WE MEET THEM AT THE DEPOT
When it was reported in 1930 that gangsters being driven out of Chicago were headed west, San Francisco Police Chief William Quinn, gave explicit orders to his men. “They will be met at ferry and railroad stations and turned back,” he commanded, “or, if they slip by the cordon of watching policemen, they will be clapped in jail. . . . Every suspicious character, whether man or woman, must give a satisfactory account of himself or herself to the police or go behind the bars. . . .”
A few years later Chief Quinn reported: “This city today stands out among the large cities of the West as one of the few where gangsters have been able to gain a foothold . Organized crime does not exist here due to a small but efficient number of hard working police officers. Not one merchant in San Francisco, large or small engaged in legitimate business, has had to pay one cent to racketeers.” "We watch the trains, the planes and the boats. We have a welcoming committee awaiting all such gentlemen from other parts of the United States. We meet them, we entertain them but they don’t like our entertainment. They therefore seldom pay us a second visit." There doesn’t seem to have been much, if any, discussion at the time of the constitutionality of such practices. And the public seems to have acquiesced.
The Ferry Building that is now home to what is perhaps the most beautiful interior shopping venue in the city was once one of the toughest beats in town. From the city’s beginning the wharves were the first beats covered, and when the Ferry Building was constructed near the turn of the twentieth centur, a permanent police detail was established there to intercept criminals trying to enter the city. In 1911, Officers Charles Castor and Thomas Finnely were murdered there by just such an arriving murderer they were watching for.
What occasions this visit to the past is the recent revelation that San Francisco’s African-American community suffers from almost twice the murder rate of African American Oaklanders. In San Francisco, where African-Americans comprise less than 10 percent of the 770,000 population, they make up 63 percent of the homicide victims. In Oakland, where they make up 36 percent of the 400,000 residents – a three times greater percentage than San Francisco-- African Americans comprise 77 percent of the homicide victims. Put another way, members of the most at-risk group to be homicide victims—young black males—are almost twice as likely to be murdered in San Francisco as those similarly situated in Oakland.
A number of explanations have been advanced to explain high African American homicide rates generally. Most subscribe to the structural argument that the rates are caused by environmental factors like poverty, joblessness and general mistreatment by the larger society. Others add that part of the reason for high rates is that a subculture of violence has become imbedded in some parts of the African American community. But neither of those explanations address the wide difference between the rates in San Francisco and Oakland.
Part of the reason for the disparity may have to do with simple demographics. Oakland has had a very large African American middle class dating back to the nineteenth century when Pullman workers settled at the Oakland end of the transcontinental railroad. There is a class dimension to homicide incidence, after all. It is among low income members of any group that high homicide rates can be found. It may just be that even today middle class African Americans make up a greater proportion of their community in Oakland than in San Francisco. In any case, there are indications that San Francisco’s African American middle class is declining, thus leaving a larger proportion of less advantaged community members behind.
According to a recent report issued by the state-appointed monitor for San Francisco’s public schools, Stuart Biegel, many minority families are leaving the city. School enrollment is declining at from 800 to 1000 students a year, many of whom are members of middle class minority families looking for housing they can afford. “San Francisco’s African American students have the worst test scores of any African American students in any urban area of California,” says Biegel. Can the same forces be at work with regard to criminal violence?
Some of the answer may lie in different enforcement strategies in force around the Bay. Tom Wolfe has a thuggish character in his Bonfire of the Vanities claim: “Manhattan makes it and Brooklyn takes it.” He is describing the process whereby Brooklynites went to Manhattan on the subway, suddenly appeared in mid-town where they committed robberies, and then fled quickly underground again before the police could arrive.
It is no accident that William Bratton, now Los Angeles Chief of Police, but New York Police Commissioner in the 1990s when New York crime rates were brought down dramatically, previously headed up the New York Transit Police. It was police enforcement at the Brooklyn/Manhattan subway chokepoint which helped bring about the “Guiliani Miracle,” at least as it related to Manhattan.
