The Most Meaningful Thing...

... goes unmentioned -

In terms of covering each homicide, and especially each homicide victim and his or her family’s plight, things in the media seem to have improved, slightly, though I haven’t done any official research into it. Back when Khadafy Washington was killed, at age 18, in August of 2000, the violent killing of a black man in Oakland seems to have been overlooked, seen as not newsworthy. KD was killed on the night of August 4 going into August 5. After combing the microfilm version of the Oakland Tribune and Oakland Post in the week after his death, and searching the archive of the San Francisco Chronicle for the same period, it looks to me like the first time his specific killing appeared in the news was on August 9th, impersonally and in passing, as part of an article about an OPD task force being formed in response to the surge in violence that his killing had begun; 5 killings happened between Friday and Monday, culminating in an “ambush-style” double-homicide on Monday night. The new task force was charged with focusing on not just gun violence, but “quality of life” crimes including public drinking, though it is not clear where the data was coming from that suggested a connection between those kinds of crimes and violence. I wonder who thought a task force of 11 officers was going to make a difference. Perhaps they only thought it would make a difference in public perception. More coverage was being given to a multiple homicide in Marin involving the daughter of a celebrity and a missing couple in Concord. I can see that those are good stories that deserve to be covered. And the Marin story was truly sensational and surely sold issues. But, again, the killing of men on certain Oakland streets was not news. Even though violence in Oakland has been decreasing. In 1999, the city had had it’s lowest homicide total since the late 1960s, after the mid-90s bloodbath of crack and gang violence, where Oakland had seen shooting and homicide numbers that even today are hard to imagine. One thing that did get coverage on the weekend KD was killed was a foray into the field by then-Oakland Police Chief Wood. Wood had gone out on patrol on a busy weekend night for the police, and had even handcuffed a guy himself. It comes across as the emptiest of political gestures, almost too obvious to believe, and reminded me of the time Edgar J Hoover was said to be upset over a question he’d gotten when testifying before Congress, in which he had to admit he himself had never actually arrested anyone. So shortly after the testimony, as his agents closed in on the amazingly elusive gangster named Alvin Karpas, Hoover arranged a ride-along, and made the actual arrest himself. From here it seems like such a meaningless, needless gesture. But the media covered it, even as the most meaningful thing, the murder of a young person. remained unmentioned.