Early last year, Oakland resident Doral Myles received a call to visit a shooting victim at Highland Hospital.
The victim, an 18-year-old from Napa, had snuck out of his parents’ home to hang with his friends in Oakland. While walking in the Fruitvale district, the young man was shot in a drive-by. He survived, but the gunshot wound left him paralyzed.
At Highland, the young man cried as he told Myles he felt he’d let his parents down by sneaking out of the house. He’d hoped to become a firefighter, and now, he thought, his dreams were dashed due to his paralysis.
Myles listened. That was his job—to take in the young man’s grief and offer what comfort he could. Myles told the young man not to give up on his dream, that he could still help out at the fire department in different ways.
Myles did not speak with the man’s family. He does not know what happened to him after being discharged. But the experience “touched me in a real serious way,” he said. He looked at that young man and thought of his own kids. “Having kids changes your ways and how you start thinking,” said Myles, now the father of two daughters and stepfather to four children.
Since 2016, Myles has been a violence interrupter with Youth Alive, an Oakland-based nonprofit working to break the cycle of violence through prevention, intervention, healing, and advocacy. This month marks Myles’ eighth anniversary working for the organization.
As a violence interrupter, Myles goes to the scene of shootings to provide immediate support and comfort to victims’ families, visits gunshot wound survivors in the hospital, and points people in crisis to resources. Sometimes, he’ll receive phone calls from clients asking him to intervene before a situation escalates. Occasionally, he’ll find himself talking cops down before they set off a riot.
“My job is basically trying to keep the problems down in the city of Oakland,” he said.
Deane Calhoun, formerly a public health worker in Berkeley, founded Youth Alive in 1991 to support Teens on Target, its flagship program. In 1989, a group of high school students in deep East Oakland formed the Teens on Target program with the mission of preventing gun violence in their community and at school. Today, Joseph Griffin is Youth Alive’s executive director.
In 2022, 73% of funding for Youth Alive came from contracts with the city of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention and other government entities, according to Youth Alive’s most recent annual report.
Youth Alive rolled out its violence interruption program in 2016. For its first three years, the initiative consisted of five members, including Myles, who focused solely on West Oakland. Today, the nonprofit employs 18 violence interrupters, all of whom are assigned to neighborhoods they grew up in. Most have experienced life on the streets, in prison, or both, according to Youth Alive. Their “clients,” as the interrupters call the people they work with, range from middle school students to adults in their 60s. Three violence interrupters work at OUSD campuses like Castlemont High School, Frick United Academy of Language, and Dewey Academy.
Violence interrupters do not work with the Oakland Police Department to find clients. Instead, they receive tips via email or phone call. They also communicate with local hospitals, including Highland, to conduct “safety assessments”—bedside visits in which violence interrupters will ask survivors if they’ll be safe after getting discharged and if they need someone to mediate any conflicts. In cases where retaliation or other further violence is likely, violence interrupters will sometimes help relocate survivors and their loved ones outside Oakland.
Last year, Youth Alive violence interrupters conducted 262 mediations and 207 safety assessments and relocated 43 families to safety, according to the program.
In addition to coordinating support with area hospitals, violence interrupters attend community events to spread the word about Youth Alive and meet people where they are. For example, on Oakland’s annual 510 Day, Myles participated in a community bike ride that featured more than 500 riders.
“People know what I do in my community because I go hang out with communities, spend time with them, and let them know what I do,” he said. “Some people start off not opening up, but when I tell them a little bit about myself, then the conversation begins to open up more.”
From the streets of West Oakland to over nine years behind bars
A West Oakland native, Myles grew up in Campbell Village, located in the Lower Bottoms. He attended Prescott Elementary, Lowell Middle School (which permanently closed in 2006), McClymonds High School, and Street Academy Alternative School, and generally had a positive relationship with his family. However, his upbringing was “very, very difficult,” he said.
“I was around a lot of drugs, hustlers, people getting shot on a daily basis,” Myles said. “I was going to school, playing sports, and trying to balance both being in the streets and being out the streets.”
He went to jail once for gun charges and was incarcerated four times for drug charges. He spent a total of nine years and eight months in state prisons—San Quentin, Folsom, High Desert, Corcoran, and the like.
“The things that I did in the streets, I probably didn’t have to do,” he said. “But I made that choice on my own.”
During Myles’ third stint in prison, some of his fellow inmates were assigned to be representatives of their racial group to help keep the peace among inmates. As the “Black rep” was getting ready to go home, he selected Myles to take over his position. In the two years he held that role, Myles learned how to be a mediator and intervene when fights or other tense situations would break out between inmates.
“I was basically doing the same thing in prison with a different job title—why not do it on the streets?” he said.
In 2005, during Myles’ fourth time in prison, his mother died. Her death, he said, pushed him to turn his life around. “This last term, it was mostly me focusing on how to be there for my family, for my kids,” Myles said. “This coming-back-to-jail stuff is not working anymore. I gotta get things in order.”
