Prison, Sacramento.
"It fulfills that ego, gives you a sense of identity. Big dudes respect you. It's like being a star athlete - kids in constructive environments, their peers give them accolades and support to continue their good behavior by bolstering their ego. It's identical in the streets, only the behavior that is rewarded is different. It's like, 'Hey! I saw you in a stolen car!' and you get a high five."
Respect is money, money is power and power is masculinity. Violence defines you as a man.
"These kids have one thing in this world, and when you have nothing else, no money, no access, no privileges, no resources, no means, the only thing you have, from a little boy on, is your respect," investigator Gandy said.
Inmates told The Chronicle that it was the drug dealers who gave them their first sense of belonging. The gang on the block is the first group that wants them, that pays attention to their whereabouts, that asks what they are doing and what they think about things. Sometimes there's a girl out there who thinks they're cute. All of a sudden the neglected boy has a posse - the first place that feels like home.
Prisoner Hamisi Spears, serving a 39-year sentence in High Desert State Prison in Susanville, described the criminal evolution as an organic process - like a seed that's planted and watered and grows into a shoot.
"You see these guys who are three or four years older than you, who are not doing kid stuff anymore, not playing tag football in the street. We watch him and all of a sudden he's got a car, he's dressing differently, and we want that too so we approach and say, 'Wassup, man?' "
At first, the older guy will likely shoo the youngster away, telling the boy he's not ready to get in the game.
Then one day he'll ask the boy to ride in his car. It's the moment that the boy has been aching for.
"You're there, it's nice, the music is playing, and he'll run an errand. He'll say 'Here, hold this.' It's a gun or some dope. He'll jump out and then jump right back and then he knows he can trust you. He'll turn to you and say, 'Hey, you hungry?' and go get you something to eat. You are part of him now."
Now the boy is loyal, even if caught selling drugs for the older dealer. The code of the street dictates never telling on the man who is providing for you.
"When you get out of jail, you've got street cred," Spears said. "He sees you, knows you stopped him from going to jail, and he'll respect you, take you and buy you a couple of outfits."
Boys go from nobody to somebody overnight.
Navigating this world is delicate. Shootings can occur simply because someone made a movement that could have been interpreted as a reach for a gun in a waistband.
While this is a common strategy in court to claim self-defense, there is an element of truth to it. Many of the killers studied by The Chronicle killed enemies who put word out on the street that they were going to kill first.
In this warped environment, killing someone can actually protect you. It's a way to keep others in fear.
Gun laws can't reach places like East and West Oakland. Rarely do boys go get a gun and kill - the gun is already there. Guns are as common as cell phones. Friends give their friends guns for protection after losing a fistfight. Every day, drug addicts trade guns for a fix. Groups of boys share guns, keeping them hidden in abandoned homes, in empty lots, in the rain gutters and under their beds.
Boys don't think they will live past 25, so they don't live their life as if they will. None of the convicted killers told The Chronicle that they were worried about their futures or the consequences of their criminal lifestyle before going to prison. To be a square, to go to school, work for minimum wage and shun the "game," takes an enormous amount of patience and personal risk in the middle of what is, in effect, a war zone. The payoff is too far off for someone who doesn't plan for middle age or a career. At the time, the quick buck didn't seem like a bad choice, inmates said.
Only a handful of the killers had legitimate jobs. Criminal records and lack of a high school diploma, no car to get to work, and no support from immediate family ensure that they simply don't fit in to what society sees as employee material.
It was only after they were taken out of their environment and given years to reflect behind bars that they had time to grasp the concept of another way of life.
The experts - and the killers - say a mentor might have saved them, anyone from the outside who could have shown them another way to be a man.
After so many years in prison, the convicted killers who spoke to The Chronicle have had time to think about why their lives turned out the way that they did. They are remorseful, they are angry at themselves and the circumstances that they were born into, and they are trying to do something useful with what's left of their tragic lives.
It's a second chance that their victims will never get.
"I don't care how bad your situation is, as we grow up in this world we know right from wrong," said Gerlen Anderson, who held her son William as he lay dying from Ivan Kilgore's shotgun blast near a pay phone at 30th and San Pablo avenues in 2000.
When Anderson saw that her 21-year-old son wasn't going to make it, she whispered in his ear, "Go to the angels."
