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Stanford volunteers in East Palo Alto |
Forty-two people shot dead in one year and all within two miles of Stanford. That was East Palo Alto in 1992.
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TURNAROUND: Former Stanford administrator William Webster says the streets are safer today.
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But since then, William Webster, a 23-year resident, has witnessed a dramatic turnaround. Neighbors now chat on streets where gun battles regularly erupted, and children play once more on corners that belonged to drug dealers. "During the day, it's perfectly safe," says Webster, who works as an administrator in Stanford's department of aeronautics and astronautics. "There's no more problem than walking through a suburban area of Palo Alto."
Webster would never have made that claim in the early 1990s. In those days, gunfire was so common that some residents slept in their bathtubs as stray bullets whistled past their windows. On New Year's Eve, police officers would cower in squad cars under freeway bridges while revelers went on shooting sprees. By 1992, the small city of 24,000 had gained notoriety as the "murder capital of the United States." Recalls Webster: "Every night as I drove home, I used to wonder if I'd make it in one piece."
At the root of the crime problem was a combination of poverty, drugs and inadequate policing. East Palo Alto had become a kind of drive-through drug store for the Bay Area, with as many as 80 percent of the buyers coming in from surrounding towns. Only one in five East Palo Alto pupils graduates from high school and 17 percent of households live below the poverty line. The city has the highest unemployment rate in San Mateo County. No wonder teen-agers were easily lured into the lucrative crack cocaine trade.
When the drug feuds and gang violence reached their peak in 1992, the media swooped in. The story was all the more compelling for its proximity to Silicon Valley and one of the wealthiest university communities in the country.
In the years that followed, homicides dropped precipitously |
