No, more police wouldn't have stopped the Juneteenth shooting at Lake Merritt
Published by the San Francisco Chronicle on June 21, 2021
By Cat Brooks
This past Saturday, thousands of people gathered at Lake Merritt in Oakland to celebrate Juneteenth, the official end of slavery in America. Just after 6 p.m., however, gunfire cut through the joy. Chaos ensued. People ran into the water, ducked for cover and stampeded to get out of the way. When the smoke cleared, a 22-year-old man was dead and six were injured.
Like clockwork, detractors of the defund the police movement claimed incidents like these are why Black communities need more cops, more control, more surveillance. The Facebook page of the Oakland Police Officers Association immediately shared an article about a spike in Oakland shootings, with the commentary: “Oakland City Council response to yet another Oakland mass shooting — further defund the police.”
As a vocal advocate of the defund movement in Oakland, I was personally attacked on the Citizen platform: “These murderers making Cat Brooks and the Oakland City Council look like a bunch of clowns … [I]n a few weeks, someone gonna get shot and killed again … rinse and repeat.”
They got the rinse and repeat part right anyway.
We seem destined and determined to keep repeating the same failed public safety policies and rinsing our hands of the responsibility for the failure.
Lake Merritt has always been one of the most heavily policed places in the entire city. In March, the Oakland City Council voted to increase police patrols even further at the lake. And Oakland Police Department spokesperson Johanna Watson stated that even more police were sent to Lake Merritt in preparation for the Juneteenth celebration.
It did nothing to stop the shootings.
How could it? Police are violence responders, not violence interrupters. They do not understand our communities nor do they have our trust.
I am tired of responding to violent crime. I want to live in a world where we prevent it.
Prevention is not punitive. Prevention is investment.
Large swaths of America celebrated Juneteenth with increased fervor after President Biden made it a national holiday. Many Black folks felt validated. Seen.
I did not.
What good is a holiday without a laser-focused investment on healing the wounds of slavery and segregation that have left Black communities rife with trauma, poverty and violence?
There is not sufficient data anywhere to prove that more cops means less violence. For years, Oakland has given almost half of its general fund to the Oakland Police Department, and for years we’ve remained one of America’s most dangerous cities. Cops are also not the great crime solvers they’d have you believe. Annually, America sees around 38% of murders, 66% of rapes, 70% of robberies and 47% of aggravated assaults go uncleared.
Meanwhile, if BIPOC people had stable incomes, secure housing, more opportunities to excel in life and a pathway to heal from the infectious disease of white supremacy, we would not see violence, we would see thriving communities and healthy people.
If a child can pick up a gun and kill another child that looks just like him — what does that say about how he sees himself? What have we taught him about the value of his life? And if he doesn’t value his life, how can we expect him to value anyone else’s?
Everyone in Oakland is responsible for what happened at Lake Merritt. Responsible because we fail our children from the time they are in the womb to the time they are in the grave. Fail them with disinvestment, liberal racism, locked economic doors, dysfunctional schools and a continuous message that their lives don’t matter and that we expect them to fail.
America can keep its holidays; I want change.
The Oakland City Council is currently weighing two budget proposals: one from the mayor that increases the police budget by 11% and another from City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas that seeks to get the police to focus on violent crime, while simultaneously investing in violence prevention and mental health emergency support.
It’s obvious which direction the city should go.
Investing in the status quo virtually guarantees more violence, more dead Black bodies, more surveillance, more terrorized communities, more incarceration, more trauma, more devastated families.
We can build the communities, the cities and the country we all want. But we have to invest in people on the front end instead of tombstones and jails on the back end.
If more policing and prisons made America safe, we’d be the safest nation in the world.
Cat Brooks is an award-winning actress, playwright, the executive director of the Justice Teams Network, the co-founder of the Anti Police-Terror Project and the co-host of UpFront on KPFA.