by Steve Early
An anonymous RPD source confirmed to Joe Eskenazi that the “premise of Ceasefire is not as flattering as a Kumbaya story. It’s about focusing on 75 of the most violent people in the city—who lose their anonymity, become paranoid, and leave.”31 For its devoted volunteers, Ceasefire work remains a blessed obligation and never-ending grind. Anyone looking for instant results need not apply. As Valerie Duncan notes with frustration, “We’re doing everything we can as a church—we march, we protest—and they’re still killing each other left and right.”32
Stopping that killing is the full-time mission of Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety. ONS was created in 2007, with strong backing from Magnus, Bill Lindsay, and Gayle McLaughlin, a year after she became mayor. “We decided that Richmond would never be able to achieve its goals with this violent crime ball and chain,” Lindsay recalls. “The city would never be able to move forward.”
ONS receives an annual city budget allocation (now $1.1 million a year) to hire and deploy six full-time youth mentors with past prison or gang experience. Like Ceasefire volunteers, these “neighborhood change agents” try to identify Richmond youth most prone to gang membership and/or gun violence. Participants in the Operation Peacemaker Fellowship run by ONS receive eighteen months of job training, counseling, and life-skills classes, as well as financial incentives for abandoning criminal activity. Its privately funded stipends aren’t much—no more than one thousand dollars monthly for a maximum period of nine months. But the novel idea of “paying kids to stay alive” helped ONS director DeVone Boggan garner almost as much national media attention as the police reforms of Chris Magnus.33
For example, PBS NewsHour reported in May 2016 that “sixty-eight men have completed the Peacemaker Fellowship so far. And according to the program, only about 20 percent have been arrested or charged for new gun crimes. Thirteen were convicted and got kicked out of the program. . . . The number of murders here in Richmond has fallen by half in the last decade—from 42 in 2006 to 21 in 2015.”34
While these metrics arouse some doubts locally—mainly within the RPD—ONS has won high marks from the National Council on Crime and Delinquency. According to the NCCD, Richmond’s crime stats improved due to a “number of factors, including policy changes, policing efforts, and an improving economic climate.” But “the work of the ONS was a strong contributing factor in a collaborative effort to decrease violence in Richmond.”35 Those results were good enough for neighboring Oakland, as well as Toledo, Ohio, and Washington, DC, all of which have begun replicating Richmond’s Operation Peacemaker in some fashion.
As the charismatic Boggan noted in one MSNBC appearance, “the clearance rate” of cases in cities with the most gun violence is pretty low; too many homicides never get solved. ONS-style mentoring and personal income support is proactive and preemptive if successful with particular individuals. “Targeted youth are out on the streets already, not apprehended yet, but idle, substance abusing, and another homicide waiting to happen. Why not engage them?”36 In Richmond, objections to doing just that have been largely overcome, even if the resources allocated to ONS hardly meet the scale of need. Locally, far more young people need to find jobs, return to school, or otherwise turn their lives around before they end up dead or in the street-to-prison pipeline. ONS interventions, like Richmond’s broader implementation of community policing, can make the community safer but not economically more secure for a population still predominantly poor and working class.
FOUR
TUESDAY NIGHT CAGE FIGHTS
IN THE NOT SO DISTANT PAST, a snobby neighbor like the mayor of El Cerrito could dismiss Richmond as the “arm pit of the East Bay.”1 Now the city was being hailed as a “progressive utopia.” Richmond’s policy innovation, including its exemplary crime-reduction efforts, landed Gayle McLaughlin and her city on the front page of the New York Times. Richmond was feted in both the mainstream media and numerous left-liberal journals, and when our city council passed an ordinance better protecting the formerly incarcerated against job discrimination, even Fox News hosted a Richmond-inspired debate on the merits of “ban the box” legislation.
But beneath the warm glow of such favorable publicity, a more disturbing local reality was unspooling at Tuesday night meetings of the city council. Politics in Richmond has long been a brutal, stressful contact sport. In 2013–2014, election-year rancor became a permanent fixture of civic life. Whether the proceedings were viewed in real time by the council’s live audience or later via public access cable, the content was shocking. The council chambers were filled with bitter, escalating clashes between old and new political forces. Each faction commanded its own devoted following. So when the verbal jousting started during “public comment” periods, anyone seated on the dais—who was disliked or distrusted by one side or the other—could become a target. The resulting public spectacle was described by local author David Helvarg as the equivalent of “watching cage fighting on TV.”
At these Tuesday night tussles, Mayor McLaughlin and her vice mayor, Jovanka Beckles, were the RPA leaders who saw the most action. At fifty-one, Beckles is youthful in appearance and exuberant in manner. She sometimes ends her political speeches with a Black Panther flourish. Thrusting her right fist high above her head, she signs off with a sixties catchphrase: “All power to the people!” She radiates such relentless good humor and palpable sincerity that she can deliver this line without coming off as hopelessly retro.
