Daniel Ramirez
Oakland city leaders will have to make hard choices about their approach to conflicting anti-gang programs
[N.B. This post has been updated to reflect the receipt of the final progress report by the California Emergency Management Administration on May 19, 2011, and that the state will begin a formal review of the O-GRIPP program.]
If Oakland is going to go forward with its gang injunction strategy, as Councilmembers Larry Reid and Ignacio De La Fuente would have it, city leaders will have to make hard decisions about how to keep that program from interfering with state-funded anti-gang programs that have already been hampered by the injunctions.
Last week, we reported on an Oakland city document detailing the conflicts between the state-funded “call-in” program, geared towards non-traditional gang prevention, and the city’s controversial gang injunction program. A final progress report accounting for $828,217 in matching state and city funds for the Oakland Gang Reduction, Intervention and Prevention Program (or O-GRIP) identifies the injunctions as one of the main challenges to the call-in effort. According to the report, overlap between the injunctions and the call-ins hurt the latter program’s credibility on the street and may have reduced participation in the call-ins.
The lack of coordination between the injunctions and call-ins was such that the state agency that funded the call-ins was never made aware of the conflict. According to Lori Newquist, the California Emergency Management Administration received a copy of the report on May 19th of this year.
Newquist said that Oakland’s Cal-GRIP grant, along with similar funds for eight other cities, was administered by Cal-EMA. A third party contractor, Stephen Wakeling of the Oakland-based Public Health Institute, was retained by Oakland through outside grant funding to troubleshoot the project as well as eight other California cities also implementing the call-in model. Neither Wakeling nor the city of Oakland had previously reported any problems regarding gang injunctions and call-ins to Cal-EMA. While Newquist did say the interaction of the gang injunctions and call-ins was something that was “between Oakland and their contractor,” she did confirm that Cal-EMA will begin formal monitoring of the Oakland grant, and the state agency will request all documentation on the project from the city of Oakland.
