The city councilman for 34x is Larry Reid, who chairs the city’s public safety committee. He said in an interview that Oakland Strategy seeks to get "people out on the streets and on the corners, intervening and helping people.”

To that end, Reid [said], the public safety committee approved $375,000 from Measure Y on Nov. 27th. After the funding is voted on by the full council in mid-December, it will be used to fund re-entry programs for offenders and street outreach efforts.

Reid says the level of constituent involvement with the Oakland Strategy has been important and that its creation involved lots of meetings between community groups, city officials and the police department. While Oakland Community Organizations hasn’t been alone in pushing for the program, it's played a vital role in his district.

“I have the fastest growing Latino community in my district,” Reid said. “I’m constantly trying to figure out how to reach out to them and bring them into the picture. OCO is the only group that seems to be able to do that, and it’s always through the church.”

The next step, Reid said, will be to send out letters of interest to identify local groups that may wish to participate in the re-entry and outreach programs.

Roland Holmgren, public information officer for the Oakland police, thinks partnerships are the kind of community policing the city is trying to do more of.

“Who has a better finger on the pulse of a community than the people who live there?” said Holmgren.

Holmgren said the “action stage” would begin before the end of the year.

Sweeping the gym floor after the meeting, Carrillo said he thought the evening had been a success.

“We got their attention,” Carrillo said about the response from city officials. “They made commitments. That has real meaning for the community.”

When the time came for her to speak, she stood in front of the crowd wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with a large photo of her son. As she stepped up to the microphone, her voice went quickly from calm to enraged.

“Over 100 murders in a city is not normal," she said. “Worrying about the safety of your children in broad daylight is not normal."

Then she pleaded, "Drastic measures need to be taken now. The city council needs to get the money out there.”

Melero’s anger is well-justified. In early September, her son, Tomas Melero-Smith, a 19-year-old community leader and recent high school graduate, was gunned down in the early evening outside a residence just blocks from St. Louis Bertrand. Police say the gunman, who was arrested in October and confessed to the shooting, mistook Melero-Smith and his friends for members of a rival gang and began firing at them with no warning.

Alicia Melero was just one of several community members who stood up in front of the crowd and a panel of the city's public safety frontliners to demand that the city commit money and resources to what they call the “Oakland Strategy,” a violent-crime reduction program that would target troubled youth and employ outreach workers to resolve conflicts and connect young people with services and jobs.

Coordinated by Oakland Community Organizations, a faith-based group, the event was heavily orchestrated – the agenda was followed to the letter, no unsolicited questions were allowed, and, except for Melero, each speaker read very calmly from a pre-written statement.

Scripted, showy meetings like these are the hallmark of Oakland Community Organizations, and it's a formula that seems to work.

In a city full of good intentions but mostly piecemeal public safety initiatives, an organization that can turn out 200 residents from one neighborhood on a weeknight is a force to be reckoned with -- a force that city leaders listen to.

But for all the meeting's structure, Isidro Carrillo, event organizer and local community leader, described the event’s origins as an organic process – the result of four months of house meetings and neighborhood discussions with over 300 residents.

“Everyone had the same complaint,” said Carrillo, a Mexican native. “Violence and crime are advancing in our community. We felt it was time to raise our voices and say enough is enough. No more victims.”

The organizers aren’t asking for a specific amount of money from the city. They are pushing the city to better direct the $6 million allocated annually to the city budget for violence prevention by Measure Y, which was passed in 2004. The Oakland Strategy, they say, is a model for how that money should be spent.

According to Oakland Community Organizations' executive director Ron Snyder, what’s lacking in Oakland’s fight against violence and homicide is coordination. Rather than working together to share information and resources, the police, community organizations, churches and youth outreach services tend to operate independently.

Snyder thinks the Oakland Strategy could change that. Based on a Boston program called the Ten Point Coalition, the local plan would have the mayor’s office coordinating a group of city agencies, community organizations and churches to target youth that are most at-risk of committing or suffering from violence.

A key part of the strategy, Snyder said, is creating teams to examine data from the community and the police – like who’s coming out of prison, or who’s in a gang – to predict who’s most likely to commit a violent crime. Then outreach workers – social workers with street credentials – would approach the at-risk youths to offer support and to try to get them back into school or find jobs.

St. Louis Bertrand sits on the edge of East Oakland, near the San Leandro border. The largely Latino neighborhood is part of Oakland Police Beat 34x, the city’s second most violent beat. The homicide rate here has nearly doubled over the last two years, with 11 homicides so far in 2007. Snyder says 34x and 6x, another high-crime beat in West Oakland, will be the pilot neighborhoods for the project, which they hope will eventually spread to other neighborhoods.