McLaughlin and Beckles were regularly pitted against fellow councilors Nat Bates and Courtland “Corky” Booze, whose last name is pronounced “Boo-zay.” Bates was first elected to the council in 1967. His new sixty-nine-year-old sidekick, Corky, was a first-termer, elected in 2010 and previously dismissed by Bates and other black community leaders as “a noisy gadfly.”2 A former stock-car racer who became the owner of a gas station and auto shop, Booze has a flamboyant gift for gab that beguiled some in the press and attracted a core of devoted followers in the African American community. His personal life and business history were both marked by controversy, sometimes arising from physical scuffles with men and women much smaller than him (Booze is about six foot three, 230 pounds).
For two decades, Corky balked at cleaning up the accumulation of junk on his Richmond commercial property that the city deemed a public nuisance and fire hazard. Contra Costa County court records listed him as a defendant in more than thirty civil cases, mainly involving unpaid debts. With similar financial acumen he also failed to handle political campaign funds properly, triggering investigations and sanctions by the California Fair Political Practices Commission, involving some of his ten council races (only one of which was successful). Corky’s personal narcissism and rhetorical bullying rivaled that of Donald Trump. Like “The Donald,” he often referred to himself in the third person.
During Gayle McLaughlin’s first term as mayor, she nevertheless recognized Booze’s better side on several occasions. In 2007 he was among seventeen activists who received Richmond’s Martin Luther King Jr. Leadership Award; three years later, Booze was among a smaller group of African Americans honored by the mayor during Black History Month.3 While running for reelection in 2010 on a platform calling for greater “fairness and civility in the exercise of government,” McLaughlin endorsed Booze’s own council campaign, as did her colleague Tom Butt.
Butt acknowledged that Booze was not always “politically correct,” but touted him anyway, as someone “in tune with a large segment of the community that routinely goes unrepresented because they do not have money, power, and influence.” According to Butt, “Everyone deserves a voice in Richmond. Corky has been that voice.” These were endorsements both Butt and McLaughlin would later regret making. Neither had any idea at the time just how politically incorrect—not to mention uncivil—Booze’s voice would later become, after he and his followers parted company with their 2010 campaign allies. As a new member of the council, Booze soon bonded with Bates, and the two began marching in lockstep with Ch
evron and other local business interests.
Both opposed the soda tax and the Richmond Cares program. Booze questioned the effectiveness of the city’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and the money Richmond was spending on it. Both Bates and Booze opposed the Marin Clean Energy option, promoted by Butt as a way of making Richmond utility users less dependent on fossil fuel generation of electricity. Neither Bates nor Booze favored issuing a municipal ID card to undocumented immigrants in Richmond, and they also opposed curtailment of RPD traffic stops that had in the past targeted undocumented immigrants.
Both stances were much resented by the city’s growing Latino community. But Booze’s nearly overnight transformation from man of (some of) the people to Chevron’s new best friend was well rewarded in the usual Big Oil fashion. YouthBuild, a local workforce development project that he favored, received back-to-back annual grants of $100,000 from Chevron. As Tom Butt noted, Corky took full credit for this funding, which “burnished his reputation and gave him the bragging rights to go with it.”
In their pursuit of political advantage, Bates and Booze helped manufacture a city hall controversy over official recognition of gay rights, and Booze would not let up. Council clashes escalated after a rainbow flag was hoisted over Richmond city hall in June 2013 to celebrate Pride Month. The flag-raising was requested by Beckles, and McLaughlin agreed to it, leaving the official announcement to her top assistant, Nicole Valentino, who is African American and Beckles’s partner in marriage. In an e-mail to six hundred city staff members and officials, Valentino explained that Richmond was simply supporting “Lesbian, Gay, Bi-Sexual, Transgendered, Queer, and Questioning struggles and movements for recognition and equality.”
Bates and Booze demanded to know why gay pride colors had been raised without prior city council approval. They seized upon a handful of complaints from city workers who opposed this gesture of solidarity. One such e-mail expressed the fear that Richmond was becoming like San Francisco’s Castro District, a predominantly gay neighborhood. Council meeting attendees aligned with Bates and Booze accused McLaughlin of simultaneously slighting Juneteenth, Richmond’s annual celebration of the end of slavery. “Why was our flag not flown?” one speaker demanded to know.
Beckles insisted that it was her responsibility as the only openly LGBT person on the council “to represent that segment of the community which is still being discriminated against.” Although her emerging chorus of critics tried to depict her otherwise, Beckles had always been responsive to victims of bias in any form.
“The mayor determined to fly the flag, but that is something that should be determined by the council,” Bates insisted. “Now we have a big stink. We have to be more sensitive to all the people in our diverse community.” Among the displays of sensitivity that followed was a hostile crowd reaction to the reading of a city council resolution honoring gay and lesbian teens involved with the work of the RYSE Center. During the public comment section of council meetings, Booze incited and condoned repeated verbal assaults on Beckles’s own sexual orientation. Making clear that he disapproved of her “lifestyle,” Booze also criticized his Panamanian-born colleague for not really being African American, due to her country of origin. “She says she’s a black Latina,” he complained “Well, you’re either African American or you’re not.”4
Booze’s unrestrained filibustering, accompanied by jeers, cheers, chanting, marching around, and heckling by his fans in the audience finally forced the exasperated mayor to respond like any good progressive parent. Constrained by law from ejecting a disruptive fellow elected official, McLaughlin was reduced to calling time-outs to help restore order among her fractious colleagues. Booze, in turn, denounced her meeting chairing as a racist violation of his free speech rights and those of his supporters when they were removed from the room.
