{"id":487978,"date":"2026-10-07T11:22:25","date_gmt":"2026-10-07T11:22:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/487978\/"},"modified":"2026-10-07T11:22:25","modified_gmt":"2026-10-07T11:22:25","slug":"the-woman-whos-transformed-how-oakland-fights-crime","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/487978\/","title":{"rendered":"The woman who\u2019s transformed how Oakland fights crime"},"content":{"rendered":"

This story is part of a collaboration between The Oaklandside and the Emmy-nominated \u201cBrief but Spectacular<\/a>\u201d interview series that airs weekly on PBS NewsHour.<\/p>\n

Long before Holly Joshi led Oakland\u2019s Department of Violence Prevention, and before she patrolled the streets as a police officer, she learned there were two different ways to experience life in her hometown.<\/p>\n

There was the Oakland that could offer stability through employment, education, and mentorship, along with the chance to imagine a future beyond the circumstances into which one was born. And then there was life without these advantages, a tougher existence focused on survival.<\/p>\n

Joshi experienced both growing up.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere were a lot of moving pieces to my childhood,\u201d she said in a recent interview.\u00a0<\/p>\n

These different worlds shaped her family\u2019s history. Her grandparents on her father\u2019s side arrived in Oakland in 1949, part of the Great Migration of Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. Her grandfather, a member of the U.S. Navy, was stationed at the now-shuttered Alameda Naval Air Station. At the time, Joshi said, Alameda was considered a \u201csundown town.\u201d Black people were tolerated on the naval base, but when her grandfather tried to purchase a home in Alameda\u2019s leafy suburban neighborhoods, they were denied because of their race.<\/p>\n

Her grandparents eventually settled in deep East Oakland on Pippin Street. Joshi\u2019s grandmother went to cosmetology school at night while she raised the children. She later opened International House of Coiffures, a beauty salon in Southwest Berkeley.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Joshi\u2019s mother and father met as teens. Her mother was white and from the Midwest. They had Joshi when they were 19, but they separated when she was still very young, and she was raised between multiple households as her parents navigated their own lives.<\/p>\n

Her mother struggled with addiction during the crack cocaine epidemic and the war on drugs in the 1980s. She cycled in and out of jail and halfway houses.<\/p>\n

\u201cI loved both my parents very much, but they were very different,\u201d Joshi said. \u201cI felt like I was exposed to a lot of balance. I saw the world from multiple perspectives.\u201d<\/p>\n

Her father eventually became an Oakland police officer. The job brought stability and opportunities that had once seemed out of reach.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe was taking me skiing in Tahoe and all kinds of things my family had never experienced before,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her grandmother, who had picked cotton and cleaned houses as a child in the South, had a sixth-grade education. Both her parents had high school educations. With the help of family and mentors, Joshi became the first person in her family to go to college.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The things Joshi learned early in life \u2014 the two worlds one might grow up in purely by chance, one stable and advantaged, the other at a disadvantage \u2014 would come back to her later in life, informing major decisions about her career. Eventually, these insights would merge with her work as the leader of Oakland\u2019s innovative Department of Violence Prevention<\/a>, subtly informing the philosophical shift she\u2019s helping lead around the city\u2019s public safety strategies.<\/p>\n

Created in 2017, Oakland\u2019s DVP is working to reduce gun violence and gender-based violence by taking a public health-informed approach. The department provides intensive life coaching and other services to people at the highest risk of shooting someone or being shot. The work is not in opposition to the police; rather, it views the problem of violence differently, looking far \u201cupstream\u201d at the root causes of crime, tangled as they are in systemic racism, segregation, trauma, poverty, and other social forces.<\/p>\n

What Oakland and a few dozen similar agencies across the U.S.<\/a>, most of them founded just in the past decade, are trying to do is shift thinking and resources around public safety.<\/p>\n

Joshi\u2019s career path, from policing to prevention, reflects this change.<\/p>\n

Policing as a pathway to stability<\/p>\n

\"\"\/Holly Joshi\u2019s grandparents left the South and came to California after World War II seeking a better life. In Oakland they encountered new challenges and opportunities. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for The Oaklandside<\/p>\n

