Plan to End Bloodshed Met With Doubts : Violence: Oakland residents are skeptical that mayor’s anti-crime proposal will slow record murder rate. They say the responsibility lies with parents who neglect their children.

The bedroom windows, shattered by gunshots in the night, are boarded up. A bloodstained mattress and a bullet-riddled box spring lie discarded on the ground, the debris of murder in a city overwhelmed by killing.

It was here that a mother and her teen-age daughters were gunned down as they slept, innocent victims of a record wave of deadly violence that has swept through Oakland this year.

On a little fence outside the apartment on 49th Street, melted wax from dozens of candles remains as a mute tribute to the three. In the homicide section of Oakland police headquarters, three white pins, numbers 41, 42 and 43, are stuck neatly in a city map. Three more unsolved murders.

“One after another you see these insane arguments that result in homicides and it’s frustrating,” said Police Lt. Mike Simms, head of the homicide squad. “You wonder when it’s all going to end.”

Responding to the alarming number of murders this year, Oakland Mayor Elihu Harris last week proposed a 15-point anti-crime plan that includes a voluntary curfew for juveniles, increased police patrols and improved social services.

But across this city of 372,000, where lavish hilltop homes with gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge overlook some of the Bay Area’s worst poverty, residents are skeptical that government can halt the killings.

The responsibility, many say, lies with parents who have neglected their children and let them grow up without love, discipline or a proper education. For some families, they say, it is too late to rescue their teen-agers from lives of violent crime.

“The curfew is not going to stop the killing,” said a neighbor of the three 49th Street murder victims. “Most of the parents are under siege from their children.”

The neighbor, a grandmother who works as a security guard, declined to give her name out of fear for her safety. “I have to live here,” she said, “and I don’t want to bring harm on my family.”

In the first 86 days of the year, 55 people were murdered in Oakland, compared to 32 during the same period last year. The city already had the highest murder rate of any large city in California; at the current pace, Oakland will far outstrip last year’s record of 165 murders.

Police say most of the killings are linked to drugs and gangs, though domestic violence and armed robberies contribute their share. Much of the increase, authorities say, stems from the fact that young people are quicker these days to resort to violence to resolve minor disputes.

One of the city’s most shocking killing sprees was the triple slaying three weeks ago on 49th Street, in an integrated neighborhood where a 32-unit housing project stands among $200,000 homes.

Gang members were apparently seeking revenge against a 23-year-old woman who lived in the housing project with her mother, grandmother, sisters and nephew. In the early morning hours of March 10, gunmen crept up to the bedroom windows of the apartment and fired with semiautomatic weapons.

Their intended victim was sleeping in the living room and escaped uninjured. But her mother, Laura Taylor, 40, and her two younger sisters, Myesha Jacobs, 16, and Tomika Jacobs, 14, died in the hail of bullets. Two-year-old Tony Redd was wounded.

No suspects have been arrested. But since that day, 12 more people have been murdered in Oakland, including seven in one 24-hour period this month.

Linda Nicholson, a mother of four on welfare who lives in the small housing project, examined the boarded windows and the bullet-riddled bed.

“They need to stop selling guns and give the youngsters some jobs,” she said. “They need some kind of recreational center where they can go instead of being on the streets.”

In calling for the voluntary curfew, Harris urged parents to keep their children indoors after 10 p.m. unless they had a legitimate reason to be out. He proposed sending the first police foot patrols into neighborhoods and providing job training, social services and recreation for the city’s largest housing project.

In addition, the mayor called for laws that would send parents to jail if their children used weapons, permit the sale of ammunition only to registered gun owners, and require forfeiture of any vehicle found carrying a concealed weapon.

“It’s not going to help--it has to be in the home,” said Dolores Uschold, a mother of three who lives next to the 49th Street housing project. “The kids are used to being in the street. They’ve practically raised themselves in the street.”

Anita Carse, 16, a 10th-grade student at nearby Oakland Technical School, agreed. “If the parents don’t care, it’s not going to work,” she said. “I don’t go out anyway. You’re not safe nowhere. You’re not safe in your own home. A lot of people have disagreements with each other and they try and solve it with a gun.”

Although violence is rampant in Oakland, some people who live here feel that the city suffers from a bad rap. All big cities have murders, they say, and some small cities, such as Compton, have even higher murder rates than Oakland.

Oakland boasts that it is the most integrated city in the nation, with a population that is 43% black, 28% white, 14% Asian-American and 14% Latino. Most of Oakland’s murders occur in certain pockets of the city, such as West Oakland, where poverty is rampant.

Middle-class and wealthy neighborhoods in the Oakland hills and around Lake Merritt have witnessed relatively few killings.

“Oakland has such a bad reputation in most people’s minds,” said Jackie Brown, an Oakland resident and a Stanford University graduate student who works part time as a secretary. “Part of the problem is that Oakland is perceived as a black city. The connotations that are put on the area often are just plain racist. I don’t live in a war zone. I live in a perfectly nice neighborhood.”

Nevertheless, the wave of murders has swamped the city’s 10-member homicide squad, bringing long hours and sleepless nights. During one recent 72-hour period, Detective Dan Voznik said he got six hours’ sleep and picked up five new cases to investigate. Last week, four new detectives were assigned to the homicide department.

“There’s been a constant caseload coming in,” Voznik said. “But we can’t have an impact in slowing down a lot of the crime. It starts with the family, it starts with the home, it starts with the school. We just deal with the outflow.”