Every day, Joseph “Church” Truehill wears a set of diamond-studded chains around his neck. On one hangs a medallion of a sun, and at the center of the sun is a tiny photo collage of a young man smiling. It’s Lil Mike, Truehill’s younger brother.
Truehill, an Oakland native with roots in the San Antonio neighborhood, lost his brother to gun violence in 2006 when Lil Mike was 19. He was shot in the back while riding his friend’s bike. After the shooting, Truehill’s friends spoke of retaliation and going into the streets with weapons.
“Everybody was in my ear,” Truehill said. “That’s exactly the opposite of what I needed. I needed to grieve and just process what was going on.”
In October 2022, Truehill lost another family member to gun violence in West Oakland. After his father confronted a friend from church about money he was owed, the friend shot him, and he died. The dispute, Truehill said, was over $40.
This time, Truehill received a different kind of support.
The City of Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention—which Truehill now works for as a violence interrupter through Trybe, Inc., one of their partner organizations—got involved. Trybe gave him two months off work, and DVP and Trybe assigned him a therapist at different points. To this day, DVP, Trybe, and other organizations in the DVP network reach out at least once a week to check on his mental state.
“I appreciate it because, growing up in Oakland, I’m not used to stuff like that,” Truehill said. “People genuinely having your back or being able to find support—it felt good.”
When Lil Mike died, Truehill said he struggled to process the trauma in any way except through anger. When his father died, with the therapists and support from the DVP network, he was in a much better place.
That kind of support is at risk. At a time when violent crime in Oakland has increased by 15% compared to this time last year, according to the police, the city’s initiative aimed at preventing violent crime before it happens is facing $4.4 million in budget cuts. Mayor Thao and the Oakland City Council finalized these cuts and others at the end of June when they passed the city’s next two-year spending plan designed to address a historic budget deficit.
Now, the department is faced with figuring out exactly what to cut, and by how much, to whittle its budget down by that amount.
As the department faces an even leaner future, we followed Truehill in his work as one of the DVP’s violence interrupters to understand how budget cuts to this agency could impact the Oaklanders it aims to help protect.
Pushed into violence interruption
The DVP was created in 2017 at the urging of a former Oakland City Councilmember who was tragically familiar with the grief and destruction of gun violence. Lynette Gibson McElhaney, who represented District 3 at the time, lost her grandson in 2015 after he was shot and killed during an attempted robbery in West Oakland. She pushed a divided council to take a new approach to addressing Oakland’s violence and proposed, in partnership with the council president, the creation of the Department of Violence Prevention. Two years after achieving her vision, McElhaney’s only child was shot and killed near his college campus in Los Angeles.
Today, the DVP’s mission is to reduce five types of harm in Oakland: shootings and homicides, intimate partner violence, commercial sexual exploitation, trauma associated with cold cases, and community trauma associated with ongoing violence.
The department, whose model is largely based on partnering with local organizations that are rooted in the Oakland community, responds to incidents like shootings and domestic violence after they happen, and it also works towards “interrupting” violence or addressing the root causes to stop it before it occurs. It supports victims as well as others impacted by violence, from victims’ families to entire communities.
In his lifetime, Truehill estimates that he has lost more than 200 people close to him. So far this year, he has attended 14 funerals for people he considers family. Nine of them died after shootings.
In 2014, Truehill started organizing peace walks, making flyers, and spreading the word on social media after shootings occurred to gather community members and walk through impacted neighborhoods. After the peace walks would end, he noticed people still needed a space to grieve, so he created healing circles. The healing circles, Truehill said, are places where anyone can show up and be themselves. It’s a space where they can process trauma or talk about everyday life like getting a job and surviving.
In 2021, Trybe, Inc.—a non-profit based in the San Antonio neighborhood that works to break the cycle of violence through supporting youth and families, and an organization in the DVP network—offered Truehill a role on their team as a violence interrupter, a position funded by a contract with the DVP. He saw it as a natural extension of the work he was already doing.
As the sun was setting on Friday, July 14, Truehill pulled out his phone to check his messages. He received a notification from the DVP about a shooting on 11th Avenue and East 18th Street. He jumped into a Trybe work van covered in graffiti art and drove to the shooting scene.
When he arrived, law enforcement had roped off the area with yellow caution tape. Police officers surrounded the parked vehicle where the victim had been shot while sitting in his car, allegedly during an attempted robbery. The victim had already been transported to Highland Hospital.
