4th Annual Vigil Day after Reflection
A Oscar Grant Memorial, 2010 Reflection
When Oscar Grant was shot on Jan. 1, 2009, by a BART police officer Johannes Mehserle on The Fruitvale a BART platform, we were traumatized and angered at what had happen to our love one.
I remember falling to my knees in awful pain as I had watched the video. I had never experienced what I felted, on that morning, in watching that video. This type of painful hurt can only be experience. Those who have lost a close loved relative can understand.
But it was seeing the videos – taken by Oaklanders’ cell phones – and the lack of balance in the coverage by the media that solidified our resolve to apply to J-Lab for seed funding to start a local news and community site called Oakland Local. Our goal: To produce news platform that we hoped would be more balanced, present more community voices and reflect views from more people of color and Oakland residents about what is happening in our city.
We launched in October 2009 and here we are, four years later, but we’re still fascinated and engaged with the story of Oscar Grant – and more importantly, the issues that Grant’s death and the struggle to bring his killer to justice highlight. Here we are four years later, and the issue of police violence against young people of color, men in particular, has not gone away.
We live in a world where too many young men are killed at the hands of people who are supposed to be protecting them, where blue has become a color that separates young men into Us and Them.
We live in a world where police protocols about how to treat people they shoot are unclear, so that a youth is (reportedly) left on the streets to bleed to death as his worried parents sit in a police station a few miles away.
We also live in a world where the gap between what the Oakland Police culture finds heroic (silver stars awarded for behavior during Occupy Oakland demonstrations) and what many members of the Oakland community find brutalizing (police behavior during Occupy Oakland demonstrations) is profound.
How can we build trust when we can’t even agree on which police officers are heroes and which ones should be – and have failed to be – held accountable?
The spirit of Grant is the spirit of racial justice, of community policing and of local community revitalization and the folks at Oakland Local think of Oscar Grant every day.
And if the spirit of Grant is the spirit of young local residents trying to make their way, trying to find education and jobs and safety for themselves, I think we – and many others – think of Oscar Grant every minute.
But as we all know, thinking isn’t enough.
Grant wasn’t the first person shot and killed by a local police/BART officer under questionable circumstances, nor was he the last. And the mayor’s promise of change – while heartfelt and sure to move things ahead – is only a part of what we need to do to make Oakland safer and more equitable for everyone, especially those young men of color our police are so quick to profile. (And yes, as I say this I also agree that our police need to do a MUCH better job protecting our local residents, who are experiencing violent crimes, robberies, assaults, break-ins etc., and need the protection their taxes – and the promise of a good life in Oakland – to help pay for it.)
So where do we go from here? On Jan. 1, the day Oscar Grant lost his life at age 22, leaving behind a grieving family and a daughter, I’m thinking about what Oakland Local, a nonprofit formed to tell the stories of our city, can do about these issues.
For one thing, we are going to step up our coverage of the police and of police accountability in Oakland.
For another, with support from The California Endowment, we are going to expand our journalism, social media and multimedia training of youth in East Oakland so we can help more young people both know how to make their voices heard and learn about some viable skills for future employment.
We’re also going to hold some events – News Cafes on these topics – and bring in folks working to build change in police culture and operations to share their views.
How you can be involved
We’d love to hear from you about police, crime and public safety issues you think we should cover, from the large to the small. We promise to review all your ideas, and pursue as many as possible. To share your views, go to this web page http://bit.ly/XcbjWW and fill out the form or email policeissues@oaklandlocal.com.