Hope of Silencing the Sound of Gunfire Is Long Past

“Neighborhood grapples with life in death zone,” read a front page headline last week.

“Life in death zone.” Nice turn of phrase, don’t you think? Pithy. Ironic. And nauseatingly familiar. Once again, the enclave of Oakwood, a square-mile piece of turf half a mile from the sea, has become a place where human beings are hunted down and slaughtered for no apparent reason other than the color of their skin, the possibility of gang affiliation.

I live in the next neighborhood. I hear the gunfire, the sirens, the helicopters. Friends and Venice sources call: “Do something!” “Come to the meetings!” Yes, I think. I will do that. I will attend the meetings where politicians and parents will denounce the violence, activists will plead for jobs and support, and cops will stand on the sidelines, shifting uncomfortably, as they are both attacked and praised.

But wait. More meetings? Why bother? I haven’t got a thing to offer but my rage and resignation. I’m sick of meetings. Sick of guns. Sick of gangs. Sick of drugs. Sick of the way nothing ever really changes.

And for my daughter, I am scared.

*

This is what happened the day I called my husband in tears and told him we need to move:

He was out of town, it was about 4:15 a.m. and I was waiting for my daughter’s baby sitter. I heard the telltale rumble of her rusty muffler, then heard the sickening staccato of automatic gunfire. My stomach heaved; my legs went weak. I ran outside, screaming her name.

No answer.

I burst through our gate into the alley, still screaming. The baby sitter came toward me, quizzical. I threw myself on her and held her, weeping with relief. She had not even heard the shots. But I had heard a murder. I had heard the sound of 34-year-old Manuel Gonzalez being gunned down less than a mile from my home as he walked down the street.

Gunfire, explained my Oakwood friend, will seem much closer than it actually is in the stillness of night.

Small comfort there.

*

The papers report that, contrary to the 1993 violence that claimed 17 lives between black and Latino gangs based in Oakwood and Mar Vista, this rash of shootings is harder to explain. It seems to be brown-on-brown violence, and has been concentrated along one street, 6th Avenue, the “death zone” of the headline.

Seven of 15 shootings--four fatal--have taken place on 6th. Why? It is not much different from other streets in the area. It has the same mix of funky rundown homes, apartments and cheerful remodeled bungalows.

Police and neighbors say 6th is a drug dealing corridor--and of course, drug dealing and violence often go hand in hand.

Some Oakwood residents are partial to a conspiracy theory, and this, I believe, is why the community refuses to embrace what seem to outsiders to be perfectly logical ways of controlling violence--blocked streets, anti-gang injunctions, a police substation in the old library at the edge of the neighborhood.

The power structure--affluent whites, developers, real estate speculators, cops, artists, entertainers, etc.--goes the theory, want poor and minority people out. And so it encourages, provokes and otherwise abets the violence.

A clear-thinking friend who lives in the middle of the “death zone” said to me in a knowing voice that this recent round of violence seems to have coincided with a police raid on the apartments of some gang members late last spring.

“A lot of people think the cops are keeping this thing going,” he said. “You know, they treat everybody in the neighborhood like they’re gang members. If you grew up in Oakwood, the chances are pretty good you’re at least going to know a gang member,” he said. “So when they talk about these kids being ‘affiliated’ with gangs, well who isn’t?”

To understand the seduction of the conspiracy theory, you have to understand that Oakwood was once the only Westside neighborhood where blacks could live. When Venice founder Abbot Kinney bequeathed his canal-side home to his African American chauffeur, Irving Tabor, outraged white neighbors forced Tabor to move the home to Oakwood, where it still sits, stately and tatty, on a corner of 6th Avenue. In the last 20 years, Latinos have come to account for more than half the community, and whites now outnumber blacks.

Economic forces are mysterious, intangible. Affluent people scoop up reasonably priced beach property in a working-class neighborhood and poor people feel forced out. One man’s fenced and funky three-story concrete loft in a neighborhood of modest bungalows becomes another’s offensive elitist fortress.

All the theories in the world will not change the fact that the good people of Oakwood are under siege, and drastic measures are needed to protect them. It’s way past time to worry about a police substation leading to inappropriate surveillance, about anti-gang injunctions infringing on the rights of hoodlums to do business. But that won’t happen.

There will just be more anguish, more rhetoric, more community meetings.

Which is why, for the sake of my child, I want to move.

* Robin Abcarian co-hosts a morning talk show on radio station KTZN-AM (710). Her column appears on Wednesdays. Her e-mail address is R[email protected].