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OAKLAND – Flags flew quietly at half-mast last week in Alameda County for Oakland homicide victim number 97 – high school student Tamellia Cobbs, who was shot to death in East Oakland last Monday. 

In the following two days, Oakland resident Kerry Thompson, 24, was shot dead, as was resident Alandos Faulkner, 33. Friday, Oakland police began investigating the death of a 55-year-old woman which they say is likely the 100th homicide in Oakland this year. 

The somber homocide statistics outpace last year’s 87 murders and run the risk of surpassing the city’s 1992 high of 165. 

Just as troubling – no one seems to know exactly why the violence is happening. 

The answer appears to be a complex web involving the current economy, the history of Oakland, and the ripple effects of a drug market that still weighs heavily within parts of the city. 

But increases as well as decreases in crime often don’t generate consensus among criminologists as to why violent crime happens, points out Rosann Greenspan, director of the Center for Law and Society. 

“We usually see an increase in crime rates associated with a downturn in the economy. This would be a direction to explore,” Greenspan said. “[But] it is too soon to know if this increase is a trend.”  

The rise in violent crime this year is not only an Oakland phenomenon but one that has crept into other cities with similar populations, hovering at 400,000 or more. 

An FBI report released earlier this month showed that after a few years of lower homicide rates across the country in the late 1990s, murders rose by 2.5 percent nationally in 2001 and by 9 percent in cities the same size as Oakland. 

Oakland City Councilmember Nancy Nadel, who represents the struggling West Oakland district where police say 20 percent of this year’s homicides have occurred, sees the problem as a trickle effect that stems from a larger economic problem. 

“Business in the underground economy is dangerous. The federal government has cut government subsidies by 80 percent over the past 20 years,” she said. “Most of Oakland’s flatlands are made up of... people at or below the federal poverty level, which is $17,000 for a four person household. People can’t live on that.”  

In West Oakland alone, 60 percent of residents earn less than $25,000 a year and 40 percent report no working members in the household, four times the Bay Area average. 

Larger than West Oakland and not much better off economically, East Oakland has been the site of 50 percent of this year’s homicides, according to police. 

But the question remains about why the high level of crime in Oakland neighborhoods. Neighboring San Francisco, for example, with a population twice that of Oakland, has only had slightly more than 50 murders this year.  

Sgt. George Phillips, who has been with the Oakland Police Department for 17 years, thinks the crime rate in Oakland is tied to the history of crime in the city, particularly around drugs. 

“When you go back and look at the early drug trade in Oakland, Felix Mitchell revolutionized the drug market. He was an entrepreneur. He would take over apartment buildings, package and distribute drugs,” Phillips said. 

He explained that Mitchell’s legacy has left an indelible mark in the drug feuds that exist today. 

“Parolees are peer-pressured and enticed into the same lifestyle,” he said. “You get some that try, really try, but the seduction of drug sales – it’s a very lucrative business.”  

Community organizations, which have joined in the effort to address this year’s surprising death rate, also see a link between the present and past. 

“Homicides aren’t new, they’re part of Oakland’s history and they’re not going to stop until neighborhoods start working with other neighborhoods,” said Don Marx, executive director of the Kids are Street Safe Campaign.  

“We had high expectations with the police department and [Mayor] Jerry Brown, but those expectations have not been met. A case in point is the addition of Oakland cops – you can’t depend on your personality to pass an initiative, you have to walk the streets and convince people,” he said. 

Measure FF, which sought to add 100 more cops to the OPD, passed, but the tax measure to fund the addition failed. 

Marx participates in the Bret Hart Middle School After-school Academy, which serves 250 kids. “You need programs like this, and you need family and community as a foundation,” said the Oakland resident. “But until people are willing to get involved, we’re going to be in the same rut we are in now.”  

Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown met with the Chief of Police and several other officers last week to talk about shifting the department’s handling of the recent spate of homicides. 

“We talked about strategies, about things that we haven’t tried and things that have worked in the past,” said Sgt. Phillips. Among some of the immediate goals for the OPD, he said, are increasing the presence of the Crime Response Teams, which deal specifically with homicide cases and increasing services for parolees who often return to the streets after being released. 

“Most of the homicides connected to the suspect or victim were on probation or parole, so that’s the audience we’re dealing with,” he said. “What we’re finding out is that a common denominator is probation and parole. Another is if the individual is somehow involved with the sale of narcotics.”  

According to Phillips, Oakland has approximately 3,000 parolees and 7,000 people on probation. Phillips said the same demographic group was tied to the bulk of last year’s homicides as this year’s. 

This year, 80 percent of the homicide victims have been African American and two thirds of them are under age 35, according to police. Half of the city’s murder victims have criminal records with five or more felonies. 

The perpetrators of this year’s murders, police say, are also mostly convicted felons – about 80 percent. Of course, that number is hard to read as 70 percent of the murder cases this year remain unsolved. 

“The reason we’re seeing a spike is because we’re seeing several different internal feuds between groups that are selling drugs,” said Phillips. “We know this through intelligence and informants, but the difficulty is that we can’t convict someone because the people who have given you information won’t testify in front of a jury.”  

The history of the city’s police department also plays into crime equation. 

Within the last year the city has also been shrouded in the controversy garnered by the Oakland Riders – the group of police officers that allegedly led violent runs through the city’s poorer neighborhoods, beating innocent people or planting drugs on them. The case has generated a climate of wariness and mistrust among the community – further complicating the situation.