So, the last two weekends I’ve found myself in the middle of a sort of intense project that’s had me sitting on my butt in front of my computer, though not writing.
Here it is: We’ve had lots of talk in the Bay Area about the number of homicides in Oakland. You may have heard about all the killings in Chicago in 2012. Just over 500 in a city of 2.7 million. Oakland, with a shade under 400,000 residents, had right around 130 homicides (I’ve got reason to believe the number was slightly under-reported in Oakland; it depends, too, on how you count homicides ruled “justified”). That puts Oakland’s homicides per 100,000 residents at 32 or so, compared to 19 for Chicago. (On a
So, I set out to finish a project I started early last year to keep tabs on the Oakland homicide data. I spent all day last Sunday and some of today (before a prominent televised sporting event) trying to come up with a list of everyone killed in the city in 2012, their names, ages, whether anyone was arrested for the killing, and stories pertinent to each victim and incident. More on this later. But for now, I’m uploading the spreadsheet below.
The most depressing thing to see here, beyond the number of lives taken, and the number of very young lives ended, is how many of these cases are unsolved (meaning no arrests have ever been made).