Ishmael Reed on the Peace-and-Quiet Bandits

The people in my neighborhood haven't had a good night's sleep since 2002 because of some young men in white T-shirts who arrived around that time bringing a nasty, high-decibel noise with them. It's usually a rumbling, obnoxious bass sound, but at times, on my block, it sounds like a dozen kettledrums, amplified, whose source are woofers placed in their car trunks.

So begins a plea by Oakland's world-famous author, Ishmael Reed. Describing his efforts of nearly three years to get action from the City, Reed reports:

On Jan. 22, 2005, [Oakland police] officer Stephen Mitchell replied to a person on our e-mail tree. He said that the Oakland police had more important matters to attend to and couldn't spare the manpower to attend to our problems.

Then on August 24, Reed and his wife attended yet another meeting of the local Neighborhood Crime Prevention Council.

As in the case of all of the previous meetings I have attended, a police officer gave us reasons why the police could not respond to our problems, among them the lack of manpower. I thought his tone to be testy and defensive. I wondered whether a police officer would address a Montclair or Rockridge meeting in this tone. His salty language was disrespectful of the women who were present.

Concluding, Reed laments that his good neighbors live in a

neighborhood that, like many neighborhoods in the flats, has been ceded to lawbreakers.

Actually, Reed had a similar plea a year and half earlier. He concluded that one:

In October, I attended an International Poetry Festival in Jerusalem, despite a State Department advisory against traveling to Israel. I found more peace and quiet there than in my neighborhood.

(For Ishmael Reed's complete commentaries, see the Oakland Tribune, Sept. 21, 2005 and Feb. 3, 2004.)

Among the books of Ishmael Reed:

Oakland Rhapsody: The secret soul of an American downtown
Mumbo Jumbo
Flight to Canada
Japanese by Spring
Reckless Eyeballing
Airing Dirty Laundry
Chattanooga (poems)
Blues City: A Walk in Oakland
The Last Days of Louisiana Red
Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon
The Free-Lance Pallbearers: An irreverent novel
God Made Alaska for the Indians: Selected essays
Another Day at the Front: Dispatches from the race war