Bakersfield blames “virus” not Criminals, Newsom Releasing Prisoners, Defund Police Movement for Crime Skyrocketing
Gavin Newsom has released tens of thousands of convicted criminals from prison. DA’s like Boudin in San Fran and Gascon in L.A. persecute cops instead of prosecuting criminals. L.A. took $150 million from the police and gave the money to social workers. Biden has opened our borders to criminals from foreign nations. The virus? Had nothing to do with crime–i—is just a poor excuse for the Democrats view that criminals had a hard life and should be helped, while the rest of us deserve to be victims.
“High rates of crime, shootings and homicides have plagued parts of Bakersfield for years, but the pandemic has had an effect similar to dousing a fire with gasoline.
The sharp rise in recent violence has galvanized community members who say it must end as they search for ways to pull their neighborhoods out of an intractable spiral.
“It’s been enough,” said Xenia King, who grew up in southeast Bakersfield and started a group called Mothers Against Gang Violence last year. “We can’t grasp at straws anymore. We have to come together and come up with a solution to this problem. It has to happen now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Right now.”
Maybe keeping criminals in jail would limit the crimes committed? Maybe deporting illegal alien’s criminals would lower the number of crimes. Stop blaming a virus for the lack of action by government.
Community seeks solutions as violence spikes during pandemic
BY STACEY SHEPARD, Bakersfield.com, 3/8/21
High rates of crime, shootings and homicides have plagued parts of Bakersfield for years, but the pandemic has had an effect similar to dousing a fire with gasoline.
The sharp rise in recent violence has galvanized community members who say it must end as they search for ways to pull their neighborhoods out of an intractable spiral.
“It’s been enough,” said Xenia King, who grew up in southeast Bakersfield and started a group called Mothers Against Gang Violence last year. “We can’t grasp at straws anymore. We have to come together and come up with a solution to this problem. It has to happen now. Not tomorrow. Not next year. Right now.”
But identified solutions are often underfunded and slow to materialize, advocates say, while crime, and ensuing tragedy, continues unabated.
Bakersfield Police reported a record number of homicides in 2020 — 45 dead in 43 separate incidents — and seven in 10 happened in neighborhoods east of Highway 99, according to a detailed list the agency provided. So far in 2021, eight of the nine homicides the department is investigating — all of them shootings — also happened in that area. Publicly released coroner’s reports show two homicides this year in and around east Bakersfield and one in south Bakersfield, just east of Highway 99, in unincorporated areas the Kern County Sheriff’s Office has jurisdiction over.
Much of the violence is related to entrenched gang activity, a scourge in some neighborhoods east of Union Avenue. Gang activity often perpetuates subsequent incidents of violence in retaliation, according to Sgt. Robert Pair, a spokesman for the Bakersfield Police Department.
But several recent incidents in which bystanders became victims have the community even more on edge, and fearing for the safety of families and children.
A week ago, 40-year-old Sha Neva Riley, a mother of four, was gunned down while at a gathering at Wayside Park just before 7 p.m. Police said more than 100 bullet casings of various types were found at the scene.
On Thursday night, two children were caught in the middle of another shooting in a neighborhood just south of Valley Plaza mall. Police said someone fired shots at a woman and a 9- and 12-year-old. The 9-year-old suffered minor injuries from glass debris caused by the impact of the bullets.
In September, two children, ages 3 and 9, were hospitalized after they were shot while the vehicle they were riding in was stopped at a red light. Police said a black SUV pulled up next to the vehicle and opened fire on a man, woman and three children.
“Action is needed. We as leaders, as activists. Our police department. Our sheriff’s department. Everyone that has a hand in running this community and keeping it safe needs to get together. We have to live here,” King said.
NOT JUST A LOCAL PROBLEM
Violent crime has spiked in cities nationwide during the COVID-19 pandemic and Bakersfield fits squarely into that trend.
In addition to rising homicides, BPD’s data on shots fired shows that starting in March, the amount of gunfire in city limits rose 75 percent last year over the previous year, to 744 incidents, up from 425 in 2019. The spike continued into this year. In January, there was an average of about three incidents of shots fired each day.
The police can only do so much, Pair said.
“What we do is we hold people accountable and if we’re present we stop the shooting. But we’re not everywhere at once,” said Pair, a 20-year veteran of the force. “It’s very frustrating. I’m a former homicide investigator… I can rattle off names for three minutes of people who didn’t deserve to die but that hasn’t changed anything.”
Advocates for southeast Bakersfield say they’re trying to make change.
King said she formed Mothers Against Gang Violence over the summer as a way to bring women together to help protect children growing up in the city’s roughest neighborhoods.
