Donald Trump<\/a> divide and conquer Black and brown and white people from each other,\u201d Lee said.<\/p>\n\u201cNobody in Oakland knows Donald Trump and his playbook better than Barbara Lee,\u201d said Lee, who served in Congress from 1998 until last year. \u201cWe have to push back on any effort to occupy, to send a military force here and occupy our city.\u201d<\/p>\n
In August, President Donald Trump labeled Oakland and Baltimore as \u201cso far gone \u2026 we don\u2019t even mention them anymore.\u201d<\/p>\n
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Last month, he called off dispatching federal forces to the Bay Area after talking to San Francisco\u2019s mayor and tech CEOs.<\/p>\n
The White House has in the past\u00a0rejected suggestions\u00a0that Trump\u2019s expanded push on crime in cities has anything to do with race.<\/p>\n
But Lee said the Trump administration has \u201ccrystallized for residents who they are, who they care about and who they don\u2019t\u201d and she is ready to peacefully resist federal authorities if they show up in her city of about 436,000. Their only purpose would be to \u201ccreate chaos,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe can\u2019t have violence,\u201d she said. \u201cThat plays right into Trump\u2019s hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
Tensions with Washington<\/p>\n
Trump has not specifically discussed sending troops into Oakland, and a White House official declined to speak on the record about any internal deliberations.<\/p>\n
Beam was profiled on Netflix\u2019s \u201cLast Chance U\u201d as the latest murder in the city that has seen many Black mayors and Black administrative leadership. AP<\/p>\n
Wil Ash, a lifelong resident who grew up in a predominantly Black neighborhood, said it\u2019s too soon to tell whether Lee really will help Oakland turn a new page.<\/p>\n
\u201cOnly God knows,\u201d he said. \u201cWe pray that she does.\u201d<\/p>\n
Between 1996 and 2020, the Oakland homicide rate hovered between 16.2 and 36.4 violent deaths per 100,000 people while the national rate hovered around five per 100,000, according to city police.<\/p>\n
Oakland saw murders decrease by 32% between 2023 and 2024, a city end-of-year crime report states. Violent crimes were down 19%.<\/p>\n
The mayor believes the city\u2019s Department of Violence Prevention, established in 2017, deserves some credit for the crime decline. The staff are \u201cviolence interrupters,\u201d who have experienced gun violence or incarceration and attempt to defuse conflict by speaking with members of the community they believe are involved in tensions that would lead to gun violence, said Holly Joshi, a former Oakland police officer who was appointed department chief in 2023.<\/p>\n
Less crime is good news but what also matters is whether people feel a change, said Tinisch Hollins, executive director of Californians for Safety and Justice.<\/p>\n
An escape from Jim Crow and birthplace of the Black Panther Party<\/p>\n
Many Black people left the Jim Crow South during the postwar boom and were able to buy homes, find jobs and seek higher education as Oakland became an epicenter of Black culture.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhole villages and communities uprooted and came here,\u201d said Paul Cobb, publisher of the Oakland Post, a Black newspaper founded more than 60 years ago.<\/p>\n
The migrants\u2019 children and grandchildren fueled a tradition of Black activism starting around the 1960s.<\/p>\n
President Trump has labeled cities such as Oakland and Baltimore as \u201cso far gone.\u201d AP<\/p>\n
Huey P. Newton and Bobby Seale founded the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense in 1966 and advocated for initiatives like free breakfast for children and sickle-cell anemia testing.<\/p>\n
But for many, the party\u2019s abiding image is of its gun-toting members, and its programs were often overshadowed by its confrontations with police, including Newton\u2019s manslaughter conviction in the 1967 shooting death of an Oakland police officer.<\/p>\n
\u201cSo many people had misconceptions about the Black Panther Party,\u201d said Lee, an El Paso, Texas native who worked with the party in its early years. \u201cYou name it, there\u2019s so many connections between today and yesterday.\u201d<\/p>\n
Today, Oakland\u2019s population is 30% Hispanic, 27% white, 19% Black and 16% Asian.<\/p>\n
Most Oaklanders celebrate their city\u2019s diversity and point to the pleasures of hiking, strolling Jack London Square marina and walking around Lake Merritt, all within city limits. Diversity has helped make Oakland a culinary destination that\u2019s it\u2019s home to Wahpepah\u2019s Kitchen, one of the Bay Area\u2019s few Native American restaurants. The chef at Joodooboo, a Korean tofu shop and eatery, was recently named Best New Chef by Food & Wine magazine.<\/p>\n
Crime down but economic insecurity hovers<\/p>\n
While some crime statistics may be down, that hasn\u2019t yet translated to economic security for many businesses. In-N-Out Burger shuttered its only Oakland location last year. Ayesha Curry, wife of Golden State Warriors star Steph Curry, closed her boutique in February.<\/p>\n
Oakland has lost its pro football and baseball teams to Las Vegas and the Warriors moved to San Francisco in 2019.<\/p>\n
Lee is determined to woo investment \u2014 everything from tech to historically Black colleges and universities. A local developer tied to the African American Sports and Entertainment Group is poised to acquire the Oakland Coliseum for $125 million and Samuel Merritt University is opening a downtown campus next year for 2,500 students.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was a cheerleader in high school, so I\u2019m sort of a cheerleader for Oakland,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
But would Lee welcome Trump to tour some of Oakland\u2019s vibrant neighborhoods?<\/p>\n
\u201cNo, thank you,\u201d Lee said. \u201cI encourage him to make his administration send a signal that his priorities include health care, housing, economic development, jobs, violence prevention and helping us get the guns off the streets of America. I hope that\u2019s what he is encouraging his administration to do.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Last week, Oakland\u2019s new mayor found herself consoling the friends and family of a beloved community college football…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":48795,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2136,303,153,9,11,10,87,58,5561],"class_list":{"0":"post-48794","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-york","8":"tag-california","9":"tag-crime","10":"tag-donald-trump","11":"tag-new-york","12":"tag-new-york-headlines","13":"tag-new-york-news","14":"tag-politics","15":"tag-us-news","16":"tag-white-house"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=48794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/48794\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/48795"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=48794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=48794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=48794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}