This past weekend our wonderful founder, Angela Glover Blackwell was featured on Bill Moyers & Company. Her interview covers her roots here at Urban Strategies Council and all she has gone on to achieve.

Angela Glover Blackwell has spent her adult life advocating practical ways to fulfill America’s promise of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” for all. Now, with our middle class struggling, poverty rising, and inequality growing, the founder and chief executive officer of PolicyLink, an influential research center, finds reasons for hope in the face of these hard realities.

On this week’s Moyers & Company, Bill Moyers and Blackwell discuss what fuels her optimism.

“I’m not discouraged, and I wouldn’t even dream of giving up, because we’re at a moment right now where I think we have more possibility than I’ve seen in my adult lifetime,” Blackwell tells Moyers. “Part of what I’ve been feeling is that all the issues are finally on the table… So many people who are being left behind are now in places where they have voice, and influence, and they’re forcing their way into the conversation.”

“America doesn’t want to talk about race,” Blackwell states, but says the future “is a five-year-old Latina girl. It is a seven-year-old black boy. What happens to them will determine what America looks like.”

“And so this country, as a democracy, really cannot expect to continue to be proud on the world stage, competitive in the global economy, or having a democracy it can put forward as working in a multi-racial society if we don’t invest in the people who are the future.”

See the Moyers article here.

Like most measures of social outcomes and neighborhood indicators, crime is not evenly dispersed across the city, so a citywide average does not speak to the reality of every neighborhood in the same way. Our beat level crime maps are powerful tools for examining distribution and change in crime across our city. In 2011 we saw shifts in crime in both the flatlands and the hills, and with some crimes that saw drops overall there were certain neighborhoods that experienced marked increases in these very crimes.

These maps represent crime reports that have been aggregated to police beats for a number of key crime types including robbery, shootings, burglary, property and violent crimes as well as homicides. The accompanying table shows the beat level report summaries for the city as a whole. You can download the complete set of beat level maps here (large 12MB PDF) or click on the maps for a popup slideshow in your browser.

To see a summary table of all crimes in Oakland compared with the past three years and our innovative Crime Calendars check out this post.

(Click image to enlarge)

2011 Violent Crime