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Oakland Unwrapped Priorities By J. Douglas Allen-Taylor They beat a man in the street in front of our apartment house the other night, who knows why. Beat him bad. Beat him for a while. Beat him while he cried for help. Beat him until he lay helpless and alone in the middle of the street, right beside the driveway where my daughters walk up to get in our house. The neighbors were all afraid to intervene while it lasted, because in this neighborhood, everyone worries about guns. But as soon as the bangers had jumped into their car and headed off, the houses emptied all around and folks came running to see what they could do. There wasn't much, except to wait for the EMT. The police responded fairly fast, swooping down from both ends. I suppose there are some benefits for living in a neighborhood that the police chief has designated as a quick-response area. But the police came too late to do anything but pick up the pieces. I doubt if you'll read anything about this beating anyplace but in this column. If it happened near College Avenue or Piedmont or Lakeshore, it would be big news. People don't expect folks to get attacked in the street in those neighborhoods. But if you read about a beat-down near Seminary and Bancroft in East Oakland... well... what do you think? Oh, over there. As if, somehow, this is supposed to be normal on this end. A week ago, or so, a kid got killed in front of his house off of Seminary, a couple of blocks from here. Nineteen or 20 bullets shot at him in the middle of a summer afternoon, in a neighborhood where children ride their bikes and scooters and wet each other down with water hoses and buy popsicles from those Latino guys with their pushcarts. The police came down and pulled their yellow tape across the street to block it off, and set down those ghastly numbered cones on the pavement to count the shell casings. A bunch of kids witnessed the shooting and saw the bloody body sprawled on the ground, but no one sent a trauma team around to counsel them. No one thought to, I guess. In this neighborhood, we're not supposed to suffer trauma. I guess it's like the politicians used to talk about Vietnamese during the war. The death of loved ones doesn't affect them the same way it affects us, our leaders used to say. They have a different attitude about life. Just as other folks must feel about us, here on Oakland's eastern outskirts. The "incident" rated a small item in a back page of the Tribune. Meanwhile, in the same week, the Chronicle ran a headline on the first page of the East Bay section that read: "Gun slaying in quiet part of Oakland." Oh, of course. That's news. When it happens in the quiet parts. Elsewhere in East Oakland, groups of kids gather on Saturday nights to spin their cars in the middle of the street and play their music bass-booming loud. Yes, it's annoying. No, I wouldn't want a sideshow on my corner. I don't like one car spinning donuts. But as far as I have heard, no one has died at one of these sideshows, in all the years they have been going on. As far as I have heard, no one has even gotten seriously injured. Yet the Tribune reports that Oakland police will spend a million dollars on overtime this year "to keep tabs on the action" at the sideshows. Meanwhile, youth programs and schools go wanting for funding, and there's a war on Oakland streets that's killing Oakland kids. We have lost our perspective on what is annoying, and what is abominable. We are a city that has got its priorities wrong. I wish I knew what happened to the guy who got beat up the other night. The cops wouldn't tell us his name. Nobody around here knew him. And he wasn't talking when they took him away in the ambulance. I don't even know if he lived. J. Douglas Allen-Taylor is an author, a journalist, and a graduate of Castlemont High School. He can be reached at www.safero.org and [email protected]. [ East Bay | Metroactive | Archives ]