OAKLAND — A new study has found that Black residents in Alameda County and people living in poorer neighborhoods are more likely to die from shootings, while proposed cuts to prevention programs may reverse the progress made to reduce gun violence since a recent peak of 141 such deaths in 2022.
The study by Alameda County Public Health Department’s Office of Violence Prevention, released on Wednesday, found Black residents of Alameda County are 33 times more likely to die from gun homicide than white residents. The county’s poorest neighborhoods in West Oakland face gun homicide rates eight times higher than the county’s wealthiest areas, according to the report, which analyzed the social determinants driving gun violence.
Researchers tracked death records and emergency room visits from 2019-2023, detailing a historic rise in gun homicides during the coronavirus pandemic that could be used as a blueprint to respond to gun violence in the East Bay.
“I’ve been involved in a lot of that culture that a lot of our community falls victim to,” said Antoine Towers, a violence interrupter with the Oakland-based violence prevention nonprofit Youth Alive. Towers said he’s witnessed shootings, carjackings and drug use in the East Oakland “trenches” of Seminary and the colloquially-named Funktown neighborhoods. “When you’re raised around it, you want to come up with solutions to where we can break cycles.”
The report began in 2021 from a roundtable discussion between members of the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office and the county public health department who postulated about examining gun homicides through a “public health lens,” said Kristen Clopton, manager of the Office of Violence Prevention and one of the authors of the report.
“The thought was there was more to tell, and more to be developed around why gun violence is a public health issue, and wanting to share with the community … the structural factors that contribute to gun violence,” Clopton said. “There’s both an economic imbalance and a power imbalance in terms of being able to uplift the community.”
What Clopton’s team found was a “shocking” racial and economic disparity in the communities that most often experience gun homicides. The report notes a “legacy of racist public policy” — such as efforts to ban Black residents from moving to wealthy suburbs in a tactic known as redlining — that has blighted the economic opportunity for Black and Latino residents in Alameda County. These imbalances have persisted through generations in neighborhoods like West Oakland and Fruitvale.
“Economic hardship can drive food insufficiency, housing insecurity and other stressors that are adverse experiences for children and adults,” according to the report. “Children with high levels of exposures to stressors, lower quality educational and employment opportunities, and high exposure to neighborhood gun ownership may get caught up in gun violence,” according to the report.
The coronavirus pandemic brought more widespread violence to communities, where there were “different victims and different perpetrators” than before 2020, according to Jason Corburn, a UC Berkeley professor who studies gun violence in urban communities and evaluates gun violence reduction plans for California cities. Disruptions to social services and prevention programs – not the pandemic itself – caused more widespread gun violence throughout communities, according to the ACPHD report.
“In Richmond, California, our research showed that neighborhoods that had the most gun violence pre-pandemic did not have a spike during the pandemic,” Corburn said about his research into gun violence. “Citywide, many places saw increases, but in the historically violent neighborhoods or street corners, not every place was more violent.”
In response to the escalation of gun homicides, the Alameda County Board of Supervisors passed a resolution in 2021 declaring gun violence a national public health crisis. The Office of Violence Prevention was established in 2023 by the Alameda County Public Health Department to coordinate violence prevention efforts with law enforcement, community advocates and community-based organizations like Youth Alive.
Corburn praised Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety, a violence prevention initiative that reaches out to suspected or would-be firearm perpetrators and connects them with support services. In Oakland, the City Council revived the “highly successful” violence reduction program known as the Ceasefire Strategy, which an audit found was instrumental to a sustained drop in gun homicides between 2013 and 2017 — reducing the overall gun homicide rate by half.
While the ONS has found support and success in Richmond, some anti-violence groups in the East Bay have faced financial hardship of late. In May, the federal government cut a $2 million grant to Youth Alive as part of $800 million in grant cuts by the U.S. Department of Justice. Towers hopes that Youth Alive can be part of the solution to negate tensions and end the cycle of violence.
“I wouldn’t say we’re the driving factor of (reducing gun violence), but I feel like things can get neutralized as a lot of conflicts are arising because the organization that specializes in mediation and de-escalation is there,” Towers said. “We can show them alternatives.”