Kilgore claimed that Anderson had repeatedly attacked him and robbed him of $100.
Oakland: A Plague of Killing logo
Coming Monday: Experts say mentoring can help stem the wave of violence on Oakland's streets, one boy at a time.
Online: To see The Chronicle's interactive map of Oakland homicides between 2002 and 2006, go to
sfgate.com/oaklandhomicides/interactives/map/
E-mail Meredith May at mmay@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/12/09/MNS1RBLQ5.DTL | | |
| http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-op-hutchinson25nov25,0,3088497.story?coll=la-home-commentary
From the Los Angeles Times
The black-Latino blame game
Finger-pointing between the two minorities is not going to help either group.
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson
November 25, 2007
One Friday earlier this month, a small but vocal group of black activists turned up at City Hall to blast Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and members of the City Council for failing to work hard enough to prevent violence by Latino gang members against blacks in South Los Angeles.
"You have one race of people exterminating another race of people," said one African American woman.
On the same day, elsewhere in the city, Latino parents stormed out of a meeting of a Los Angeles Unified School District advisory council. The council had been fighting for months about whether to hold its meetings in Spanish or English -- a dispute that got so abusive that district officials felt the need to bring in dispute-resolution experts and mental health counselors. On this particular Friday, the Latino parents walked out after a group of black parents voted to censure the panel's Latino chairman.
These two events are certainly not isolated incidents, but they are the most recent examples of the long-running tensions between blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles. Just a few weeks earlier, federal prosecutors had filed a highly publicized case against more than 60 members of Florencia 13, a Latino street gang that prosecutors say engaged in a violent campaign to drive African American gang rivals out the South L.A. neighborhood of Florence-Firestone, resulting in more than 20 killings over three years. In the late 1980s, according to a report in The Times, the neighborhood was about 80% African American, but today it is 90% Latino.
Animosity between Latinos and blacks is the worst-kept secret in race relations in America. For years, Latino leaders have pointed the finger of blame at blacks when Latinos are robbed, beaten and even murdered. Blacks, in turn, have blamed Latinos for taking jobs, for colonizing neighborhoods, for gang violence. These days, the tension between the races is noticeable not only in prison life and in gang warfare (where it's been a staple of life for decades) but in politics, in schools, in housing, in the immigration debate. Conflicts today are just as likely -- in some cases, more likely -- to be between blacks and Latinos as between blacks and whites. In fact, even though hate-crime laws were originally created to combat crimes by whites against minority groups, the majority of L.A. County's hate crimes against blacks in 2006 were suspected to have been committed by Latinos, and vice versa, according to the county Commission on Human Relations.
Across the country -- in Plainfield, N.J.; Jacksonville, Fla.; Annapolis, Md., and Indianapolis, Ind., among other places -- the clash between black and brown has drawn attention, and lots of it, because it involves two groups that some think should be natural allies. At least that's what the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez thought four decades ago. They had a mutual admiration society and passionately believed that blacks and Latinos were equally oppressed minorities and should march in lock step. "Our separate struggles are really one -- a struggle for freedom, for dignity and for humanity," King wrote to Chavez in 1965. But that rhapsodic notion of black and brown harmony is now the faintest of faint memories. Three years ago, when the Census Bureau proclaimed Latinos the largest minority in the U.S., many blacks loudly grumbled that they would be shoved even further to the margin among minorities. The grumbles have risen to a near-shrill pitch among many blacks during the immigration debates of recent years. Although most civil rights leaders and black Democrats publicly embraced the immigrant rights struggle, many blacks privately expressed dread about being bypassed in the battle against poverty and discrimination, and some were actively hostile to the goals of immigrant groups. At a 2005 meeting in L.A., for instance, black radio host Terry Anderson summed up a not-uncommon position in the African American community when he blamed illegal immigrants for stealing jobs from blacks and crowding schools. "We've been invaded," he said. "There's no other word for it."
One of the first warnings that many blacks felt threatened by soaring Latino numbers was the battle over Proposition 187 in California in 1994. California voters approved the measure, which denied public services to illegal immigrants, by a huge margin. Shockingly, blacks also backed the measure; one L.A. Times poll several months after the proposition passed showed blacks supporting its "immediate implementation," 58% to 36%. Apparently, blacks were mortally afraid that Latinos would bump them from low-skill jobs and further marginalize them by increasing joblessness and fueling the crime and drug crises in black neighborhoods. And it's probably true that at the low end of the scale some young, poor, unskilled blacks have been shut out of jobs at hotels and restaurants and in manufacturing. There's also fierce competition for the dwindling number of affirmative action spots in colleges.
