Crime, Crime, Lotta Crime
Fires are hot, homicides are up, and rent is due. Also, the Police Reform Commission is finalizing its report, and Project Rebound is making a difference in the lives of formerly incarcerated students
☀️Good morning, Fresno! It’s Sunday, Oct. 25, 2020.
👾 First off, an announcement: Our First Twitch Event
We are throwing our first Twitch stream together and we decided to invite friends of the pod to play Among Us. We all saw how fun it was seeing AOC play Among Us and we thought it’d be fun to get some of our faves to all play together and hopefully get young people to vote. WE HAVE 9 MORE DAYS UNTIL ELECTION DAY!
The stream will be tomorrow on Monday, Oct. 26 at 6:30 p.m. on twitch.tv/fivebyfivenine
Hope to see y’all there!
Hey sis. It’s Tommy. Even though I once wrote the intro, this is actually my first time writing the entire newsletter. This was a ton of work, honestly. Just exhausting. So I’m feeling a lot of appreciation for Ram this week. No, Ram did not make me write this part. Yes, I am fine. Do not call the police.
Speaking of cops, you’ll notice this installment is very police and crime focused. Sometimes when you’re making a newsletter like this, the stories just fall into a certain theme. While we strive to show the best of Fresno at Fiveby, we’re also very cognizant of the fact that Things Are Just Very Bad Much of the Time.
So that’s a bummer. But don’t let it get you down. Reality must be faced. And if we’re going to defund the police we need to understand the community that they have so often failed to serve, whether that’s a surge in gun violence, the stigmatization that formerly incarcerated people face or even the landlords that are racing to snuff their own tenants out.
This is last week in Fresno.
—Tommy 💙
Fresno By Five
🚓 Fresno Commission on Police Reform’s Final Meeting Pushed Back
The commission’s last Zoom meeting has been pushed back from Monday to Thursday, Oct. 29 at 5 p.m.
Oliver Baines, commission chair and—I truly can’t stress this enough—former police officer, said the extra days were needed to avoid a time crunch following the approval of 73 recommendations last weekend.
“We are close to the finish line,” Baines said, “It’s been very quick given the gravity of the topic.” But even so, he thinks the community will be very satisfied with what the commission came up with. Big we’ll see energy on that one.
👮 Jerry Dyer’s Plan for Gang Violence
The mayor-elect promised big moves during his first 90 days in office. He told a crowd at the peace rally that he plans to reinvigorate the Mayors Gang Prevention Initiative, which connects the mayor’s office to organizations that intervene in gang violence; establish Bringing Broken Neighborhoods Back to Life, a program that connects neighbors with one another, to the entire city; and utilize Camp Fresno in the Sierra National Forest for youth activities.
Dyer says Fresno has experienced 289 more shootings than it did last year at this time.
“The war on gangs may never be won, but it’s a battle we have to continually fight,” he said.
👼 Fresno’s D’Aungillique Jackson in the LA Times
Fresno’s own D’Aungillique Jackson, one of the youngest members of the Fresno Police Reform Commission, and president of Fresno State’s chapter of the NAACP, made it into LA Times writer Erika Smith’s column about the movement to defund the police.
“We can’t let history repeat itself, letting our fears and desperation inform public policy decisions over logic and common sense. So Jackson is absolutely right to double down on her efforts to shift money from the Fresno Police Department’s budget and toward residents who have long been denied even the most basic public amenities, such as decent parks,” Smith writes.
“I believe crime rates will go down if people wake up and love the neighborhood they’re living in,” Jackson said.
Some Extremely Not Fun Facts from this article:
We’ve had 560 shooting deaths that Fresno Police Chief Andrew Hall blames on prisons being emptied. Hall introduced a violent crime suppression task force earlier in October to address increased homicides.
Life expectancy in West Fresno is 20 years lower than the Northeast part of the city.
🎒 Out of Jail and Making Moves at Fresno State
Project Rebound is a grant funded program at Fresno State, as well as a consortium of 13 other colleges, that helps formerly incarcerated students reintegrate into society through higher education.
Ashleigh Panoo, at the Fresno Bee’s education lab, wrote the feature story about Project Rebound, which tells the story of students like Khoi Quanch, a Vietnamese immigrant who was incarcerated, and is now a graduate student at UC Berkeley thanks in part to Project Rebound. Also, Chevelle Parks, a PR student who now mentors others at Fresno State. We highly recommend the article.
A key detail is that the program has a ripple effect. It doesn’t just help the students, but the people in their closest circles. Victoria Rocha, a social work student who had been incarcerated several times, is a mother of five.
Rocha and Alex Banda hope to recreate Project Rebound at the community college level.
🏥 Coronavirus Updates: Breaking 30k Cases
As of Oct. 17, the most recent data available at the time of writing, there have been a total of 29,796 total confirmed (+794) cases and 429 (+7) deaths in Fresno County. Currently, there are 100 (+8) hospitalized. A total of 20,110 people have recovered.
