Well I think I ended my last installment with an observation on the use of fear in controlling the people of America. Largely it is a fear of the unknown. Today I encountered the source of some of that fear - a source that very few San Franciscans can claim to have met face to face.
Three times since yesterday I have come across the same reaction from different people about Hunter's Point (south-west San Francisco and about 20 minutes on the bus from downtown). Firstly, last night while out at my local bar with my room-mate and some of his friends I mentioned that I was visiting Hunter's Point to find out more about a programme called Brothers Against Guns. The reaction was hushed discomfort and one of them started to tell me about how it was very poor and... all stuff I knew already. She asked the rest of the table (of five 25 year-olds) how many of them had been to Hunter's Point. None. And they all said they wouldn't.
Then this morning I went to a coffee shop at about 7.30 to try to look up on the internet which bus could take me there. I am a bit of a local celebrity in that cafe as all the staff tease me about saying things like 'to take away' instead of 'to go' and 'laundrette' instead of 'laundromat' and just generally find me highly entertaining. So they started chatting this morning and I took the opportunity to ask them if they knew which internet site could inform me about transport links to Hunter's Point. 'Hunter's Point! Do you KNOW what it's like there? Are you crazy...' etc. 'Do YOU know what it's like there?' I retaliated, 'Have you ever been?' By this time I was bored with people trying to scare me out of visiting part of the city when they themselves had never been there and couldn't even tell me why exactly I shouldn't go. These guys were no exception.
Anyway, I still couldn't work out how to get there so I went to Market Street to ask at the city transport desk. When I told the woman there where I was trying to get to she said, 'That's not a very nice place...'. Yes, I said, I know. She told me to get the 19 bus and after a bit said, 'You're really the wrong colour to be going to Hunter's Point'. Yes, I said, I know. When she was showing me the map and pointing out where to get off the bus she looked at me and said, 'Do you HAVE to go there?'. YES. '...I've never been, myself'.
Now there's a surprise. By this time I just wanted to go and LIVE there to prove to all these people that to be scared of an IDEA of a place - an idea that has been fed to you to make you so afraid of potential crime that you agree with the government that less money should be spent on schools and more on beds in the Juvenile Hall (THIS IS WHAT'S HAPPENING) so that you can be less afraid - is to be a victim of this system. I wanted to say, 'Even you 'free' people are not free'.
So I went to Hunter's Point. Projects of cardboard-cutout-type housing, row upon row, upon a hill looking out over the industrial estates to the bay and across the water to Oakland. There was a blue sky. The roads were clean. There was a heavy metal gate infront of every door (but you could kick a hole in the wall i should think). There was no-one on the streets. I got off the bus and strode up towards the Brothers Against Guns house. Fine, I thought. Rather quaint.
There I met Shawn Richards. Ex-gang member (a few), ex-con (3 years in the state penitentiary), ex-dealer and current God Of The Projects. His brother was shot dead 10 years ago and he established Brothers Against Guns then at age 26. They have worked with about 500 young people and last year only 2 out of 80 were re-arrested. Two. He's pretty good. He was quite nervous of me for the first half-hour of our 'chat' and then when I started talking about London and what I know of how things work on the street there he relaxed and realised we were on the same side. He has invited me to one of the sessions he runs for young people in the Juvenile Detention Center, 'Street Talk' on Thursday night. He says that's the best way for me to see how he works.
He suggested I got a lift with one of his colleagues in her car to the busstop to get back downtown. I got in the car. She had to pick up a friend just up the hill so we sat in the car with the engine running and the doors locked outside her friend's house for about 5 minutes. I was quizzing her about the different housing - which is subsidised long-term, which is a 'housing community', who has access to accommodation in the 'peejays' etc. She was pointing out the different blocks to me and I said I'd get out and look through the gap in the houses where we were through to the temporary ones the other side. She said no, don't get out here, I'll drive you round in a minute. I said I just wanted to look through the gap quickly.
The street was dead. Nobody outside and no noise. I opened the car door and got out, walking a couple of steps to give myself the view I wanted through the gap in the houses. Ten people suddenly appeared in the road. Immediately. One man looks side to side up and down the road and then marches over. 'You better get back in that car lady'. I get back in the car. He leans down to the driver and starts shouting at her, demanding to know who I am and what I'm doing. All the other people are standing looking. The stage-set quality of the buildings enhanced the filmic nature of the scene. But I had not stumbled onto set as an extra - I was the main part!
Anyway he cooled down and once it was established that I was not a cop he started explaining that if i was going to hang around Hunter's Point I needed protection. He showed me his Masonic ring (pushing his hand through the re-locked-car-door's open window) and said that he'd had little trouble (only theft of property) since becoming a Mason. The girl we were waiting for came out and we left. I was a little shaken.
In London unless you are involved with the hustle or street beef you are not really at much risk of being affected. It is essentially a self-contained problem. Collateral damage is relatively rare. In the African-American community in California they are not gang members but rather in 'cliques', 'turfs' or 'sets' (the difference is slight but essentially they are more territorial). This means that ANYONE on the wrong patch of ground is trespassing and may take a bullet as a result. Suddenly I realised what all this fear was about. Why you don't go there.
In an article about Brothers Against Guns in the SF Weekly the description reads, 'Richard's cramped and cluttered office is a converted bedroom in a collapsing government housing project at 8 West Point Road - a neighbourhood in which, unless you're black, the bus driver may well refuse to let you off "for your own good"'. I think it was for my own good that the driver did drop me off. I needed my naivety to take a bit of a knocking.
But maybe if more people walked through each other's 'turf' we would all walk in each other's shoes a bit more easily and we would all be a bit less scared - or at least more aware of what we were scared OF and be more inclined to fix it rather than put it out of mind.
Mayor Gavin Newsom said that he was ashamed that $300billion has been spent on the war in Iraq and there are tolls of deaths of Americans always on the news and yet there are no body-counts in the media to tell us who was killed last night in the war in Hunter's Point.
I wonder how narrowly I escaped becoming a casualty of that war.
