Oakland Town Hall on Violence Prevention
From YouTube Channel: October 29, 2020 at 10:40PM
ONN – Oakland Mayor Libby Schaaf Holds Town Hall on Violence Prevention, Same Tired Views
Last night, Mayor Schaaf held a virtual town hall meeting to discuss the rise in gun violence in Oakland since the Coronavirus hit the industrialized World. It was, in one word, disappointing. It reminds me of The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, a book that came out in 1979, and was introduced to me back then because I was learning system dynamics at the time. Without going too much off track, Mayor Schaaf is making the mistake that UC Berkeley Professor C. West Churchman introduces in that book, of which he was author. In short, she and her Oakland officials are guilty of what is called “disciplinarian thinking”.
In The Systems Approach and Its Enemies, “disciplinarian thinking” is the problem. West wrote that the “science” of the disciplines is an “enemy” of the science of the systems approach. The reason is that it failed to see the big picture of interrelationships that cause a problem. So, in this Oakland Town Hall, to solve gun violence, the answer the discipline practitioners give is simply to get guns off the street and hire more cops. That approach totally misses the real answer.
The real answer was given in the reason the Town Hall was called to start with: Pandemic-related gun violence. So, what is the Pandemic causing? Well, loss of income. So, the real solution to gun violence is really to get money to the people who need it the most. Right?
Would you believe that answer was not even advanced during the Oakland virtual town hall meeting? I wasn’t there, but I saw the video, above. It reflected the same approach that has not helped to solve the problem at all. It was sad.
Oakland’s elected officials are afraid to do the one thing that would change the game: get millions of dollars into the hands of the poor of Oakland. Oakland should give $3,000 cash to each homeless person. Some, particularly those who are working and unhoused, will seek housing and get off the streets. Some may elect to remain in the new environments they created and save that money, but use some of it to get basic needs, like food and clothing. Whatever the case, the bet here is that gun violence will fall and dramatically.
Wealth creation is the enemy of gun violence.
What I am blogging about has never been done before, and I have said it again and again prior to this blog post. Oakland should take about $20 million from its reserves and do this. With that, it could help 6,000 in this way. That’s a substantial portion of Oakland’s adult population. One would have to be nuts to think that would not help the situation.
Stay tuned.
Note from Zennie62Media and Oakland News Now: this video-blog post demonstrates the full and live operation of the latest updated version of an experimental Zennie62Media , Inc. mobile media video-blogging system network that was launched June 2018. This is a major part of Zennie62Media , Inc.’s new and innovative approach to the production of news media. What we call “The Third Wave of Media”. The uploaded video is from a YouTube channel. When the video is “liked” by Zennie62 YouTube, then it is automatically uploaded to and formatted automatically at the Oakland News Now site and Zennie62-created and owned social media pages. The overall objective here, on top of our is smartphone-enabled, real-time, on the scene reporting of news, interviews, observations, and happenings anywhere in the World and within seconds and not hours – is the use of the existing YouTube social graph on any subject in the World. Now, news is reported with a smartphone and also by promoting current content on YouTube: no heavy and expensive cameras or even a laptop are necessary, or having a camera crew to shoot what is already on YouTube. The secondary objective is faster, and very inexpensive media content news production and distribution. We have found there is a disconnect between post length and time to product and revenue generated. With this, the problem is far less, though by no means solved. Zennie62Media is constantly working to improve the system network coding and seeks interested content and media technology partners.