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West Oakland Councilmember and mayoral candidate Nancy Nadel says she wants to use some of Oakland’s newly-passed Measure Y violence prevention money on something she calls “peacemaking circles.” Ms. Nadel says that a judge in Nogales, Ariz. has used the circles with couples involved in domestic violence, and that a training in the technique was attended early last year by OPD Lt. Lawrence Green of North Oakland, who, she reports, “thought it was very useful.” The technique is also apparently being used, with some success, in both Massachusetts and Minnesota. 

With some slight modifications for Oakland use, I believe the councilmember is on to something. 

An Internet fact sheet put out by the Minnesota Department of Corrections (www.doc.state.mn.us/aboutdoc/restorativejustice/rjpeacemakingcircleprocess.htm) explains that the circles “provide a process for bringing people together as equals to talk about very difficult issues and painful experiences in an atmosphere of respect and concern for everyone. … [They are] built on the tradition of talking circles, common among indigenous people of North America, in which a talking piece, passed from person to person consecutively around the circle, regulates the dialog. The person holding the talking piece has the undivided attention of everyone else in the circle and can speak without interruption. The use of the talking piece allows for full expression of emotions, deeper listening, thoughtful reflection, and an unrushed pace. Additionally, the talking piece creates space for people who find it difficult to speak in a group. Drawing on both traditional wisdom and contemporary knowledge, the circle process also incorporates elements of modern peacemaking and consensus building processes.” 

Another good description of the circles and how they are used by the Massachusetts-based Roca organization can be seen at www.rocainc.org/circles.htm. 

The first modification I would suggest—and I consider it an unfortunate one—would be to drop the term “peacemaking circle.” 

The term conjures images of Native Americans sitting around a fire passing around a peace pipe because, of course, it comes directly from the practice of Native Americans sitting around a fire passing around a peace pipe. For too many Americans still infected with the memory of stereotyped Hollywood cowboy-and-Indian movies, that image is a caricature ripe for ridicule. For those of us old enough to remember how Oakland collapsed in embarrassment under the ebonics debacle—a flawed plan which deserved far more serious consideration than it got—it ought to be recognized that how an idea is named and how it is first presented to the public can be far more important than the substance of the idea itself. 

The second modification I would suggest is that—at least unless and until a major department reorganization is accomplished—we leave out the participation of the Oakland police as peacemakers and mediators. 

This is not meant as a criticism of the Oakland police—goodness knows, I’ve done enough of that in this column, and will probably do it again, when the occasion arises—but more an acknowledgement that the roles and actions we require of police as law enforcement and crime prevention officers often makes them less effective—and even, on occasion, detrimental—as peacemakers. 

And it certainly doesn’t mean that the police should be excluded from any role in the peacemaking process. 

To make peace—which is a far different thing from merely preventing violence—you have to get to the heart of the conflicts, including airing out how the conflicts came to be. 

But conflicts that have the potential for breaking out into violence oftentimes have already dipped into violence or other illegal activity along the way and, so, you are not likely to get the truth of things out if a police officer is a mediator or even if a police officer is in the room. 

This is even further a problem when police officers themselves are on one side of a dispute. Police, as we know, tend to close ranks in public when complaints are brought against one of their own. (If you want to see this in present practice, take a look at the agony and convolutions the Oakland Police Department is going through in the ongoing Riders trial.) 

One of the truths about Oakland—or any other diverse American city, I would imagine—is that the people who hang out on the streets in the violent zones are the people who can often tell you both the details of violent incidents as well as the immediate-and, sometimes, long-term causes. 

It was these people, for example, who first told me that the first death attributed to an Oakland sideshow—22 year old U’ Kendra Johnson in a February, 2002 auto accident—was actually the direct result of a high-speed police chase. Despite the later surfacing of a video showing the events leading up to that death, the Oakland Police Department has never publicly acknowledged that such a police chase even took place. 

But it is also one of the truths about Oakland—and maybe most other diverse American cities as well—that the people who hang out in the streets in the violent zones are the least likely ones to show up at official meetings to discuss causes of and cures for the violence. 

Part of the problem is that many of these street-hanging folks have crime histories themselves, which they would—understandably—prefer not get aired in a forum monitored by police. But another problem is that these folks are used to being either ignored or discredited by official Oakland, and so prefer to restrict the dispersal of their knowledge to the bars and porch steps and streetcorners and other more welcoming spots of our city. 

An Oakland Peace Project that fails to include street-familiar Oaklanders as major partners and players in the process is an Oakland Peace Project that is itself probably going to fail. 

(If you want to see how this could work in theory, and how it ends up getting botched in practice, you could take a look at the KTOP videotape of the city-sponsored town hall meeting held at Oakland’s Eastmont Mall in the summer of 2001 to come up with solutions to the sideshow problem. Sideshow participants weren’t invited, but came on their own to present their views. The tape shows how two of the sides of the conflict—sideshow participants and affected East Oakland neighborhood residents—came agonizingly close to working out a solution to Oakland’s sideshow problem, until police and city officials stepped in and aborted the process. Don’t take my word for it. Look at the tape yourself.) 

The shortest path to preventing violence and other social problems often buries the underlying conflicts and causes, leaving them to merely resurface in other places and other times (like cracking down on prostitution along San Pablo Avenue, only to have the girls and the johns move their business out along International). Making peace means bringing those underlying conflicts and causes out into the open, and attempting to bring about their resolution. Oakland, with a serious violence problem, needs to look at serious, adult solutions. The “peacemaking circles,” name notwithstanding, might be an important contribution to that solution, certainly worthy of serious consideration. 

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