Joshi didn\u2019t set out to become a police officer.<\/p>\n

She had her first child in 1999 and became a single mom the following year. In 2001, she was studying criminal justice at Cal State Hayward \u2014 now Cal State East Bay \u2014 and planned to go to law school to become a lawyer.<\/p>\n

Police departments throughout the Bay Area were recruiting heavily on college campuses. Joshi was already familiar with policing through her father, Rick Hart, who worked for OPD for 28 years, was esteemed by his colleagues there, and had risen to the level of a commander.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t think that would be my pathway, but I remembered the stability that it created, and I thought, \u2018Let me just try it,\u2019\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Her original plan was to work in law enforcement for five years and save enough money for law school. Her first choice was the San Francisco Police Department, partly because she didn\u2019t want to be seen as benefiting from her father\u2019s position at OPD.<\/p>\n

Her dad persuaded her to come to Oakland instead. The department was smaller, he told her, and had more women of color who could serve as mentors. Plus, she already knew the city.<\/p>\n

The five-year plan, she said, became 14 years.<\/p>\n

Determined to prove herself after graduating from the police academy, she chose to work in Beat 30, OPD\u2019s largest and busiest patrol area, in deep East Oakland. She spent her first two years there before moving through a series of specialized assignments.<\/p>\n

Joshi worked in a crime reduction team focused on gangs, guns, drugs, shootings, and homicides. She became an undercover officer and investigator in the VICE\/Child Exploitation Unit, which she eventually supervised. She was the public information officer in the chief\u2019s office, and later in internal affairs. By 2013, she rose to chief of staff, becoming the first \u2014 and, so far, only woman \u2014 to hold that position in OPD\u2019s history.<\/p>\n

She learned discipline and organization and developed relationships across the city. But she was also a Black woman in a roughly 200-year-old institution she described as \u201cvery white, very male, very not from Oakland\u201d and \u201cvery militarized.\u201d (Today, the department is 78% male, with Latino and white officers the two largest racial groups, according to the city<\/a>.) The department, when she joined it, was just being placed under federal court oversight as the result of a class-action civil rights lawsuit alleging squads of officers had beaten up and planted drugs on over 100 Black men.<\/p>\n

Her male colleagues, she said, would often make sexist and racist jokes and microaggressions toward her.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was trying to be a police officer in an environment that wasn\u2019t necessarily created for people who looked like me,\u201d Joshi said.<\/p>\n

While the job gave her a more intimate view of policing, she also began to see its limitations.<\/p>\n

A key insight<\/p>\n

Some of Joshi\u2019s most meaningful experiences at OPD centered on combating sex trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children.<\/p>\n

Many of the survivors she encountered were Black, Southeast Asian, and Latina girls from Oakland\u2019s flatlands, where poverty and crime had been deeply entrenched for generations. Most were between 11 and 19 years old. The average age of entry into sex trafficking in Oakland was 13, Joshi said.<\/p>\n

California law and law enforcement practices at the time treated underage girls being exploited as offenders, not victims. The law had already recognized that a child could not legally consent to sex with an adult, but once money changed hands, that same child could be labeled a \u201cprostitute\u201d and sent to juvenile hall.<\/p>\n

Joshi worked to change that, including advocating for legislation that would better recognize the victimization of children and working with nonprofits and survivors of sexual exploitation.<\/p>\n

\u201cThrough that, I started to see my strengths and passions differently,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Joshi recalled a turning point during her time as an investigator, when she interviewed a young pimp right after interviewing his teenage victim. The girl, who had been trafficked on International Boulevard, had a history of sexual and physical abuse, neglect, and involvement with the foster care system. When she interviewed the 19-year-old exploiter, Joshi noticed his childhood hardships were very similar to the girl\u2019s.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn that moment, it hit me that the victim\u2019s story and the suspect\u2019s story are often the same,\u201d Joshi said. \u201cI realized this is a gendered response to trauma.\u201d<\/p>\n

Whenever she donned her badge and uniform, Joshi\u2019s goals were to seek justice for victims and improve public safety. But she began to question whether she needed to pursue those goals from inside a system whose primary tools were punitive and applied after the fact.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the time I\u2019m working with people, whether they\u2019re a victim or they\u2019ve committed a crime, every other system has already failed them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

