Life, death, and colliding cultures in the 'hood

Down the block from us, a young man sleeping in a car was shot a couple of weeks ago. According to media reports, the killer pulled up and departed on a bicycle. There are no subsequent reports that anyone has been charged.

A day or so after, Erudite Partner and I checked in with each other: were we scared by this? Not really. Maybe we should be, but this event felt both horrifying and depressingly ordinary. There have long been too many young men with guns and mysterious grudges around here. They exist in their world and we in ours; any threat to us would be an accidental intersection of separate worlds. I worry more that frustrated drivers navigating the congested street will hit a child leaving the school.

After the shooting, as is common around here, friends of the dead man set up a somewhat forlorn memorial in the style of the local young.

And then the neighborhood's underlying tensions kicked in. According to the Examiner,

Less than 24 hours after [Jonathan] Bello’s death, The City received an anonymous complaint requesting the clearing of a memorial erected in his honor — flowers, some 15 candles, a cross, several empty liquor bottles and the words “RIP Dae Dae” scrawled in bright orange and black lettering on the public sidewalk where Bello was targeted.

As of yesterday, the memorial is still standing, but a block resident/neighbor hit with a public nuisance notice from the city expressed his frustrations with some of his current neighbors.

“I think it’s outrageous to demand of us — to be conscripted into taking down a memorial and erasing this tragic event and the suffering of his friends and family as if the residue of a murder is just some kind of blight,” said Ben Rosenfeld, a resident of 115 Bartlett St...

... “There’s already layers of extreme disrespect baked into the dynamics of extremely rich people invading the working class community before you even arrive at the crossroads of asking relatively new neighbors to take down a memorial,” said Rosenfeld, who has lived in the Mission for 15 years and said that a lot of “gentrification issues play out on my doorstep.”

I too wouldn't want to be asked by the city to cross the border between worlds, because that's what a clean-up order in this situation amounts to. Where possible, we have to let each other be. That's no solution, but thoughtless interventions seem likely to make an inequitable reality worse.