Publication Date: Wednesday, July 27, 2005
Our Town: Life on the street
Our Town: Life on the street
(July 27, 2005) by Don Kazak
Back in early May, eight young people sat in the front of the crowded City Council chambers and talked about how violence has affected their lives in East Palo Alto.
Most people hung on every word they said.
Outside the City Council chambers, in the lobby, a young black man, Doug Fort, was talking earnestly with Meda Okelo, the city's longtime director of community services.
"There's a lot of love in that room," Fort told Okelo. But, he added, it won't make any difference.
"Why not?" he was asked.
Money, he replied.
"It's basic math," Fort said. "If I'm going from $2,000 a week (as a drug dealer) to $400 a week, the lifestyle changes. You almost have to deprogram their minds."
Deprogramming minds of youthful drug dealers is what Fort and his colleagues are doing through an organization called "For Youth By Youth." The nonprofit agency works with county jail inmates and parolees, trying to get them to forsake "the life" of being gun-wielding drug dealers.
Fort, 27, knows the turf. He is a former drug dealer. He's also a born and bred East Palo Altan.
"I've sold drugs, I've been shot," he said. "I've lived the lifestyle. We try not to glorify it."
Fort said he left life on the street because "I saw a lot of death in front of me. There was no future. I had to make a move."
Christina Thompson, the executive director of For Youth By Youth (formerly with another, similar program) "gave us to the tools for living."
The program hands out small cards at the San Mateo County Juvenile Hall and to the 13 to 14 young men on probation they meet with once a week.
The cards have the "Commandments of the Hood," written by Joe Marshall of the Omega Boy's Club in the tough Hunter's Point neighborhood in San Francisco.
They codify the unwritten code of drug dealers and gang members:
Thou shalt not snitch.
Thou shalt handle thy business.
Thou shalt do what thy gotta do.
Thou shalt get girls.
Thou shalt not be no punk.
Thou shalt get thy respect.
Thou shalt get they money on.
Thou shalt put in work.
Thou shalt carry a gat (gun).
Thou shalt recruit.
Thou shalt be down for thy set/crew/hood.
Thou shalt be down for thy homeboy: right or wrong.
"In the words of the neighborhood, this is survival," Fort said.
"But it is really death."
East Palo Alto has come long way since the horrific 1992 with its 42 homicides. But the violence is creeping upward again.
The city had its seventh homicide of 2005 last week -- a bungled robbery -- compared to seven for all of 2004.
There have been 41 homicides since 2000, 33 of which have been gun deaths.
"Drug dealers and gangs are all territorial,"Lt. Mark Wyss, head of the San Mateo County Narcotics Task Force, said of a primary cause of shootings. When someone violates turf, people get hurt.
Street-level drug dealing isn't as visible as it once was. "I'd like to think we are keeping a hat on it," Wyss said.
"We also have information and intelligence to think there are also large-level vendors present," he added.
"How many people die in a war?" Fort asks. "That's what war is. They're part of the game, and in the game that's what happens. Everywhere."
He said he feels personally frustrated by the rising number of deaths and gang activity, and sees it as a sickness: "They have the disease of violence in their minds."
The increase in shootings and homicides prompted San Mateo County Supervisor Rose Jacobs Gibson to form the East Palo Alto Crime Reduction Task Force last year. It was at the May 2 meeting of the task force where the eight young persons described their live, and Fort talked of street math.
It's going to be tough to break the wicked cycle of being poor and selling drugs as an "easy" way to get money, compared to working a real job.
The easy way has no retirement benefits. Drug dealers don't live that long.
Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be e-mailed at dkazak@paweekly.com.. An earlier column about the May 2 East Palo Alto meeting can be read in the May 18 edition of the Weekly at www.paloaltoonline.com.
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