It's not what you hear, it's what you DON'T hear

Read this carefully...

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Richmond violence returns City struggles for solutions to persistent bloodshed

By Karl Fischer and John Geluardi
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

LaTonya Dominick raises her family in a city sometimes labeled the "most dangerous" in California, on a quiet cul-de-sac that hardly screams danger.

Neatly groomed lawns and retired neighbors surround her home in Richmond's Laurel Park neighborhood. Kids roller-skate and play street football on warm evenings.

On the asphalt where those children play, someone shot a woman dead Wednesday night. The victim's 5-year-old son watched.

"It's very traumatic," Dominick said Thursday morning, a shell-shocked expression on her face. "I'm trying to raise my 13-year-old son here. I didn't want him to see this."

The killing was the first of two homicides in Richmond on Wednesday evening, a bloody flurry of street violence that pushed the city's homicide total to 40 this year and left community leaders grasping for answers.

Despite Richmond's growing social movement against violence, new policing strategies and increased commitment from City Hall, the city has matched last year's decade-high homicide total with one month to spare.

Residents across Richmond -- the silent thousands who live here in peace every day -- want to know: What will make it stop?

"It is remiss for us to blame the police. It is remiss, and it is very misplaced, to say that the mayor or the City Council are the cause of the violence. These people are not going to work every day shooting people down," the Rev. Carleton Leonard said. "There is something here deeply rooted in our fabric."

In August, the City Council signed a $185,000 contract with the Oakland-based Mentoring Center to help establish a permanent Office of Violence Prevention, which is meant to take a long-term approach to reducing violence. The Mentoring Center has been working to determine the scope of the office and practices that will be the most effective.

A preliminary report will be presented to the council in mid-December, said consultant DeVone Boggan, who has been working with the center.

City Manager Bill Lindsay is confident the center will help reduce violence in the long term.

"The reason we want to establish an Office of Violence Prevention is because we believe we have a chronic problem," Lindsay said. "Enforcement issues are ongoing, and I think the police department is doing a good job responding, but the problems are still out there, and we don't believe they will go away unless we take both a short-term and long-term approach."

Leonard and many other community activists have called for a revival of Richmond's Tent City peace protests, during which residents camped in parks near high-crime areas to focus community attention on stopping street violence.

The protests, which ran from late September through October, resonated with the public and gave ordinary people an outlet to express community solidarity and opposition to the endemic street violence terrorizing Richmond's flatland neighborhoods.

"We were just about to go to the media to congratulate the young people for keeping in the spirit of the Tent Cities' message, and this happened," the Rev. Andre Shumake said. "This is just a signal that we have more work to reach our goal of zero homicides in Richmond."

Tent City came about after a bloody day in Richmond: Sept. 10, when three died in separate shootings and two more were wounded, all in the Iron Triangle neighborhood and North Richmond. A period of relative peace followed.

But it was fragile peace.

Shootings tend to come in bunches in Richmond, often products of retaliation between neighborhood factions. Before Wednesday, police had not investigated a single homicide in November, and no street-shooting homicides since Oct. 21.

"Days like these are very frustrating. But a lot of the problems that the department is trying to address are very much entrenched and long-standing. It is going to take time for many of our efforts to make a really tangible difference," Deputy Police Chief Lori Ritter said. "One thing we are really recognizing this year is that the community is very willing to partner with us."

In June the department changed its approach to patrolling, putting more officers on the street and assigning them geographically so the same officers spend most of their time in the same neighborhoods and work on small problems locally before they blossom into serious crime.

The change reaped quick benefits that show in the department's homicide closure rate, which now stands at about 50 percent, up from 13 percent last year. More people are tipping officers about violent crime, Lt. Mark Gagan said.

"These killings are senseless. They take away the community's sense of safety," Gagan said. "But I can tell you that after these shootings, the phones of the beat officers in those neighborhoods were lighting up almost immediately."

Police intend to continue the new patrol patterns and add a number of tools to their repertoire in coming months.

The city recently put out to bid a contract to install closed-circuit television cameras in crime hot spots, Ritter said, and next month officers begin training with COMPSTAT, a system of crime data analysis meant to help identify and stop block-level crime trends as they happen.

In the meantime, residents continue to watch and wait for the shootings to stop, listening to the flurry of gunfire at night on distant streets, and sometimes close to home.

"I didn't come out. I heard the noise, but I said to myself, 'I'm not going out there,'" said Ulysses Brooks, who lived for 37 years on Hershey Court without a shooting on his block until Wednesday. "I've been thinking about it a lot this morning. I've been thinking about it a lot."

Staff writer Malaika Fraley contributed to this article. Reach Karl Fischer at 510-262-2728 or kfischer@cctimes.com. Reach John Geluardi at 510-262-2787 or jgeluardi@cctimes.com.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Tazer would like to point out that the only officials heard from for this article are City Manager Bill Lindsay and the police department. We'll cut Chief Chris Magnus some slack because that's what public information officers are for, but where's everyone else?

Does Lindsay speak for the whole council when he thinks that the $185,000 The Mentoring Center got for consultation on the fabled "Office of Violence Prevention" is money well spent? We're not nearly so optimistic, but we'd still like to know what the others have to say. Irma Anderson's term expired on Nov. 21st and Gayle McLaughlin won't be sworn in until next year. Does that mean there's no mayor right now? How about the council?

We're as curious as anyone to hear what the findings of TMC's consultation are, but the only things we've experienced that seemed to have any real effect on violence were RPD and the Tent City movement.

Anyone know how much the 30 days of the Tent Cities cost, by the way? We're pretty sure it wasn't $185,000.