By Francisco Barradas
OAKLAND — The dead do not need bodyguards, unless the wake happens in Oakland. Joseph Whip II is employed due to this fact. On Friday, Jan. 14, he was standing guard over a funeral home on the corner of Fruitvale Avenue and East 16th Street.
With his statutory gun on his belt, Whip, a Louisiana native, explained how he has been working as a security guard in Oakland since 1979. “We have to be alert, because gangs could attack the relatives,” he explained. In April of 2010, there was a shooting inside an East Oakland chapel where a wake was taking place to commemorate a youth killed during a party, his dead body present lay in state at the wake.
On Jan. 14, Whip had more specific reasons to be on the lookout. He invited me to follow him around the corner to East 16th Street where he pointed at Ignacio, who did not want to reveal his last name. “He was robbed last night,” said Whip.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon and Ignacio, a Latino of Mexican origin, was cleaning out the inside his car because someone had smashed the driver’s window in order to steal the stereo.
Two months earlier Ignacio was mugged on the sidewalk across the street; he was just getting home at three o’clock in the morning. “It was a black man; he put his gun on my head,” he said.
Cars being broken into or damaged are common on East 16th Street, said Ignacio. He pointed at another parked car on the other side of the street with a broken window since the previous night. Then he pointed at a pick-up truck, some 500 feet away, saying that a week earlier someone stole all-four tires with “brand new rims.” He said that he does not bother filing a report with the police department as he thinks it is a waste of time.
From East 16th Street you can cross Fruitvale Avenue heading south and you will reach the front of the Carmen Flores Recreation Center, which is administered by the Oakland Parks and Recreation Department. A sign, big enough to fit the names of every City Supervisor and that of the ex-Mayor Ron Dellums, announces the recent remodeling work. This sign has been vandalized and is covered with graffiti.
A half hour earlier and less than a mile away to the northeast on the intersection of Foothill Boulevard and Bridge Avenue, an adult and a minor were hit by bullets fired from a moving car. A police helicopter hovered over the area. There were no arrests made.
A day later, and within a mile radius facing south at the intersection of 23rd Avenue and East 15th Street, a 15-year-old youth was wounded, once again in a drive-by shooting. He died briefly thereafter. The police linked both attacks to gang activity.
This is Fruitvale. On sunny afternoons families walk in the streets. But as soon as it gets dark they take shelter in their homes and most of the businesses close their doors. One street over from where Whip guards the peace at wakes sits Santa Elizabeth Basilica, which hosts the largest Catholic community in Northern California. On Sundays parishioners mingle with balloon vendors, ice cream vendors and many other vendors that are typical in Mexican communities creating an idyllic scene.
At first glance it is hard to believe that this is one of the most unsecure areas in one of the five most dangerous cities in the U.S. However, the numbers and crime statistics do not lie. And if there is any doubt, one has only to turn and look a bit west to the Fruitvale BART Station, where holdups are common and where the destiny of Oscar Grant was set. Grant, an African American, was arrested after engaging in a fight on a BART train in the early hours of Jan. 1, 2009. In the process of being arrested on the BART platform Grant was killed by a shot on his back. A white policeman was holding the gun. The policieman, Johannes Mehserle, has since been convicted of involuntary manslaughter.
Racial profile
Fruitvale’s population is predominantly Latino and a working-class neighborhood with almost a third of its population living under the poverty line.
Economically it suffers from unemployment and public service cuts due to the emergency budget that is suffocating the city of Oakland, the State and the country as a whole. A probable new storm is approaching, and curiously, most of Fruitvale’s inhabitants do not know about it.
The Supreme Court of California will decide on Feb. 16 whether to grant a gang injunction order against 40 assumed members of the Norteño gang in Fruitvale.
John Russo, Oakland’s City Attorney, presented the request against the Norteños in mid-October of 2010. If approved, the gang injunction would establish a “security zone” of 400 blocks in Fruitvale. Inside that area, which is equal to two square miles, the 40 people listed in the order would see their rights to meet, to wear certain colors—red and orange are usually identified with the gang—and to be out on the street after 10 p.m. severely curtailed.