He’s been out of prison since 2010.
After leaving prison, Myles first heard about Youth Alive when two Youth Alive employees, who were already familiar with his background, encouraged him to join the team. At first, he was hesitant about returning to the streets. But after seeing the nonprofit “bringing peace to his neighborhood,” Myles said, he accepted the job offer.
“Doing this work, you got to be from the streets,” he said. “You’ve got to already know what you’re getting yourself into.”
Of course, the work isn’t easy. To keep his mental health in check, Myles likes to play sports, take a vacation, or watch a football, baseball, or basketball game.
“I never knew how much I needed self-care until I started working here,” he said. “Doing this kind of work, you need to tune that battery up.”
‘Police can only do so much’
Unlike OPD, violence interrupters do not enforce the law, cite or arrest people, or carry firearms. While police officers take down reports and collect evidence after a crime, violence interrupters focus on helping survivors, their families, and others at risk of falling victim to gun violence.
“Police can only do so much,” Myles said. “They can’t do what we do in the streets. People are not gonna trust them like how they trust us.”
At the scene of a shooting, violence interrupters may even step in to calm down police officers. “I’ve been to some shooting scenes where it’s been taped off, and the family’s upset and mad, and the police officer’s about to damn near start a riot,” Myles said. “We’ve had to come in as violence interrupters and tell the police officer, ‘Just calm down, let us calm this family down because the way you’re pushing it, you’re about to make the issue worse.’”
After a homicide, Myles tries to find the victim’s family and lends support by listening to them, offering them water, and giving them his business card with an invitation to call him anytime. He may also refer them to resources like the Khadafy Washington Project, a Youth Alive program providing emergency financial assistance to families who may not have life insurance for their late loved one or need help planning a funeral.
In the early stages of the violence interruption program, Myles said, many OPD officers didn’t fully understand the role of interrupters. At times, he said, officers made “nasty and mean” comments toward Myles and his colleagues at the scene of a shooting. But over the years, he said, some officers have sought help from violence interrupters in mediating conflicts between people and gangs. Myles now describes his relationship with OPD as “growing.”
Property crimes in Oakland increased after pandemic-era relief dried up
Prior to 2020, Myles said crime across the city was on a downward trend. This can be attributed to the city of Oakland’s Ceasefire program, which was implemented from 2012 to 2019 and helped reduce homicides citywide by focusing efforts on a small group of people most likely to commit—or become victims of—gun violence.
Then, once the COVID-19 pandemic hit Oakland, the city saw a rise in violent crime. Myles started noticing that his clients were beset by new kinds of problems, stemming from scams related to the expansion of public assistance during the pandemic. “People were getting killed over money,” he said.
After the unemployment benefits, Paycheck Protection Program loans, and other pandemic-related financial assistance dried up in 2021, Myles said he saw an increase in “bippings” (car break-ins) and other property crimes across Oakland.
“Once that money was gone,” he said, “they start doing the crimes on the streets—bippings, breaking into people’s cars all the time, hitting small businesses in downtown Oakland. That’s when the robberies and lootings got even worse.”
In recent months, Myles has noticed a decrease in property crimes throughout Oakland. According to citywide crime reports from OPD, commercial burglaries are down 44% from this time last year; car burglaries are down 60%.
“It’s still gonna take a little bit more time” to see Oakland communities recover from the effects of the pandemic, Myles said.
Nowadays, Myles gets called at least once a week to help a victim’s family or respond to a shooting or homicide. Many recent incidents, he said, have taken place in deep East Oakland. He and his colleagues also work two overnight shifts—from midnight to 8 a.m.—every week.
Summertime presents a unique challenge. When school is out and children and teens have more free time, Myles and his colleagues notice more violent crimes taking place and have to be more cautious. “When the sun’s out, people are outside, having a drink, enjoying themselves, and sometimes people get into simple arguments over nothing, and that leads to something bigger,” he said. “When it’s raining and it’s cold, there ain’t really too much crime going on because everybody’s in the house.”
Envisioning a safer Oakland
In the long term, Myles hopes to see OPD officers attending more community events rather than only showing up to a neighborhood after a crime has taken place. “They don’t need to do too much—just let people see them, be a presence,” he said.
Several years ago, Myles organized a softball game at De Fremery Park between West Oakland and OPD to allow children, families, and police officers to mingle and play together. “I told the police, ‘You’re not here working. Y’all are here to get to know the community,’ and that went swell,” he said.
He also believes communities should host more outdoor events, like family gatherings and neighborhood barbecue parties, to bring people together, and that the city of Oakland, business improvement districts, and other local organizations should provide more funding opportunities to make it happen. He wants Oakland youth to stay busy, whether that means getting a part-time job or taking on more responsibilities as a leader in a club, sport, or community service organization.
“When you don’t have that kind of stuff going on,” Myles said, “things get real, real bad.”
