East Bay Metal: Check Out Crysknife and Industrial Undergrowth

Today (4/20 dudez!!!11!!1) is the official release of Mythos, the most recent effort from the Oakland+Philly masters of metal mayhem Crysknife. I give it four horns up.

Also, Industrial Undergrowth has a demo out. I've been listening to it all weekend and can't get it out of my head. I highly encourage you to infect yourself as well.

Morgan Hill Temblor

Lest you need reminding that we live in a geologically active part of the world, well, after yesterday's shaker near the conjunction of the Hayward and Calaveras Faults you don't need reminding any more. I've often thought that it's no surprise that the theory of plate tectonics did not mature until after experience with the west coast of North America, in particular with the San Andreas and associated faults, because the fault geology here is so self-evident as to be insulting. Read with Brooklyn accent: "Hey stupid! I'm drifting over here!"

So, to sate the bloodlust of the tectonics gods before they punish us with further quakes, it's worth emphasizing some of the cooler geological features of the East Bay. If you think these are interesting then check out Oakland Geology and Berkeley's Walking The Fault.

1) There's a place in Hayward where you can actually see the displacement caused by the Hayward Fault as one side drifts north. The curb has moved noticeably over a few decades.

2) Sibley Volcanic preserve. Right up in our hills there's a dead volcano, with an old quarry exposing some of the rock. Plus it's damn purty. A few miles to the north, Lake Anza in Tilden is sitting in a dead caldera as well.

3) On Mt. Diablo, there's a cool little trail with interpretive signs heading up through the different geologic age-zones exposed on the mountain.

4) There is a wall that runs the length of the East Bay hills, from above Albany all the way down to Fremont. No one knows who built it, but there are theories ranging from boring early twentieth century rancher, to exciting but probably B.S. Aztec colony.

5) There was a train tunnel under the Oakland Hills that came out in the town of Canyon. (Never been back there? You should go.) The east entrance was buried by a landslide almost 3 decades ago. Does anyone know where the west entrance is/was?

Oakland vs. California Crime

When I saw the disparity in crime rates between Oakland and other mid-size CA cities, I asked the question "Were we always different? If not, when did we pull away?" Consequently, what I really wanted to do was compare to the other mid-sized cities (Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach, Anaheim, Santa Ana). But that's a lot of work, and not every city (or the FBI) provides historical crime data online going back before 2000, and I suspect there are people who know either where to find the data already digested, or at least in an easier format - if so, please feel free to comment.

So what I settled for was looking at whether Oakland followed the trends in homicide and general crime across the state. I used both California vs Oakland homicide, and composite crime as an indicator. To get the curves in the same region of the graph I normalized Oakland to CA in 1969, and I had to use some pretty extreme multipliers as you can see. Sources and caveats at the end; click on the graphs to make them legible.


The murder rate, in terms of the trend outpacing the rest of the state, is a relatively recent trend. From 1969 until 1991 the overall murder rate in Oakland did not rise as quickly as in the rest of the state, as a percentage of the 1969 rate, and then at the peak in 1992 it dropped slightly faster. However, just in 1999 it began to shoot up while the rest of the state rose only very slowly.

Similarly, the general crime rate in Oakland does not rise as quickly as a percentage of the 1969 rate as the California rate does. However, in 2000 when crime in the rest of the state was still falling from its peak in 1992 (and continued to until at least 2006), Oakland began climbing. Again, outpacing the rest of the state is a recent trend.

It bears keeping in mind that both the murder rate and the general crime rate peaked in 1992 in both California and Oakland, and we haven't returned to those levels. But that we see a spike beginning in 99-2000, not only while the state trend is declining but prior to the dot-bomb downtown, strongly suggests something specific to Oakland is going on.


Sources and Caveats:
(1) California homicide and crime data from the California Attorney Generals Office. To avoid holes in the graph data was smoothed between 4-year-data points.
(2) Oakland population data 2000-2007 from the Census.
(3) Oakland population data 1960-1980 from the Census, obtained here.
(4) Oakland population data 1990 from the Census, obtained here. Population was assumed to increase or decrease arithmetically between census points.
(5) Oakland absolute crime data comes from OPD.
(6) The Oakland general crime statistic is a sum of all murders, forcible rape, robbery, felony assault, burglary, total larceny, and auto thefts. The California general crime statistic is a sum of all homicides, rapes, robberies, and aggravated assaults.
(7) Data for Oakland general crime statistic 1995 was unavailable, so figure was averaged from 1994 and 1996.

Oakland Does Have a Crime Problem

I have changed my mind. Vsmoothe and an anonymous commenter showed me some better statistics. Oakland is worse than Philly. Oakland is worse than almost everywhere.

Fortunately, someone has already done what I was going to sit down and do myself, which is to compare Oakland to neighboring cities, and similar-sized California cities. And we look terrible there too.

What I would also like to see is these same stats but going back further. When did Oakland start to pull away from the other cities? How and why? Which parts of the city contribute disproportionately, and have they become crime areas in parallel, or at different times? The elephant in this discussion is race. It's 2009, we have a black president, and we still have a chronic issue with economic disparity and crime in black neighborhoods; the time to tiptoe around this subject is over.

One overcontributor is the area around 74th and Macarthur where the shootings happened, and residents of the neighborhood have expressed frustration that this is what it's taken to wake up the rest of the city to how bad it is there. So let's use this as a silver lining to convince people that we need more cops, and we need more attention on that neighborhood. I would also ask that if you live in that neighborhood and you're reading this, talk to your friends and neighbors and convince them that "don't snitch" is killing the community.

Citizen Reaction to Other Citizen Reactions

A friend of mine emailed me this today. Originally I wasn't going to post anything about my emotional reaction to the idiots heckling the police as cited in Chip Johnson's column. My friend expressed his anger more eloquently than I could:

I am interested by the response of some in the Oakland community to the murder of the four officers this weekend.

While the vast majority of Oaklanders were shocked by these crimes, some people gathered near the scene of the initial shootings to celebrate the deaths of the officers. In the Chronicle this morning, it was reported that Mr. Mixon, the man who shot the officers, had a lengthy rap sheet and was connected to an unsolved rape in Oakland a few months prior and may have been responsible for another murder in 2007. Apparently, a crowd gathered near the apartment in which Mixon was killed to pay respects to that great young man, with a member of that crowd calling Mixon a "soldier." Indeed. A soldier whose righteous missions included terrorizing innocents in Oakland through theft, assault, rape, and murder. Such a soldier would be right at home in the Sudanese army.

They also pointed to Oakland's hsitory of police mistreatment of blacks as justification for the four officer deaths. I am sure that Mixon's thoughts were solely focused on racial injustice when he first opened fire. His sister recently told the Chronicle that Mixon was "not a monster." I beg to f**king differ. Your brother was nothing short of a monster and the real tragedy here is that he was born at all. The ability of people to feed themselves lines of bullshit never ceases to amaze me.

He goes on to describe his two degrees of separation-experience; it turns out that Dan Sakai was a friend of a friend. I think a lot of people in the East Bay are going to have this experience this week.

I Am In Need of Levity

I'm considering seeing Carcass on Thursday in SF. Tell me if the schedule at the Grand Ballroom that night doesn't make you laugh too:


3/26

5:00p Appel & Frank "Spring into Style" Womens shopping event

6:30p Carcass W/ Death Angel, Suicide Silence, The Faceless, Toxic Holocaust

Vigil for Fallen Officers Tuesday 6pm

Vigil for the four officers at 6pm Tuesday, 74th Avenue and MacArthur. More information here.