Activist groups such as Critical Resistance, Youth Together and Communities United for Restorative Youth Justice—an ad hoc group fighting against the gang injunction—have said over and over again that injunction orders only promote racial profiling and police repression.
It has also been said that the injunction would increase police encounters with the community in the neighborhood. And it should also be remembered that under the Secure Communities program, which was established by the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE), anyone without documents who is arrested and has a police record faces the real threat of deportation. According to activists, this is precisely the profile of thousands of youth who live in Fruitvale and have no relationship whatsoever with the gang.
Protests
On Tuesday, Jan. 25, around 100 individuals, mostly youth, gathered in front Oakland City Hall to protest the Fruitvale gang injunction order. City Attorney Russo had agreed to meet with a contingent of protestors, but according to the event organizers he cancelled the appointment.
Since Russo made his demand against the Norteños he has insisted that the restriction order will not motivate any prosecution against persons who are not specifically mentioned in it.
But even without an injunction the residents of Fruitvale complain about continuous police harassment. On Jan. 11, Juana González spoke about it before the Public Security Committee of Oakland’s Board of Supervisors. She testified that the police have come to her home 15 times looking for one of her sons, however, he was already deported back to Mexico. “I do not have to pay for my children’s mistakes,” said Gonzalez.
The story alarmed council-member Patricia Kernighan, who chaired the committee meeting that afternoon. She asked González to share the details of her case with a police officer who was present to ensure that her complaint would be heard. González returned to the public platform to say that they have presented their complaint dozens of times to the Police Department but the harassment continues.
Michael Muscadine is one of the assumed 40 Norteños listed in the injunction. When interviewed he said “How many times has the police arrested me? I do not know, I have lost the count. But I can tell you that to me, to my friends and to many more youth, police stop us, search us, point at us with weapons, harass us without any reason. I am not afraid of walking around Fruitvale, I feel secure. I am afraid when I see the police.”
In the Dec. 14, 2010 and Jan. 11, 2011 meetings of the Public Security Committee, those concerned with the gang injunction insisted that funding should be invested in prevention measures and not on reinforcing the police presence.
More “security zones”
If approved, the Fruitvale injunction would be Oakland’s second order. The first occured in June of 2010, when the civil liberties of 15 individuals were curtailed when they were accused of belonging to the North Side Oakland gang in legal arguments. The injunction covered a 100-block area in the north of Oakland.
According to attorney Anne Weills, City Attorney Russo intends to create at least eight more “security zones” in Oakland. Weills described this policy as an “epidemic” attack on the youth of certain racial minorities.
Weills works for the office of Siegel & Yee, a law firm that has been embroiled in the Fruitvale controversy. Two lawyers from the firm–José Luis Fuentes and Michael Siegel–decided to legally represent the assumed 40 Norteños mentioned in the gang injunction. However, Russo claimed there was a conflict of interest because Jane Brunner, another attorney in the office, belongs to the City council. Russo’s arguments were reinforced after finding out that Dan Siegel–Weills’ husband and Michael’s father–was assigned as one of the personal counselors of the new mayor, Jean Quan. In their determination to provide free legal defense to the assumed Norteños, the lawyers from Siegel & Yee came up with the idea to create the Communities United for Restorative Youth Justiced as a non profit organization. This way, they reasoned they could avoid the conflict of interest issue.
On Feb. 3, California Supreme Court justice Robert Freedman declared that a conflict of interest did not exist. Besides Siegel and Fuentes, the 40 people named in the restriction order will be represented by Yolanda Huang, Jeff Wozniak and Dennis Cunningham.
On Feb. 16, Judge Freedman will hear from the two parties—the City Attorney and the lawyers for the 40 alleged Norteños— before deciding whether or not to approve the gang injunction. Asked about the abundance of restriction orders against gangs, José Luis Fuentes responded, “Federal money!” He explained that there are federal monies to support legal initiatives to fight gang activity and at this moment of budgetary crisis the police departments have rushed to compete for those resources.
In fact, the Oakland Police Department has already received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the CalGRIP program (California Gang Reduction, Intervention and Prevention), created by ex-Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger in 2007.
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