“(Women) are the ones our children first see,” she said. “We spend the most time with our children. We can make a difference in our children’s lives.”
The group reaches out to mothers in the impacted neighborhoods and offers parenting support as a way to prevent more children from falling into gang activity. The goal, she said, is “to break the chain of violence.”
Wesley Davis Jr. has run a nonprofit for 15 years dedicated to improving the lives of kids and parents in the city’s most violent neighborhoods. His own son, Wendale Davis, was shot and killed in 2006 at age 16 when he drove to southeast Bakersfield to visit a girl.
His group has a facility on Chester Avenue and 8th Street with programs focused on gang intervention, mentorship and tutoring. He’s also involved with the city Safe Streets program, a partnership between law enforcement and community members.
Davis said groups like his work on shoestring budgets to do the hard work of changing communities. What’s lacking, he believes, is greater investment from local government and elected representatives.
“No one has really gone deep. No one’s really flowing resources that way,” he said.
Even school districts, he said, will use money to hire new principals or administrators before spending more on positions that work at the community level.
“We funnel the resources up high instead of down low,” he said. “We’re really not giving the real focus where it needs to be.”
The connection between community investment and quality of life in neighborhoods is real, he said.
“If I’m a 5- or 6-year-old kid, I’m going to school and I walk by homeless people, heroin needles. When I was coming up I’ve even seen dead bodies. It has an effect on the psyche,” he said. “Gang bangers with pistols in their pockets, selling drugs on the corners. You got kids witnessing this day in and day out.”
“When you see better, you want better, you do better,” Davis said.
Davis’ foundation is struggling in the wake of COVID-19. It had to cancel several fundraisers it relies on to fund its operations. The organization applied for government economic relief grants but received none, he said.
THE IMPACT OF COVID-19
Even before the pandemic, many communities in Bakersfield, particularly in the east, southeast and southern parts of the city, were riddled with poverty, poor health, unemployment and other chronic challenges that tend to create conditions where violence and gangs flourish.
A recognized index of community health and well-being by census tract in California, called the Healthy Places Index, shows that nine of Kern County’s 10 worst-off tracts are located east of Highway 99. Not only are they the worst in Kern, all 10 rank in the bottom 1 percent of census tracts statewide, the Healthy Places Index shows.
“When you look at a community that was already underserved before the pandemic and you rip the Band-aid off that, what we’re seeing is what’s going to happen,” said Arleana Waller, a community activist who grew up in the Cottonwood area. “I hold this community responsible but I also hold our leaders responsible for not doing anything before this pandemic.”
Christina Romo, a staffer for Kern County 5th District Supervisor Leticia Perez, acknowledged that southeast Bakersfield has suffered from neglect but said Perez and the area’s newly-elected city councilman, Eric Arias, are committed to improvements.
“For decades nothing has ever happened for that community,” Romo said.
One recent investment in the community is the Bakersfield City School District’s new Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, immediately west of Belle Terrace Park, which has a focus on STEM education — science, technology, engineering and mathematics. It has been touted as an investment in the area’s future. In partnership with that project, Perez dedicated $650,000 in Community Development Block Grant funding to improve Belle Terrace Park and its surroundings with new curbs, gutters and lighting, as well as new playground equipment.
Plans eventually call for the annexation of some of Cottonwood’s multiple county pockets into the city, Romo said.
Arias recently told The Californian he is pushing for more of the city’s Measure N sales tax money to go to improvements in the southeast.
It’s a start but Waller is calling for more partnerships between community groups and local government, and more money to support the grassroots groups doing the on-the-ground work in communities, as well as to fix up parks, improve lighting and add security cameras.
She also heads up the MLK CommUNITY Initiative, which aims to revitalize southeast Bakersfield. As part of that work, she is trying to convince the city to spend $325,000 in Measure N funding to spruce up Martin Luther King Jr. Park. Meanwhile, she said, facilities in newer parts of the city have been funded to the tune of millions of dollars. She pointed to the Kaiser Permanente Sports Village, a southwest recreation complex with dozens of soccer fields, four youth football fields, and other amenities, which has received $1.5 million in Measure N funds and $3 million in outside grant funding in recent years.
“These mothers and fathers are just like the mothers and fathers in the southwest,” Waller said. “They want a better life for their children.”
Davis said the consistent neglect is a fact of life for many Black organizations in Bakersfield. He said he’s devoted to improving his community no matter what but the situation reminds him of something once said by Martin Luther King Jr.
“MLK said this: How can you ask a bootless man to pull himself up by the bootstraps? This is what we’re asking those poverty-stricken neighborhoods to do. Not only asking them to do it but asking the minority workers working with that population to do it,” he said. “We’re told, ‘don’t ask for boots but pull yourself up by your bootstraps.'”
