Oakland is a city with its share of struggles: crime, gun violence, under-performing schools. Kevin Grant is working to change that. He is a former Oakland gang member who now works against youth violence by literally taking to the streets. In his work with Oakland Unite, Grant intervenes in retaliatory violence and works to keep parolees from going back to jail. He was awarded the California Peace Prize last November. KQED’s Forum with Michael Krasny talked to Grant as part of its First Person series. Here are some highlights from the interview. Edited transcript …
Kevin Grant on the Availability of Guns:
If a hundred oak trees fell in Oakland, they would have federal dollars trying to find out what Rocky Mountain Spider Fever Tick was eating them. If a hundred spears of broccoli went bad, they’d trail it all the way back to the store it was sold at and the plantation it grew from and everything else. A hundred kids are dropping. We need to find out where these guns are coming from while we’re doing our thing, because without the tools, the kids would have to go back to what I grew up with: fighting, and that’s much safer and healthier than laying each other down with these long weapons.
[They’re] shooting 223’s—these are military style ammunition that they’re getting down with today … Somebody needs to put some dollars into trailing these guns, because these kids are buying guns on the street for amounts of dollars you wouldn’t believe, and that means that the supply is grand. [My] kids is getting… what they call “long things” for two, three hundred dollars off the street…
On Race:
I was a black man, and when I was getting arrested in Oakland, every cop who arrested me was white, right? So I had that, and then I grew up in the system that helped feed that [concept of racism]. It wasn’t ‘What’d you do to get back here,’ it was, ‘Who arrested you?’ You know, ‘My parole agent.’ It was everybody else’s fault.