A Holdup, A Killing, A Library

Allen Hicks III recruited two buddies for a holdup at Coliseum Pizza and Taqueria. Hicks backed up their demand for money with an assault pistol.

Catarino Piedra's shop had been robbed before. This time he had a gun, too. He pulled it and shot. Hicks died at Highland Hospital a short while later. The two accomplices fled.

Hicks was on probation for repeated drug dealing. He had gotten into the apartment of his ex-girl friend last Christmas Day and punched her in the face six times, so hard that her head made a hole in the wall. On a previous visit, he had brandished a gun at her.

Hicks, 22, was an aspiring rap artist. Perhaps he grew up on the songs of gutter rapper Too Short.

Soon Hicks' crowd had a sidewalk shrine up at 90th Avenue and Olive Street honoring the thug with cognac bottles and candles. That's not far from 81st Avenue and Rudsdale – where the City of Oakland promised almost three years ago that the community would have a branch library by this June.

Shrine for armed robber (Photo: San Francisco Chronicle)

The promise was a lie. The library site remains a vacant lot. The City held up work on a political gamble, listing the project in Measure N, the $148 million bond proposal on last November's ballot. The gamble failed. Voters, seeing that most of the money would go for a palace library downtown, defeated Measure N. Result: one of the poorest parts of Oakland has for years been denied a branch library, even though library director Carmen Martinez said, "It's going to be built, and it's on the way." She said that in late 2004 after the State awarded a grant for construction.

City officials always seem to propose new social programs as their major crime-fighting strategy. For example, the Measure Y taxes enacted in 2004 are to be split between more police and violence prevention programs. Today we have fewer police than when Measure Y was written, but the city council has awarded millions of dollars to favored agencies. One of them is Youth UpRising, which promotes sideshow culture and welcomes gutter rapper Too Short. The council gave the agency a five-year grant of $1.5 million.

Why does the city council drop millions on social agencies but break its solemn commitment to build a library for the same targeted "youth at risk"? The behavior seems contradictory, but it is not. Social agencies are political allies for councilmembers. A branch library is run by City employees, funded by a budget open to public oversight. There is not much ongoing political gain for councilmembers in that. They prefer to assemble a squad of allies from the executives of social agencies with counterproductive strategies and murky finances, even outright embezzlement.

In Oakland, a sidewalk display goes up for a thug ready to kill for the night's take at a pizza place. And in Oakland, the City staffs only half a police department, and the council won't build the branch library it promised.