An Oakland Crime, Video On 3-Year Old Carlos Nava's Murder Must Be Seen

The Oakland murder of 3-year-old Oaklander Carlos Nava sparked an outpouring of emotion appropriate to the tragedy (Take guns off Oakand's streets!). But only to a certain point. There are graphic videos of the scene just after he was hit by a stray bullet allegedly produced by 26-year old Lawrence Curtis Denard (who did not enter a plea in court). Oakland videos that have not seen the light of media coverage, even by blogs - until now. For that, you can credit Oaklander Max Allstadt for doing what he does best: righteously bugging the crap out of people he thinks can make a difference if they take action. This blogger's going to skip what would be an off-the-track explanation of how that happened, and just say "Max. You are correct." At first, I objected to his plea because I felt it was sensationalizing a tragedy. But then, I realized I was going against my own belief that digital media is a mirror of our times, and to not show something is to deny others a view of what our society actually looks like. In 2009, and in a search for videos on what was happening in Oakland, I ran across a video by East Oakland 106 on YouTube, about two young brothers who stopped, then assaulted a white man in a wheel chair. A man they claimed was running drugs in their neighborhood. I posted a blog featuring the video because I felt it was important to show people what was actually happening in Oakland. (The video has been removed from YouTube.) My blog posts appear in several places, from Zennie62.com to Oakland Focus and SFGate.com. For the SFGate.com post, I took the rare action of calling the editor to advocate for the blog's posting above the website "fold," where I knew the comment exchange would be more meaningful than the insults and general bottom-feeding crap that City Brights bloggers deal with below the fold. The editor agreed, and what resulted was a massive comment debate on what was seen. This time, I don't expect such placement at SFGate.com, and I don't advocate for it - I just blog. My target is placement on search in Oakand-related matters and in Google News, and my views on how SFGate.com should be ran are massively different that what is done as of this writing. (Let's just say that if I were in charge, the site's revenue generation would be much better by a factor of 10, but they're too afraid of what I would do.) But I digress. This is the video aftermath of the murder of Carlos Nava, or one of them: This is the vigil for Carlos: Apparently the video was made just after the shooting, and before anyone realized that little Carlos was struck. The point is, if we don't want to see videos of this, then we have to act to change the Oakland society around us. Personally, I don't think that having more police is the only answer. We also have to address the lack of jobs and poor economic development in the area. Stay tuned.