She decided it was time for her to pivot out of policing and move upstream. That meant she\u2019d work with the same population \u2014 low-income communities, people struggling with mental health issues, and people lacking access to support systems \u2014 but would use a different, more proactive approach.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe police only have a couple of tools, which are investigation and arrest. But for the vast majority of people I was coming in contact with, me showing up on the scene in my arrest capacity was usually the least of their needs,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

While still working at OPD, she returned to school for a master\u2019s degree in leadership for social justice from Saint Mary\u2019s College. In 2015, three months before her graduation, she left the force.<\/p>\n

Building what she wished existed<\/p>\n

\"\"\/A violence interrupter shows up to the scene of a shooting in 2023. Credit: Florence Middleton for The Oaklandside<\/p>\n

Joshi moved on to community-based organizations focusing on violence prevention and the systems surrounding people most at risk. She became the executive director of MISSSEY<\/a>, an Oakland nonprofit primarily serving girls and women of color impacted by commercial sexual exploitation. She also worked for Bright Research Group<\/a>, where she was a research consultant on criminal justice systems, gender-based violence prevention, and other issues. She eventually earned a doctorate in educational leadership from Saint Mary\u2019s in 2022.<\/p>\n

She viewed these experiences as an extension of the work she\u2019d been doing as a police officer, with her ultimate goal being to build a career that allowed her to give back to the community.<\/p>\n

\u201cOakland, in the trajectory of my family\u2019s story, represents the promised land because we were fleeing racial terror,\u201d she said. \u201cMy grandma used to always say, \u2018Public service is the rent you need to pay for being alive.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

In late 2023, Joshi was appointed head of the city\u2019s Department of Violence Prevention. During its first year of existence, Oakland\u2019s DVP had just a few staff and a budget of $246,000<\/a>. But city leaders had already embraced a goal of slowly but profoundly changing Oakland\u2019s approach to public safety. By 2023, the DVP\u2019s budget had grown<\/a> to $28 million.<\/p>\n

As part of its flagship Ceasefire-Lifeline strategy<\/a>, the DVP receives intel each week from OPD identifying the community members at the highest risk of being involved in gun violence. (At any given time in the city, around 350 people are most at risk of being a victim or a suspect in a shooting, according to Joshi.) The DVP then directly reaches out<\/a> to those individuals and works with community-based organizations to offer them services to quit the cycle of violence. That support could look like relocation, employment, therapy, substance abuse treatment, or intensive case management.<\/p>\n

Community members call violence interrupters<\/a> \u2014 often people with lived experiences in gangs and the criminal legal system \u2014 before a tense situation escalates into a potentially deadly one. These credible messengers respond after shootings and homicides to try to prevent retaliation. Violent interrupters also proactively mediate conflicts through their relationships across Oakland.<\/p>\n

The DVP\u2019s intensive case managers, also called \u201clife coaches,\u201d meet with clients multiple times a week, accompany them to court, help them navigate probation and parole, connect them with jobs and housing, and provide mentorship and therapeutic support. The department currently has 15 life coaches, who can collectively serve up to 150 people.<\/p>\n

Public safety, Joshi said, cannot belong to the police alone. It requires a web of city departments and community groups, each with a different role. She believes police, prosecutors, and courts still have a role in the public safety ecosystem. But so do violence interrupters, street outreach workers, life coaches, workforce development programs, and organizations that can help people secure housing, employment, and mental health support.<\/p>\n

Joshi said that\u2019s not a rejection of policing but rather an expansion of the public safety toolbox.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe know the credible messenger model works,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

Studies of Oakland\u2019s changing public safety system lend support to the view that recent reductions in violent crime are due in part<\/a> to the city\u2019s Ceasefire strategy. One study<\/a> from 2019 found Ceasefire was responsible for a 31.5% decline in gun homicides in Oakland.<\/p>\n

Separately, some studies of community-based violence prevention services have found mixed results. A recent study<\/a> found adults participating in life coaching sessions through community organizations were less likely to be arrested, but the same was not true for youth in the same program. (Participants in those life coaching programs were not identified through the city\u2019s Ceasefire-Lifeline strategy, according to Joshi.)<\/p>\n