In fact, Bates and Booze were engaged in a concerted effort to demonstrate that the mayor could no longer chair an effective meeting. Despite being a frequent target of personal attacks, from RPA opponents and media outlets amplifying their criticism, McLaughlin had always maintained her placid composure and air of cherubic earnestness. Passionate on the stump when delivering a Richmond rally speech or pep talk at an RPA meeting, she presided over council sessions with the patient sing-song voice of a kindergarten teacher. As she tried to rein in the unruly around her, the stress and strain of incessant verbal conflict and public disrespect began to mount, and the physical and emotional toll was increasingly visible.
Even a daylong retreat for council members and senior city staff failed to change the behavior of those baiting McLaughlin and Beckles. The facilitator for this event was selected by City Manager Lindsay. He hoped city council members would find common ground on routine procedural matters at least. Bates, who had pressed for the retreat, only stayed for half of it. Neither he nor Booze would join their five colleagues in a joint pledge of mutual respect. (Booze declined on the grounds that it might prevent him from staying true to his principles.) Meanwhile, some in the community continued to show Booze undeserved respect. At an annual fund-raiser cosponsored by Chevron, the Richmond NAACP made him its guest of honor in 2013. At this dinner Booze was pleased to accept the Martin Luther King Jr. Peace and Freedom Award.5 McLaughlin and Beckles, a fellow NAACP member, boycotted the event in somewhat truer MLK fashion.
As the verbal sparring escalated, council meeting interruptions led to frequent agenda delays, which made it harder for city employees to do their jobs. “The atmosphere makes it challenging to get work done,” Lindsay said. “It can be demoralizing to a staff person who goes to a meeting to give a presentation on an item and waits hours only for the item to be held over to a later meeting.”6 Chris Magnus was forced to expand his Tuesday night police detail because, as he wryly put it, “we certainly have an engaged community when it comes to council meetings.” The RPD’s role there was not to make disorderly conduct arrests, he explained. Officers were instructed to act only “in a civil capacity,” functioning as sergeants at arms, which meant they needed to be responsive to the mayor, as the meeting chair.
Some Richmond cops got their signals crossed about who was in charge of such ejections. At one particularly raucous session in September 2013, Booze made a demeaning comment about his fellow councilor, Jael Myrick. In response, RPA cofounder Juan Reardon, a member of the audience, reacted with disgust, drawing Booze’s attention. The latter demanded that Reardon be removed from the room. According to the responding officer’s later report, Reardon had been “raising his arms in the air and flailing them around.” When Reardon was asked to leave, he allegedly told the officer: “You are not the governing body, the mayor is the governing body, and I don’t have to listen to you!” In the next day’s Contra Costa Times, the RPA leader was criticized for having a double standard on council meeting decorum. At prior sessions, according to the paper, Reardon himself had “used the public speaker’s microphone to lecture residents, who had been disruptive.” In short, the “cage fights” made everyone look bad, sooner or later. Those creating a circus-like atmosphere in the council chamber clearly hoped to reap electoral benefit from this. In 2014 both Beckles and McLaughlin faced campaigns for reelection; voters fed up with city council “dysfunction” (but not following matters too closely) might blame them for it rather than those actually responsible.
Beckles’s demanding day job, as a child protection worker for the county, put her in close touch with the needs of low-income families. Many struggle with drug use, domestic abuse, teen pregnancy, joblessness, and lack of affordable housing and child care. As the personal attacks on her increased, Beckles’s second job, her part-time work on the council, became even more stressful, tiring, and time consuming. Even under more normal circumstances, when council sessions were not so acrimonious and didn’t last until 11 p.m. or later, the official workload was great and public expectations high.
“I’m expected to keep on top of thousands of pages of documents every week,” Beckles notes. “I’m e
xpected to dig deep into issues to understand them. I’m expected to appear at dozens of events every week. I’m expected to counter the dozens of paid lobbyists and experts that corporations hire. I don’t have a personal staff. All the Richmond city council members get to share one paid staffer. The only way that we can carry out a progressive agenda, once elected, is if we keep organizing.” Yet several years into her career as a municipal official Beckles still encountered voters who “think that politics is about electing some savior.”
The mounting attacks on Beckles worried RPA leaders because, as one confided, “The homophobic baiting had legs in the African American community. It was the nut cases who did it, but they had broader support.” What the “nut cases” had to say was hard to justify under the rubric of free speech unless you were Nat Bates, also a strong believer in the First Amendment rights of corporate “persons” like Chevron. When Richmond resident Mark Wassberg and others were accused of using “hate speech,” Bates defended them. “You’re filth. You’re dirt,” a wild-haired Wassberg told Beckles during one council meeting, with no rebuke from Bates. “I’m going to keep coming up here and telling you how gays have no morality, because I have the constitutional right to say it.”
