Fault Lines Voices: Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce

Sugiarto Loni is the president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce.  He has worked in Oakland since 1984, and he was touched personally by violence in Oakland when he was mugged by four teenagers earlier this year.  He shares his perspective on violence in his neighborhood, and how to solve it:

"Chinatown in fact, is a community, and people comes here and has a lot of activities going on, and we also have a lot of volunteers to make sure the community is safe, people are watching out each other, and it's actually considered one of the safest areas compared to the other neighborhoods.  But even that, it's still not good enough for me, because crimes do happen, you know? But I think having an increased police force, having community take responsibility for their own community, put people who commit crimes, make them accountable, when you put them in jail, lock them up, and have some consequences.  

I'm under the impression that people who commit crime, they don't think jail is that bad, they just go in and out, go in and out, so it's like a hotel thing.  So to them it is not a big consequences.  It has to be part of the solution, it may not be the total solution. 

The victims is also suffering. The victims who get robbed and get mugged, and those people are good citizens, they pay taxes, and they need protections.

A lot of us take this community as our community, so we want to make sure this community thrive, okay? So when crime get reported, we all try to help out. We help out to report to the police, eveen though they don't speak the language, we help them to make the report to the police. So that kind of community spirits I think will make Oakland Chinatown a safer place.  

But having said that, we are not happy with the current situation because crime do happen in Chinatown, and it got reported to the police, and it hurt small business because people think oh it is unsafe, therefore we don't want to come, and we want to change that image."

Fault Lines Voices are a feature of our Fault Lines Project, exploring the causes and solutions to violence in Oakland. You can hear the reports from our series, other voices from the fault lines, read blogs from our reports, and participate in online discussions around these important issues at our Fault Lines Project page.