OAKLAND — After a devastating year of crime in 2023, former Mayor Sheng Thao made a risky promise to the public: homicides would come down, she said, if the city revived a once-lauded approach to curbing gun violence that apparently had ramped down during the pandemic.
Thao left office this month after voters recalled her in the November election, but on Monday the city’s current leaders — headed by Thao’s temporary replacement, interim Mayor Nikki Fortunato Bas — took a victory lap in her absence.
The newly refurbished Ceasefire initiative, they said, has successfully curbed violence in the crime-stricken city, bringing homicides to a five-year low.
“The strategy is proactive rather than reactive,” Bas said Monday at a news conference. “It has proven time and time again that it works.”
At its core, Ceasefire involves negotiating de-escalations between people at highest risk of shooting each other, an effort to interrupt cycles of violence by discouraging retaliations.
Shooting victims are paid visits at their hospital beds by the program’s assigned police officers, while faith-based leaders help host large “call-in” meetings to offer high-risk individuals a choice: either accept mentorship and jobs and education opportunities, or face heavy prosecution.
The program also leads to arrests, including a raid earlier this month that targeted an Oakland gang, which police say is linked to a series of violent crimes across California.
There isn’t available data drawing a straight line between the Ceasefire program and Oakland’s crime numbers, but even the former mayor’s most vitriolic critics have had trouble denying that the city is seeing some improvement.
There were 82 homicide victims recorded in 2024 as of Monday, marking a 35% drop from a year before through the same date.
Of those cases, 75 were classified as murders — the unlawful, premeditated killing of one by a human being by another — and the others, including a fatal shooting by police, were considered justifiable deaths.
It is an encouraging trend in Oakland, where crime did not initially level off at the same rate as other, similarly sized California cities following a nationwide spike during the coronavirus pandemic.
City officials have said the significant reduction in violence produces a downstream effect on other areas of crime, such as burglaries, robberies and motor vehicle thefts, which through Dec. 22 had seen respective year-to-date declines of 49%, 25% and 33%, per Oakland Police Department data.
Bas has praised other apparent factors for the crime reduction, such as extended assistance this year by the California Highway Patrol, which on Gov. Gavin Newsom’s orders swelled the city with extra officers and took over managing the city’s surveillance cameras.
Bas, who will serve as interim mayor until January when she becomes an Alameda County supervisor, said Ceasefire’s funding and personnel will not be affected by upcoming planned budget cuts.
A triumphant tone struck by other leaders, including Police Chief Floyd Mitchell and Department of Violence Prevention Chief Holly Joshi, highlighted the end of a peaceful 2024 that, at one point in the fall, saw a 45-day stretch with zero homicides.
Joshi previously served as an Oakland police officer during Ceasefire’s last heyday, when the city saw violence drop to historic lows over a five-year period that ended in 2019.
This year, Joshi said, the program shifted from focusing on younger people who might commit violence over the next decade to “(working) with folks at imminent risk of violence.”
“We’re talking about the people in this city who are driving violence currently and who, within the next 90 days, may either pick up a gun and shoot someone or become a victim of violence themselves,” she said Monday.
Ceasefire, a program that originated in Boston and launched in Oakland in 2013, was developed under the Mayor Jean Quan administration and was later championed by her successor, Mayor Libby Schaaf, as a key strategy for reducing violence.
But an audit released in January determined the program was actually de-prioritized starting in 2016 and fell into neglect during the pandemic, when gatherings between its leaders and those at high-risk of gun violence became limited by public-health policies.
The audit, co-authored by two former Ceasefire officials, Reygan Cunningham and retired police Capt. Ersie Joyner III, laid some of the blame on Schaaf’s administration and former Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong, who the report said began favoring his own initiative to investigate past homicides rather than prevent future killings.
Schaaf and Armstrong have denied crippling Ceasefire, while key conclusions of the audit are not quite substantiated by its findings, such as the timeline for when the program actually began declining.
City officials said Monday that weekly police reviews of recent shootings — which the audit said lost effectiveness during the pandemic — are now attended by high-ranking OPD leadership.
“I love OPD… but they weren’t doing Ceasefire,” said Pastor Billy Dixon at Monday’s news conference, held at a local chapter of Faith in Action East Bay. “They had the name up, but it wasn’t going the way it was (before).”
Staff writer Nate Gartrell contributed reporting.
Shomik Mukherjee is a reporter covering Oakland. Call or text him at 510-905-5495 or email him at shomik@bayareanewsgroup.com.