With gun violence on the rise, Oakland ends the year with 134 homicides

OAKLAND — Chantal Azanga-Lennon still texts her son’s phone, though it remains stowed away in a dark police locker as evidence in his January 2021 slaying. She has yet to unpack his black Saturn Ion, which was shipped back to her home in Georgia and remains parked in the carport, stuffed with his clothes, shoes and unopened mail.

“When I want to do it, my heart just races and I just can’t stop the tears,” Azanga-Lennon said. “I felt like that would make it real.”

It’s been more than a decade since the ripples of violence on Oakland’s streets extended as far and touched as many households as they did in 2021, with a surge in homicides and shootings spreading across the city. Even as other crime rates have ebbed or dropped across Oakland and throughout the Bay Area, the rising tide of gun violence in this city has left a growing swell of grief, and further stoked a debate over how best to keep the streets safe.

Overall, 134 people died in killings investigated by Oakland police in 2021 the highest annual total since 2006, when 148 people died by homicide here. Another five people were shot dead last year on freeways within the city limits, and their deaths remain under investigation by the California Highway Patrol.

The most recent freeway slaying involved a 29-year-old mother of two, who was shot dead Nov. 18, when a bullet flew into the SUV she was traveling in as it neared the Bay Bridge.

That woman, Amani Morris, was on her way to pick up materials for her new gig at a local call center. Her small children sat just feet from their mother when the fatal bullet hit.

The death left Morris’ mother, Alicia Benton, reeling. A couple of weeks after the shooting, those boys – ages 3 and 5 – still couldn’t grasp what happened, she said.

“We took them to counseling, but they can’t process it, you know?” Benton said. “It’s frustrating, it’s senseless, all of this stuff going on.”

Of the 134 homicides investigated by Oakland police, the victims were generally young and male — two-thirds of those killed last year were in their 30s or younger, including 15 children and teens. At least 79 of the people killed were Black, and about another 35 were Hispanic, according to Oakland police.

Among them was Azanga-Lennon’s son, Willie Lennon III, 30, who had been living in Oakland and was fatally shot Jan. 18 near MacArthur Boulevard and 103rd Avenue in deep East Oakland.

Nearly a year later, Lennon’s mother still routinely marches to a grassy gravesite and looks down at a headstone bearing her son’s name, along with the words “our beautiful.”

“I go there for my own sanity,” said Azanga-Lennon, who lives outside Atlanta, where her son is now buried. “And I just want to talk to him. And I say, ‘Well this time, I can talk to you and I know you aren’t going anywhere. You’re going to have to sit here and listen to me.’”

Among the homicides for which motives are known or suspected, disputes and arguments ranked as the most common factor, Oakland police said, playing a role in more than two dozen of this year’s homicides. Robbery was the known motive in at least 18. Motives have not been confirmed in 73 of the cases, police said.

The rise in murders — and related spikes in shootings and other firearm-related crimes — has caught police by surprise, and underscores a rise in gun violence that shows no signs of relenting. More than four out of every five homicides investigated by Oakland police involved gunfire, helping fuel a homicide count that rose 23% from last year and 64% compared to averages from 2015 through 2019, the five years immediately preceding the coronavirus pandemic.

Meanwhile, assaults with a firearm jumped about 95% compared to those pre-pandemic averages, while shootings at homes and vehicles rose at least 102%. And carjackings, which often involve the use of firearms, are up about 150% from pre-pandemic averages. Aggravated assaults rose about 35%, compared to pre-pandemic averages.

By comparison, the number of assaults that did not involve firearms increased at a much lower rate, rising a little more than 10% from before the pandemic.

It comes as cities across the nation have seen shootings and homicides climb steeply since the start of the pandemic, said Christopher Herrmann, assistant professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. Researchers are still trying to understand the root causes of that violence, as well as why Oakland’s figures appear so stark compared to other cities, particularly in California and the Bay Area.

While other cities in the Bay Area have seen rises in violent crime, the trends have been less stark than in Oakland. In San Francisco, there were 55 homicides in 2021, up 9% from a pre-pandemic average of about 50. However, aggravated assaults last year were down 8% from the pre-pandemic average. In San Jose, 40 people were killed in homicides in 2021, a number that includes the nine people killed in the May 26 mass shooting at the VTA yard, but is in line with the pre-pandemic average of about 34 homicides. However, aggravated assaults in San Jose rose by 11% year-over-year in 2021 and were up 30% from the 2015-2019 average.

In Oakland, police Chief LeRonne Armstrong said the pandemic impacted violence prevention programs, such as Ceasefire. The need to social distance, for example, left the program understaffed and unable to conduct the type of face-to-face work shown to prevent shootings.

He also cited the rise in so-called “ghost guns” – firearms that people can purchase online and assemble at their homes with little expertise. They do not have serial numbers, and purchasers can circumvent typical retail screening processes by ordering each component separately.

“I’ve just seen a huge influx in firearms like I haven’t seen before,” Armstrong said. “That influx of ghost guns has been something that we were not prepared for.”

But larger, more systemic forces also appear to be at play, community activists and criminal justice experts said.

“There’s so many dimensions to the way the pandemic may be behind what we’re seeing” in Oakland, said Jonathan Simon, a UC Berkeley professor of criminal justice. “One is just the level of stress it’s putting on really everybody. And we’re seeing people respond to that stress with what you could say is risky behavior.”

Overall crime remained essentially flat compared to figures from 2015 through 2019. But while robberies last year dropped about 5% compared to pre-pandemic averages — and burglaries dropped more than 15% — there were 1,094 robberies involving firearms, as of Dec. 26. That’s the highest number seen since 2016, and up 41% from 2020, Oakland police data shows.

One such robbery left Trevor Lawrence, who has lived in Oakland for 35 years, so rattled that he later bought a gun himself, driven by the terror of seeing four masked men pull guns on him and take his wallet, watch, phone and a necklace before fleeing.

“I thought I was in a bad dream,” Lawrence said. “Four guns? That was a little too much.”

He acknowledges the irony of buying a gun himself while lamenting the overall rise of gun violence across his city. But right now, he said, he sees no alternative.

“When you’ve been through that level of trauma, I feel that’s the only sense of security I have.”

Staff reporters Harry Harris, Rick Hurd and Robert Salonga contributed to this report.