Closer to home, when Captain Greg Corrales took command of San Francisco’s Mission Police District in 2002, he noticed that 90 percent of drug arrestees in his district gave out-of-town home addresses. By the time he was assigned elsewhere in mid-2004, enforcement efforts by his officers--principally around his district’s BART stations--brought that percentage down to 5 percent. Interestingly, 2003 was the peak year for homicide in Oakland for the period from 1999 to the present. During that same time span, San Francisco and Oakland homicide rates rose and fell in opposite directions like buckets in a well. Could it be that East Bay enforcement programs are currently displacing the crime back to San Francisco? If that’s the case, maybe it’s time to send it back.
There are doubtless other factors at work as well. San Francisco’s high homicide rate is particularly troubling because, as was reported in December 2005, the last two members of 38 from the Big Block gang, thought to be responsible for much of the drug-connected homicide in the Bay View-Hunters point area, were finally brought to justice by the work of a joint city-federal task force. Yet the homicide rate still rose.
That really should come as no surprise. The cessation of Chicago’s Prohibition Era “Beer Wars,” during which up to 500 gangsters killed each other, did not put an end to beer running; it just meant that territorial conflicts had been temporarily resolved. The most extensive gang violence occurs when the dominant force – in this case the Big Block Gang—is removed from the equation. Then, up-and-coming gangsters fight for the now open territory. Whether that is the case here will have to be determined by someone close to the events, but the fact that it is occurring should surprise no one.
In fairness to both the police and the community, they are faced with circumstances simply not present in earlier times. Many of the current homicides involve men found dead in automobiles or in the street. The underlying suspicion in many cases is that drugs are involved.
In times past, many if not most homicides resulted from drunken disputes in drinking establishments. It was never easy to get the facts from patrons in a saloon killing. But the proprietor, depending as he did on police regulation of his license, was less inclined to stonewall an investigation. Drug dealers have no such incentive to cooperate with the police, so the cases go unsolved.
San Francisco suffered from even higher homicide rates in the early and mid-1990s. Rates for all groups then declined so that by the century’s end San Francisco had its lowest overall homicide rate since the early 1960s. The African American rate, while still higher than other groups, had declined to 37.3, less than half its current rate. And now the rates have risen again.
Many of the recent killings involve shootings from automobiles at other automobiles or at groups of people standing on the street. It would be interesting to look at a comparison of auto stops by the police at different periods to ascertain if there is perhaps a relationship between vehicle stops and firearms taken out of the equation. We can expect that discussions about profiling will attend such an examination. It is interesting to note that a survey of news articles about racial profiling show none in 1998 with increasing numbers annually to a peak in 2001 and 2002, about the time that homicide rates trended sharply upward again.
One recent issue bearing on the subject was Bill Cosby’s 2004 call for his fellow African Americans to tone down the anti-police rhetoric and to come to grips with undesirable behaviors by some of the black underclass. Cosby was roundly attacked for his stance by University of Pennsylvania professor Michael Eric Dyson and others, and since then has remained comparatively quiet, at least publicly.
What is clearly needed, then, if there is the civic will to genuinely come to grips with the problem of black-on-black homicide, is an open-ended discussion of what the issues involved really are, and then the adoption of an agenda-free program aimed at addressing the factors disclosed. The first question posed in that discussion should ask why there is such a marked disparity in homicide rates in the two communities just across the Bay from each other. And maybe it’s time to revive some of the methods of an earlier time around the modern equivalent to the Ferry Building of old, the BART stations. Many of the specific methods used in the 1930s would doubtless fail to pass constitutional muster, but the principle is sound. By paying more attention to who is coming into the city and taking enforcement action where legal and appropriate, perhaps the homicide imbalance can be adjusted.
Complex problems can never be explained in terms of simple, single factors. Neither are solutions simple or singular. A number of programs are under consideration to help bring down the homicide rate. Supervisor Chris Daly announced the introduction of a charter amendment to establish a homicide prevention council of public and private officials. Mayor Newsome has shown strong personal interest in getting the problem under control. There has been much discussion about the implementation of community policing as a sort of omnibus cure-all for the problem. And a number of enforcement programs targeting high crime areas have been instituted. As yet, permanently positive results remain elusive.