‘The city made a mistake’: why a marquee Oakland violence prevention program broke down

By the end of last year, major cities across the United States released violent crime reports that looked markedly different than those in recent years.

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The increase in gun violence and homicides that had devastated underserved Black and Latino communities since the pandemic was finally beginning to ebb, including in cities like Detroit and St Louis, with incident numbers seeing their first dips since 2020.

But in Oakland, California, a city simultaneously known for its struggles with gun violence and for pioneering programs to prevent it, the number of homicides remained stubbornly high with just above 100 reported in 2023, according to the city’s annual crime reports.

The dynamics fueling the high rates of homicides and gun violence in the city are complex, and their exact interplay is still being studied and debated. Some police officials and city leaders blame bail reform and anti-police sentiments, while others point to the long-running impact of pandemic lockdowns and social distancing orders of already struggling communities.

Now, a new audit conducted at the behest of the Oakland mayor, Sheng Thao, is adding another possible factor: the gradual degradation of the Oakland police department’s (OPD) Operation Ceasefire, one of the city’s marquee gun violence prevention strategies and one officials and criminologists say contributed to a significant decrease in homicides between 2012 and 2017.

“Violent crime in Oakland did not reach crisis levels overnight,” Thao said in a statement. “Unfortunately, years working in silos and losing focus on what’s actually worked in Oakland have taken its toll, and it’s time to get this train back on track.”

Operation Ceasefire was launched in late 2012, and was modelled after a similar program in Boston. In Oakland’s version, police for years used weekly reviews of shootings to identify the small portion of the city’s population responsible for the bulk of shootings. Program officers made contact with them, often in roundtable meetings known as call-ins that bring together police officers, faith leaders and violence interventionists, and implored those at risk of being on either side of a gun to change their ways and accept short and long-term resources.

Ceasefire’s struggles began in 2016 and substantially increased in 2020, according to the report, which was authored by the California Partnership for Safe Communities, a non-profit that helped the city establish the Ceasefire program and works with other municipalities to develop and maintain their own gun violence prevention programs.

Since 2020, the researchers concluded, “each essential element of the strategy was significantly watered down.”

That year, just before the pandemic hit, Ceasefire’s strategy shifted from one that narrowly focused on the people at the center of the city’s gun violence to one that was “place-based”, with police zeroing in on troubled neighborhoods rather than individuals.

Pandemic-era stay-at-home orders added to the program’s woes, cutting off the direct communication between city residents and violence prevention workers. Even as restrictions on gatherings disappeared, Ceasefire never regained its footing.

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“Over time, as we learned to live with the pandemic, the city never went back,” said Reygan Cunningham, one of the audit’s authors. “Our life coaches used to pick people up but all of those things couldn’t happen … The city tried very hard for workarounds, but there is no replacement for relationships.”

The report also highlighted shortcomings in the organisational structures of both OPD’s Ceasefire and the city’s office of violence prevention, which was founded in 2017 to drive down violent crime.

And it points at the subpar quality of the police’s weekly shooting reviews, which are meant to analyze patterns in violence and identify recurring suspects to figure out which incidents were ripe for retaliation.

In another blow to the program, the report said, the violent crime operations center, a unit started in 2021 by former police chief LeRonne Armstrong to solve past crimes in an effort to boost the city’s clearance rate, moved intelligence units out of the areas where Ceasefire was operating. The auditors recommend that the center be disbanded and officers return to their Ceasefire details.

“Our audit says that the city made a mistake, and there’s nothing wrong with admitting that and making a course correction,” Ersie Joyner, a 30-year OPD veteran and a former head of Ceasefire, said during an Oakland city council meeting on Tuesday. “Let’s go back to being strategic and mindful and not just arresting people.”

Even as police resources were moved from Ceasefire, some of the work continued, said Antoine Towers, a violence interventionist with Youth Alive!, a non-profit that works with youth in schools and hospitals to intervene in conflicts and help people heal physically and emotionally. Yearly training sessions for violence prevention workers run by Ceasefire continued to run, Towers said, and program leaders remained active in conversations and organising around violence prevention in Oakland.

“You still had Ceasefire at the table, the work was still going on,” he said. “The strategy meetings were still happening to figure out who can go where and who can have conversations. We were all working together.”

The report comes as Thao, the Oakland mayor, as well as the Alameda county district attorney Pamela Price, both face recall efforts over how they have addressed violence, property crime and homelessness in the city.

Before the pandemic, Operation Ceasefire was partially credited with driving down violence in Oakland 46% between 2012, a year when 126 people were killed – most of them with guns, to 2017 when 72 people were killed.

The city was one of a handful in the Bay Area that saw homicides rise again during the pandemic, with 102 people killed in 2020, 123 in 2021, 120 in 2022, and 118 in 2023.

The national increase in gun violence has brought newfound federal recognition of the important role that community-based organizations play in neighborhoods that have long-borne the brunt of gun violence in US cities.

For the first time, formerly-incarcerated community leaders were brought to the White House to guide officials through the process of building and investing in robust violence prevention ecosystems that can address the underlying causes of violence like unstable housing and unaddressed trauma.

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In Oakland, too, leaders stressed that community violence prevention organizations need to be part of any broader strategy to address violence in the city.

Holly Joshi, current director of office of violence prevention, stressed in her remarks at the city council meeting that both her office and the OPD will have to collaborate closely with community organizations.

“Community-based organizations still have a role to play,” she said. “We don’t want to lose sight of the bigger picture. Relationships help us deal with people who don’t rise to the level of Ceasefire client.”

Cunningham hopes this national momentum combined with the audit’s finding will right the Ceasefire and office of violence prevention ships.

“[This audit] shows that the city was not organized around this major public safety crisis,” Cunningham said. “All of us who live, work and play in Oakland want to know: how do we not only get back to where we were, but get better.”