An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer and legal justice advocate stated she and her household have been caught in crossfire when bullets penetrated the partitions of her residence in Oakland, California.
Allyssa Victory stated she and her household weren’t injured within the incident that unfolded Friday night time.
“This is kind of regular for my neighborhood, to constantly hear sirens and hear a lot of commotion and chaos happening,” Victory informed KTVU. “It doesn’t feel good for it to hit so close to home. I’m thankful that my family is safe.”
Victory and her household, together with her husband and father-in-law, have been cleansing within the kitchen at about 10:30 p.m. Friday night time and her teenage godson was sleeping in a bed room when she heard what appeared like 10 gunshots on her block of twenty first Avenue within the San Antonio neighborhood.
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An American Civil Liberties Union lawyer and legal justice advocate stated she and her household have been caught in gun crossfire. (Getty Photos)
A bullet got here into her eating room space and one other bullet got here via her kitchen wall, exiting into a distinct room.
“It spread debris all over the dishes we had just washed,” she stated. “We were a bit rattled.”
Victory rapidly checked on her relations to verify they have been alright, inspected her residence and walked exterior the place she noticed a big police presence, inside a couple of minute of the capturing.
Oakland police stated not less than one individual fired a gun within the 2100 block of Commerce Approach and that one individual went to a hospital and stated that they had been shot. No arrests have been made in reference to the capturing.
As no stranger to crime, Victory’s neighborhood is usually the sight of sexual violence and shootings, and she or he says she can’t afford to maneuver away even when she needed to.
After being homeless at occasions throughout her childhood, she now advocates for underserved communities via engaged on meals and clothes drives at her church, in addition to being a social justice organizer with Oakland’s Youth Collectively.
Victory is a employees legal professional for the Prison Justice Program on the ACLU of Northern California, the place she works on police reform and legislation enforcement accountability and oversight. She additionally ran an unsuccessful marketing campaign for mayor of Oakland in 2022, dropping to Mayor Sheng Thao.
Earlier on Friday, Victory’s finest pal was caught within the crossfire in a distinct location in East Oakland.
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A bullet got here into Allyssa Victory’s eating room space and one other bullet got here via her kitchen wall, exiting into a distinct room. (Getty Photos)
Victory stated she had by no means skilled bullets penetrating via her residence as she was inside.
“It’s unusual for it to hit this close to home, literally,” Victory stated. “But sadly, this is regular. It seems normalized in some ways.”
“I mean, I’ve been witnessing crime my whole life, growing up in Oakland,” she added.
Witnessing the sort of crime, Victory defined, is a part of the rationale she determined to pursue a profession in legal justice.
“I wanted to help be an intervention, to understand criminal justice and its policies, how to make a real difference in everyday people’s lives,” she stated. “It makes me want to double down on my efforts to do more direct work and engage with our youth, with families, by providing people with services for healing or for trauma.”
In Oakland, violent crimes jumped 21% in 2023 in comparison with the yr earlier than, whereas automobile thefts elevated 45%, robberies rose 38% and burglaries have been up 23%. Homicides, in the meantime, remained regular at about 120 apiece in 2022 and 2023.
“There’s a lot of truth behind the ‘crime is happening,’ I would never deny that. It just happened last night in front of my house,” Victory stated.
She additionally stated she needs to keep away from perpetuating fearmongering and never grow to be so petrified of crime that she stays inside to flee it. She defined that she believes the answer to crime is to not merely put individuals behind bars.
Oakland police stated not less than one individual fired a gun within the 2100 block of Commerce Approach and that one individual went to a hospital and stated that they had been shot. (Getty Photos)
“There needs to be a larger narrative that ‘this is not new,'” Victory stated. “This didn’t just start last year or two years ago. This neighborhood in particular has been known for high rates of violence and of crime, and there hasn’t been a lot of change in that over decades.”
“So, some of the current things we’ve been doing over those decades are not working, and we’re not having a real conversation about that and just pushing out the narrative that people are criminals or people should move,” she added.
Victory stated there may be at all times a big police presence in her neighborhood, so she thinks including extra cops wouldn’t have prevented the gunfire. She additionally claimed that Alameda County District Lawyer Pamela Worth is charging circumstances that come to her with the right proof and policing protocols adhered to.
She stated working within the legal justice system doesn’t exempt her from the impacts of crime and violence, however that she nonetheless has not misplaced her progressive worldview.
“There’s still usually more to people than just the crime or the violence that they are committing,” Victory stated. “And if we can intervene earlier with public services, ensure there’s housing and show we have strong education systems, those are things that can help prevent crime from happening in the first place.”