The Oakland she wants to see<\/p>\n

Joshi does not think Oakland has solved its problems. Community violence intervention, the type of work the DVP does, is still a relatively young field. And some of the programs Oakland is developing are still pilots. The city needs to evaluate them, adjust them, and figure out what works best.<\/p>\n

One example is a workforce development program the DVP is piloting with the Oakland Private Industry Council<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The program, Joshi said, is designed for people who may still be involved in gangs or groups. Simply sending them into an existing workforce program can fail, as the locations may be in a current or former gang member\u2019s enemy territory. Participants may encounter people with whom they have unresolved conflicts. And they may not feel prepared for the expectations of a traditional workplace.<\/p>\n

As part of the pilot, about 15 participants and their life coaches meet in a neutral location in downtown Oakland for 16 weeks. Transportation is provided when necessary, and participants receive meals and $1,000 a month.<\/p>\n

The curriculum covers practical skills many people take for granted \u2014 resumes, workplace interactions, and professional expectations \u2014 and asks participants to think about who they are and what they want their lives to look like.<\/p>\n

\u201cBy the end of 16 weeks, we want them to be ready and have made a decision on what they want to do,\u201d Joshi said. \u201cDo you want to go to truck driving school? Do you want to learn how to paint? Do you want to learn how to do construction at Cypress Mandela?\u201d<\/p>\n

The goal isn\u2019t necessarily to get them into their dream career immediately, but to help them envision a path toward it, while giving them enough stability to steer clear of the survival strategies that may have sustained them up to that point.<\/p>\n

\u201cPrison and the streets are all about survival,\u201d Joshi said. \u201cA lot of our participants don\u2019t see themselves as working professionals. No one\u2019s ever told them they could be one, and they\u2019ve never imagined it for themselves.\u201d<\/p>\n

The next step, Joshi believes, is scaling those approaches. In addition to city funding, the DVP also relies on grants and philanthropic support, including from Kaiser Permanente, Congresswoman Lateefah Simon\u2019s office, and Alameda County.<\/p>\n

While the DVP\u2019s funding is \u201cpiecemeal,\u201d Joshi said, the resources it offers better align with what she believes will lead to better public safety outcomes.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe DVP feels more expansive in terms of the creativity we can apply to support people on their journey to safety and health,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

A public safety system without silos<\/p>\n

\"\"\/Joshi\u2019s teams work as an integral component of Oakland\u2019s strategy to prevent violent crime. Credit: Estefany Gonzalez for The Oaklandside<\/p>\n

Throughout her life, Joshi has witnessed the evolution of Oakland\u2019s approach to public safety.<\/p>\n

Growing up with a mother who struggled with addiction and incarceration, she saw how police and the criminal legal system prioritized accountability over support. She\u2019d wondered what a comprehensive approach to public safety would look like but hadn\u2019t heard of community violence intervention work or life coaching.<\/p>\n

\u201cI gravitated towards the Oakland Police Department trying to create safety in the community, and I thought that was the only option in Oakland,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The city\u2019s public safety infrastructure now includes OPD, the DVP, the Alameda County District Attorney\u2019s Office, the non-police crisis team MACRO, and an extensive network of community-based organizations. Joshi said Oakland\u2019s current public safety planning also intentionally brings agencies together around violence reduction rather than treating each department as an isolated entity. She sees Mayor Barbara Lee\u2019s office as part of that change, saying Lee has helped break down some of the traditional silos between departments.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt has absolutely transformed Oakland\u2019s public safety outcomes, and it shows through the numbers,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

OPD\u2019s latest weekly crime data<\/a> shows violent crime \u2014 including homicides, assaults, rapes, and robberies \u2014 is down 18% year-to-date compared with the same time last year. Shootings are also down<\/a> 39% citywide.<\/p>\n

Since the start of the year, 189 people in Oakland have received life coaching services from the DVP, according to the DVP\u2019s focused deterrence data dashboard<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Joshi acknowledged that there\u2019s still work to be done. The city has lost<\/a> 40 people to homicide this year, and many residents still don\u2019t feel safe.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re not winning yet,\u201d she said, \u201cbut it\u2019s been a game-changer to apply the public safety tools appropriately and to have leadership that understands everybody\u2019s role.\u201d<\/p>\n

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