Body Count

Here in Oakland, we're getting ready to replace our police chief. Chief Batts resigned just two years into his three year contract, citing the bureaucratic challenges as the main reason he found it hard to get his job done. He didn't mention that it's pretty hard to get a job done when people are shooting at you.
Most of us don't have to think about this. It was only fairly recently that being a teacher here was a gunfire-related profession. There were three separate lockdown incidents in the first two days of school in the Oakland Unified School District. There are plenty of kids at my school who openly share about this relative or that friend who got shot. It's part of the world in which they live. And die.
There aren't many days that go by when I can read my local news without a report of a shooting, drive-by or otherwise. The residents of the "sleepy little town" in southern California didn't expect to have to read about eight people being gunned down in and around a local beauty salon. Seal Beach, after all, is not Oakland. I'm not guessing that the police chief of that "sleepy little town" will be tendering his resignation anytime soon. Orange County was happy to report that this was the first mass shooting since 1976. Those are the ones that make the TV cameras show up. There's not a lot of network coverage of the weekly body count here in Oakland. It made my wife wonder if there have been days when the casualty rate of the United States outstripped that of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. My guess is that Chief Batts won't be looking at any of those locales for a relief from the bureaucracy.