We remain in the Red tier which allows restaurants and movie theaters to continue indoor operations at 25% capacity. But Fresno County is in danger of backsliding to the purple tier which will close indoor operations for said businesses.
We had a positivity rate of 7.3 per 100,000 residents last week, which is in the Purple tier zone. To remain in the Red tier, Fresno County has to meet the following state requirements:
An adjusted average daily rate of seven new coronavirus cases for every 100,000 residents
Have no more than 8% of residents who are tested for COVID-19 show positive results for the infection on a weekly basis
Testing is available around Fresno. Visit lhi.care to set up an appointment. It’s free even without insurance. If you have insurance, you can also try these other testing sites here.
🚒 Creek Fire Update
The largest single-incident fire in California history is now 61% contained, as of Oct. 24. The cause? Still unknown.
The fire has burnt 358,967 acres of the Sierra National Forest. Outcroppings of granite have slowed the spread, but we aren’t out of the woods yet, which is a problem because the woods are still very much on fire. Smoke and visibility continue to be an issue, but the hope is that cooler temperatures and light winds will clear the air.
Rental Assistance — The FEMA Individuals and Housing Program is assisting those affected by fire-related emergencies in California, including in Fresno and Madera counties.
Initially, the reward is provided for two months, but it may be extended. It can be used to help pay for temporary housing and other needs not covered by insurance, as well as personal item expenses like furniture, appliances, school supplies and even dental or medical bills.
Apply online or with the FEMA app. Yeah, I didn’t know they had an app either. Also, there’s a Helpline at 800-621-3362 from 7 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. daily.
😡 Bredefeld Mad
THE GIRLS ARE FIGHTING! NO!!!!! Councilmember Miguel Arias told Garry Bredefeld to resign after the latter got HEATED over a??? Trash clean up contract for Chinatown???
Bredefeld, our favorite councilmember, said the $143,000 contract brought by Arias was corruption because it didn’t go through the routine bidding process, which it was able to sidestep because of the council’s emergency declaration.
For what it’s worth, City Manager Wilma Quan agrees that it should have gone through the bidding process, and city staffers say they can provide the cleanup service to China Town $110,000 cheaper.
Arias said that no-bid contracts are pretty common, regular parts of city management. Bredefeld himself voted for an animal control center without a competitive bidding process.
🌬 A 10-pound bag of weed spills into the HIGHway
Okay, this is kind of a fun one. So I guess a 10 pound bag of even smaller bags of weed fell onto a Clovis roadway? It’s funny because it’s Clovis. Some of the bags broke as they hit the pavement, leaving piles of pot on the road. The ABC subheading thought of that alliteration, not me. Lovely.
Officers had to sweep, scoop and shovel the weed, an image that is very fucking funny. They even had to call a street sweeper.
💅🏽 Know Your Renters Rights
Fresnoland’s Monica Vaughan wrote a really good explainer about your rights as a renter. Ever since the eviction moratorium expired the girls—and by the girls I do mean the parasitic landlord class—have descended like vultures.
If renters have completed the declaration that they have lost income due to COVID, they are shielded from eviction until Feb. 1, 2021. However, the landlord can still try to recover unpaid rent in small claims court after March 1, 2021.
Brandi Snow, the lead housing attorney at Central California Legal Services, urges anyone who has received a notice from their landlord or a summons to court to “please call us.”
Graphic courtesy of the Fresno Bee.
Links for the Road
CUSD is set to reopen their elementary schools on Jan 19. But some campuses have already reopened employing the experimental hybrid model.
FCC breaks ground on that damn 5-level parking structure. FINALLY.
Hundreds of Fresno streetlights are getting 5G antennas. Can’t wait to read your mom’s Facebook post about how it’s causing cancer or autism or COVID or, IDK, liberalism. It’s fast tho.
🎧 On the pod this week
The vibologists learn how to preserve a neighborhood’s identity with Kiel Lopez-Schmidt, a community organizer and activist. Lopez-Schmidt is a Tower District resident who opposed Producers Dairy’s recent attempt to turn part of H Street into a parking lot for their trucks. He authored a 10-point plan for Producers to give back to their community and be better neighbors. Plus, Tommy and Ram learn all about the space around cities, the process of building parks and how one adds to a neighborhood without like, disrupting the vibe.
Broadway Parque survey: https://forms.gle/BMGdgJudz5Cuc65k9
Answer Producer survey: https://tinyurl.com/ProducersSurvey
Listen to the episode on these other podcasting platforms:
Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Anchor | Google Podcasts
Also pls give us 5 Stars on Apple Podcasts
This newsletter was written by Tommy Tribble (@tomiiwrites) and edited by Ram Reyes (@vibesradiator) | Follow Five By Five Nine on Instagram & Twitter | Remember, you are loved