Back when Khadafy Washington was killed, at age 18, in August of 2000, the violent killing of a black man in Oakland seems often to have been overlooked as not newsworthy. K was killed on the night of August 4 going into August 5. After combing the microfilm version of the Oakland Tribune and Oakland Post in the week after his death, and searching the archive of the San Francisco Chronicle for the same period, it looks to me like the first time his specific killing appeared in the news was on August 9th, impersonally and in passing, as part of an article about an OPD task force being formed in response to the surge in violence that his killing had begun; 5 killings happened between Friday and Monday, culminating in an “ambush-style” double-homicide on Monday night. The new task force was charged with focusing on not just gun violence, but “quality of life” crimes including public drinking, though it is not clear where the data was coming from that suggested a connection between those kinds of crimes and violence. I wonder who thought a task force of 11 officers was going to make a difference. Perhaps they only thought it would make a difference in public perception. More coverage was being given to a multiple homicide in Marin involving the daughter of a celebrity and a missing couple in Concord. I can see that those are good stories that deserve to be covered. And the Marin story was truly sensational and surely sold issues. But, again, the killing of men on certain Oakland streets was not news.
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