Counted: An Oakland Story

This week, we devote our entire show to a documentary from our friends at the storytelling podcast Snap Judgment.

Oakland is a fascinating place: the birthplace of political movements, a new frontier for tech, home to a rich arts scene and a world championship basketball team. It’s rapidly gentrifying and changing. But one thing residents still have to deal with? The city’s high murder rate.

During 2017, a team of Snap Judgment producers joined up with Oakland activists and parents to learn about Oakland’s homicide victims, their families and communities.

Counted: An Oakland Story is the result: an ambitious yearlong project documenting all 77 homicides that took place in the city in 2017. See their faces and hear each of their stories here.

We’ll hear the stories behind the numbers – the victims who were mothers, fathers, sons and brothers.

Snap Judgment is produced in Oakland, where white, wooden crosses planted at a local church to mark each death sparked producers to start investigating.

Host Sasha Khokha talks with Snap Judgment producer Adizah Eghan as she walks us through the story and the reporting process.

We feature long excerpts from the hour-long documentary, which focuses on several victims and their loved ones. And we’ll meet one man on a mission to bring the number of murders in Oakland to down below 80.

The stories Snap Judgment found were surprising, tragic and hopeful all at once. After spending a year with people whose lives intersect with deadly violence over and over again, the show's producers got to know victims posthumously, through their friends and family members. And they learned how difficult, important and dangerous the work of homicide prevention is in Oakland.

Listen to this and more in-depth storytelling by subscribing to The California Report Magazine podcast.