The prime reason for chronic black unemployment, however, is lingering racial discrimination and the lack of job skills, training and education.
Over the years, racial fear has spilled into politics; blacks worry that the national chase for Latino votes will erode the political gains and power they have won through decades of struggle. That was evident in the ambivalence and even flat-out hostility of many blacks toward Villaraigosa in his first bid for mayor. Heard repeatedly on the streets was that a Villaraigosa win would mean the ouster of blacks from City Hall.
Fear also has spilled into the schools. The battle between black and Latino members over whether the L.A. Unified parents advisory panel meetings should be conducted in English or Spanish actually masked larger issues. Many blacks feel they are getting the short end of the stick educationally in a school district in which Latinos make up more than 70% of the students.
Of course, there's nothing unique about L.A.'s situation. Latinos and blacks make up the majority of students in many big-city school districts -- and these public schools are among the poorest and most segregated. In their desperation to get a quality education for their kids, Latinos and blacks in many districts across the country accuse each other of gobbling up scarce resources, dragging down test scores and fueling the rise in crime and gang problems at the schools.
The only real solution is to press school officials for more funding, better teachers and high-quality learning materials, but when the money is not there, the problem quickly is reduced to ethnic squabbling over scarce dollars. And students take up the battle, as in the case of the months-long skirmishes between black and Latino kids at Jefferson High School in 2005 -- where the student body had gone from 31% Latino to 92% Latino in 25 years.
Partly, these are problems of empathy. Many Latinos fail to understand the complexity and severity of the black experience. They frequently bash blacks for their poverty and goad them to pull themselves up as other immigrants have done. Former Mexican President Vicente Fox took heat from black leaders in 2005 when he claimed that Mexican immigrants would do work in the United States that "not even blacks" want to do. Some Latinos repeat the same vicious anti-black epithets as racist whites -- like the Latino kid at Jefferson High who helped start a race riot when he yelled "Go back to Africa!" at his fellow students.
Ethnic insensitivity, however, cuts both ways. Many blacks have little understanding of the impoverishment and social turmoil that has driven so many Latinos to seek jobs and refuge in the United States. Once here, they face the massive problems of adjusting to a strange culture, new customs and a different language, and that includes discrimination too.
Despite the problems, the picture is not one of total gloom and doom. Blacks and Latinos have worked together in some communities to combat police abuse, crime and violence, as well as for school improvements and increased neighborhood services. Still, the painful truth is that blacks and Latinos have found that the struggle for power and recognition is long and difficult. On some issues, they can be allies, on others, they will go it alone. Changing demographics and the rise of Latinos to the top minority spot in America won't make the problems of either group disappear. Nor will blaming each other for those problems solve them.
Earl Ofari Hutchinson is an author and political analyst. His new book is "The Latino Challenge to Black America: Towards a Conversation Between African Americans and Hispanics," published by Middle Passage Press. | | |
| I like to be frivolous, instead of conscientious. I like to be foolish, instead of wise. I like to be selfish, instead of giving. I like convenience, instead of what is right. I like to be irresponsible, instead of dependable. I like to fight back, instead of give in. I like to be unreachable, instead of available. I like to ignore, instead of see. I like to be vampy, instead of modest. I like comfort, instead of growth. I like to follow, instead of lead. I like the default, instead of choice. I like to be self-protective, instead of authentic. I like the present, instead of change. I like luxury, instead of simplicity. I like to be confusing, instead of honest. I like to be stubborn, instead of flexible. I like to be angry, instead of forgiving. I like to be proud, instead of humble. I like to be alone, instead of in community. I like to judge, instead of accept. I like to be shallow, instead of deep. I like to be self-centered, instead of thoughtful. I like to be free, instead of intentional. Sometimes. | | |
| Kay: ahhahah you're so bohemian lol me: that is the highest compliment you can pay me | | |
| as in the thrift store, not the moral concept. hehheh.
why?
a 100% silk, earl jeans dress. for $4.
omg. viva la thrift store.
fyi/btw - i too am reading free food for millionaires!!!!
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