By Chip Johnson
San Francisco Chronicle
OAKLAND, Calif. — If anything new was revealed Monday by a Discovery Channel documentary on gangs in Oakland, it was this: There’s a disconnect between the Oakland Police Department’s view of gangs and reality on the street.
Oakland, according to police spokesman Jeff Thomason, has only a half-dozen gangs. What’s even more astonishing is that police say that just a dozen of the more than 200 homicides in this city in 2008 and 2009 have been listed as gang-related killings.
How can that be?
Well, according to an unedited screening of “Gang Wars: Oakland,” a two-part documentary film, Oakland police have vastly underestimated the gang problem.
In the documentary, which focuses on the city’s Hispanic and black gangs, filmmakers report there are at least 10,000 gang members on the streets of Oakland every day of the week. But Oakland only counts as gangs groups that fit the state definition of what a gang is.
While Oakland police have withheld official comment until after the show finishes airing, an officer who saw the video before it aired said the filmmakers got it right: “It shows Oakland the way it is.”
Another officer, Sgt. Fred Mestas, who heads the department’s gang intelligence unit, a five-man team that operates out of the city’s Area 2 command district and covers much of central Oakland, says of the 10,000 gang figure: “That doesn’t sound too far off.”
And a third officer said the department has never aggressively classified gang members in Oakland.
Mestas said many homicides, including a host of drug-related killings, could easily be categorized as gang-related killings. But they’re not.
The Oakland Police Department isn’t alone in its limited view of gangs.
In the city’s African American community, there has been a long-standing view that individual criminal crews - and not gangs - have produced the lion’s share of violent crime over the years.
Over the city’s long struggle with high crime rates, the gang tag in Oakland’s black community has more often been a reference to large organized drug rings that may “do business” with certain neighborhood crews.
“Most young black people in Oakland are not gang affiliated,” said Olis Simmons, executive director of Youth Uprising, a city-funded teenage community center.
“We don’t have Bloods and Crips here. Oakland is not a gang town. I will be interested to see the piece, because it’s inconsistent with my work on the ground,” Simmons said. “We get a lot of bad press here, and some of it is deserved, but this is not one of our issues. It’s not who we are,” she said.
But gangs or not, the outcome of this criminal behavior is pretty much the same.
There is a homicide every three days in Oakland, the city has one of the highest violent crime rates in the nation, and there seems no end in sight.
There is one thing highlighted in the documentary that everyone seems to agree on: Hispanic gangs are growing.
“Latino gangs are on the rise in this city,” said Danyelle Marshall, executive director of Project Re-Connect, a program to reunite gang members with family members and community.
“A lot of it is being drawn from the prisons, but it’s also coming from Mexican drug gangs who cross the border and trickling up here from L.A. County,” Marshall said.
“We’re not as big and we’re trying to do something so that it doesn’t get out of control,” she said.
Meanwhile, an eight-man police gang unit featured in the documentary was disbanded a little more than two weeks ago, leaving the department without a much-needed resource to combat a problem that is sure to draw national attention.
It’s a sure bet that Mayor Ron Dellums, who didn’t like the premise of an HBO TV project about an Oakland pimp, will issue a statement defending the city against the latest media critique of his working plan to create a “model city.”
Unfortunately, this isn’t a disagreement over a fictional representation. It’s a fact-based documentary, and a reality check for the whole city.
Copyright 2009 San Francisco Chronicle