While Truehill’s colleagues were heading to the hospital to meet the victim, Truehill stayed at the scene. He waited for family members to arrive searching for answers. He waited for anyone involved in the shooting or looking to retaliate to show up. And he waited to see if the shooting would turn into a homicide—that is, if the victim would survive.
“A violence interrupter is pretty much a pastor, a peacemaker, a therapist, a friend, and family all in one,” Truehill said.
He spoke to concerned community members who came by, including the woman who found the victim after he was shot and a man who said he knew Truehill. Truehill had showed up for him in the past, the neighbor said, after he had been shot in a different attempted robbery just blocks away.
The victim’s brother arrived, and Truehill shared with him examples of services the DVP network could offer: therapy for the victim and his family, financial support, and relocation services if they no longer felt safe in their home. They exchanged contact information, and Truehill left.
“People think the work is the event when we respond,” said Kentrell Killens, DVP’s interim chief of violence prevention. “That’s when the work begins.”
Supporting Chalinda Hatcher’s journey to a safe space
It’s been two years since Shamara Young died, but in late July, there were still fresh flowers lining the sidewalk in front of her home in East Oakland. Above the bouquets, purple, wooden letters spelling out her name hung from the fence. Her mother, Chalinda Hatcher, sat on the porch.
“Without them, I don’t think I would have made it through the whole ordeal. I’m almost certain I would not have made it through mentally,” Hatcher said, referring to the support she received from multiple violence interrupters with the DVP after her daughter died. “I definitely wouldn’t be here talking with you.”
Hatcher’s 15-year-old daughter was murdered in October 2021 during a road rage incident on Bancroft Avenue. Young was in the passenger seat when she was shot by someone in the other car. She was taken to Highland Hospital but did not survive.
Truehill got the call that Young had been shot when she was still on the way to the hospital, but it wasn’t a work call. They were family friends, and a relative of Hatcher’s called Truehill immediately.
Truehill met Hatcher and her family at the hospital where Young was pronounced deceased on arrival, and he stayed with them until 5 a.m. That morning, he connected Hatcher to another violence interrupter who could support her long-term, Daryle Allums, and to Trybe for mental health resources. And he ordered Hatcher’s family a big meal from DoorDash.
“It was food galore. We got more food than we ever had in our life,” said Hatcher, referring to the meals her family received through DVP the two weeks following Young’s death, starting with Truehill’s DoorDash order.
Throughout those first two weeks, DVP checked on Hatcher every day, she recalled. She hadn’t had much prior experience with death. When she was overwhelmed with the logistics of planning candlelight vigils and the funeral and writing an obituary, Allums was there to help.
“Even though I was so frantic and so all over the place, he kept telling me, ‘I got you. I got you,’” Hatcher said.
Allums helped Hatcher with funeral-related costs, and a gesture that stood out to her was when someone from DVP took her to get a manicure and pedicure before the funeral—a moment when she felt cared for.
One month after Young’s death, Hatcher and loved ones celebrated Young’s birthday. Right before Young died, she and Hatcher had started planning her sweet 16. The hardest part, Hatcher said, was going from planning a birthday to planning a funeral for her child. In November—Young’s birthday month—Truehill invited Hatcher to Trybe’s annual retreat. She went. It was the first time she had the space to fully grieve.
Over the long term, Hatcher said, DVP supported her with giveaways like backpack drives for her two sons, inviting her to Christmas events and connecting her to a support group for mothers who have lost a child. Even now, she said, DVP folks still check on her, and she’s looking forward to attending Trybe’s next retreat this November.
“If I didn’t have DVP and Trybe and stuff, I might be in retaliation mode because I didn’t get help that I needed back then…I would have been so buried in anger,” Hatcher said. “I’m not perfect mentally. No. But I’m in a safe space.”
Town Nights and Buckets Not Bullets: offering fun, safe spaces to hang out
Much of DVP’s work is trying to get ahead of violence before it happens. Since most shootings in Oakland happen during summer, that’s when the agency is at its busiest.
On the evening of July 14 in San Antonio Park, it was 83 degrees outside, the DJ was bumping Kendrick Lamar’s DNA, and vendors were preparing 1,000 free meals and bottomless nachos for a crowd of San Antonio residents and friends. Trybe was hosting a Town Nights event.
DVP launched Town Nights—a series of six free events held throughout summer evenings at nine different locations, totaling 54 events—to provide safe spaces in Oakland neighborhoods most impacted by violence. The gatherings promote peace and simply offer a fun and celebratory place to gather with friends.
