Let me first just say that the key to all this violence is truly education and with Oakland only graduating 46% of its students it should come as no surprise that things like this happen. That being said let me offer my condolences to the victims’ families. When I read this story of the shooting of 22 year old Demetrius A. Church Oakland’s 69th homicide victim it bothered me, reading further that there were “no cooperating witnesses” made me even more upset but not for the obvious reasons. “No cooperating witnesses “implies that the witnesses were part of this massively over- stated “stop snitching” rule in the hip-hop community, maybe the witnesses were possibly scared of some sort of retaliation or that the witnesses themselves had something to hide and therefore wouldn’t cooperate with the police. The reality I believe is that the witnesses and in fact the whole community harbor resentment towards the police and the entire governmental establishment for what they feel is an apathetic attitude towards their daily situations. Let’s keep it real for a moment; I’ve spent many a night at and around downtown Oakland from the soon to be new FOX Theater on telegraph all the way up to the Kaiser Permanente hospital on West MacArthur and it’s clear that Oakland has invested millions in a considerable gentrification project in that area and as a result I have seen at least 15 patrol cars on any given night constantly patrolling that 2 mile area, I’ve even seen police officers on bicycles not motorcycles but bicycles riding up and down the block smiling and talking to pedestrians, which has to be a first for Oakland. Now, I often times wonder if there had been this bicycle patrol in east Oakland namely on seminary a week ago maybe Mathew Thomas would be alive today instead of having his funeral which was on July 3. See Mathew Thomas was that young 31 year old man who was shot on June 21 while trying to buy some food from Tom’s Chinese restaurant and because some people outside decided to get into a confrontation and someone decided to handle it with a gun Mathew an innocent bystander is now dead. While this story is sad in of itself it brings me back to my original point about apathy. Mathew Thomas was a young man; a husband of several years, a father, and a deacon of a church, yet his story wasn’t in the papers or on the news, there were no obituaries, there was no information about the services, or where one could send flowers or offer condolences to the family, there were no police officers or representatives of the City of Oakland at the funeral assuring family and friends that everything was being done to catch the perpetrators , nor was there any mention of a place to send donations to help his kid who must now grow up without a father. What was so undeserving of Mathew’s story that he didn’t deserve the same attention that the tree sitters at Berkeley received from the local media, why was it that upon further research of the other homicides that have happened in Oakland this year I could not find any of the for mentioned information on the majority of cases. The harsh reality is that as long as these acts of violence happen to the “right type of individuals “namely young African American and Latino men under the age of 35, and takes place in the “right zip code “nobody seems to care whether these people live or die and they (the people most affect by these crimes) realize it and until we bring these people into mainstream society and show them that we care what happens to them by having police patrol the areas in east Oakland the same way the patrol around the FOX theater, by putting out all the information relevant including ways to help the family when crimes like these occur, by not accepting the type of lame excuses offered by people like Assistant Police Chief Howard Jordan who say that the reasons for the homicide rate have to be because Oakland has a high number of probation and parolees as if there is no way to track these individuals and make sure that they are getting the proper training, counseling, and job placement that will insure that their transition back into normal society is a successful then these types of crimes will continue to happen.

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