“It’s one of the safest places you can be in the area,” said Zachary Cohen, the violence prevention program planner with DVP who coordinates Town Nights.
That night, Truehill and other Trybe team members provided security for the event. Truehill also mingled and hugged friends he’s known for years, sampled appetizers including corn cakes topped with shrimp, and ran into his aunty, his mom’s sister.
“You just look around and everybody’s smiling, and it’s like a great feeling of connective energy,” said Truehill.
Later in July, Trybe sponsored a summer basketball day camp called Buckets Not Bullets to provide kids with an outlet for their energy. That morning, the Tassafaronga Gym on 85th Avenue in East Oakland filled with kids wearing Buckets Not Bullets t-shirts and dribbling basketballs around the court.
Before the drills began, the coaches opened the day with remarks acknowledging the high rate of gun violence these kids are growing up in. In the next generation, they said, things can change.
What comes next?
The DVP is deep in conversations about what will get cut from their violence prevention work to address the $4.4 million deficit that came down in the city’s latest budget. The agency does not make these decisions alone.
The DVP’s budget is funded by the city through two revenue streams: the city General Purpose Fund and Measure Z, also known as the Oakland Public Safety and Services Violence Prevention Act of 2014.
Revenues through Measure Z account for 75% of the next two years of funding DVP will have to contract with partner organizations like Trybe. The Public Safety and Services Violence Prevention Oversight Commission (SSOC) oversees Measure Z spending.
On July 18, the DVP submitted a memo to the SSOC outlining proposed cuts that could reach the mandatory $4.4 million reduction, highlighting four areas that it saw as possibly the most eligible: youth employment, adult employment, mini-grants (funding for residents and smaller service providers working to change norms around community violence), and healing and restorative activities, which includes funding to support families who have lost loved ones to violence—like the support Hatcher received.
DVP recommended these four areas for cuts because they are less directly aligned with Mayor Thao’s priorities of addressing group- and gun-related violence, sex trafficking, and school-based programs, said Jenny Linchey, DVP’s acting deputy chief of grants, programs, and evaluation. The DVP also considered what services are being funded through other agencies and departments, Linchey said, so that if their funding is cut, the impact might be less severe. If three of the four recommended services are eliminated, the deficit would be covered.
On July 24, the SSOC reviewed the DVP’s recommendations but did not support them. The SSOC expressed disappointment that the DVP proposed reducing partner organizations’ budgets.
“We did not want to come here with any of the four recommendations. We would choose to keep everything whole. All of these are necessary services. It is our best thinking. And we recognize that at the end of tonight, we’re still going to have a deficit,” Killens responded. “It’s going to hurt regardless. Let’s just be honest. Period.”
The SSOC recommended a different approach. It recommended keeping the partner organizations’ budgets fully funded for nine months. While Measure Z does not fund DVP staff positions, the SSOC questioned the DVP’s staffing model and recommended it cover the remainder of the fiscal year and the budget deficit with potential philanthropic funding and by leaving vacant positions open.
That plan is risky, according to Linchey. The vacant positions need to be filled from the administrative roles to the violence interrupters on DVP staff, she said, and the DVP network does not currently have enough violence interrupters to support the city around the clock. She fears that fully funding partner contracts for nine months could backfire, draining the budget when additional funding after nine months is not guaranteed. Doing so, Linchey said, could result in even worse cuts for DVP partner organizations.
With all this uncertainty swirling, Truehill worries that he could be impacted. Trybe has three violence interrupters funded by DVP, and Truehill is the only full-time staffer on their team.
“Once the cuts go through,” Truehill predicts, “I won’t be working no more.”
The DVP will submit their final funding cut recommendations on August 14 which will go through a series of reviews and discussions before the City Council meeting on September 20 where the plans will be finalized.
Beyond figuring out these immediate cuts, the DVP still has a major hurdle ahead. Measure Z sunsets on December 31, 2024. According to Linchey, the city will advocate for another ballot measure on the 2024 general election ballot to reauthorize Measure Z for another ten years. If Measure Z is not reauthorized, DVP services could be dramatically cut.
“It sucks because with the city, it’s like paper pushing what the numbers are saying, but they’re not actually standing on the corner and seeing the guy that got shot last year that’s saying, ‘Thank you,’” said Truehill.
If Truehill is impacted by the budget cuts, he expects he will continue doing the same work, he said, just without getting paid. He might try to start a non-profit; he’s not sure.
“I won’t let it affect the way I look at things or how I help people,” Truehill said. “Whatever was meant to be will be.”
