This story is part of a collaboration between The Oaklandside and the Emmy-nominated “Brief but Spectacular” interview series that airs weekly on PBS NewsHour.
Long before Holly Joshi led Oakland’s Department of Violence Prevention, and before she patrolled the streets as a police officer, she learned there were two different ways to experience life in her hometown.
There was the Oakland that could offer stability through employment, education, and mentorship, along with the chance to imagine a future beyond the circumstances into which one was born. And then there was life without these advantages, a tougher existence focused on survival.
Joshi experienced both growing up.
“There were a lot of moving pieces to my childhood,” she said in a recent interview.
These different worlds shaped her family’s history. Her grandparents on her father’s side arrived in Oakland in 1949, part of the Great Migration of Black Americans fleeing the Jim Crow South. Her grandfather, a member of the U.S. Navy, was stationed at the now-shuttered Alameda Naval Air Station. At the time, Joshi said, Alameda was considered a “sundown town.” Black people were tolerated on the naval base, but when her grandfather tried to purchase a home in Alameda’s leafy suburban neighborhoods, they were denied because of their race.
Her grandparents eventually settled in deep East Oakland on Pippin Street. Joshi’s grandmother went to cosmetology school at night while she raised the children. She later opened International House of Coiffures, a beauty salon in Southwest Berkeley.
Joshi’s mother and father met as teens. Her mother was white and from the Midwest. They had Joshi when they were 19, but they separated when she was still very young, and she was raised between multiple households as her parents navigated their own lives.
Her mother struggled with addiction during the crack cocaine epidemic and the war on drugs in the 1980s. She cycled in and out of jail and halfway houses.
“I loved both my parents very much, but they were very different,” Joshi said. “I felt like I was exposed to a lot of balance. I saw the world from multiple perspectives.”
Her father eventually became an Oakland police officer. The job brought stability and opportunities that had once seemed out of reach.
“He was taking me skiing in Tahoe and all kinds of things my family had never experienced before,” she said.
Her grandmother, who had picked cotton and cleaned houses as a child in the South, had a sixth-grade education. Both her parents had high school educations. With the help of family and mentors, Joshi became the first person in her family to go to college.
The things Joshi learned early in life — the two worlds one might grow up in purely by chance, one stable and advantaged, the other at a disadvantage — would come back to her later in life, informing major decisions about her career. Eventually, these insights would merge with her work as the leader of Oakland’s innovative Department of Violence Prevention, subtly informing the philosophical shift she’s helping lead around the city’s public safety strategies.
Created in 2017, Oakland’s DVP is working to reduce gun violence and gender-based violence by taking a public health-informed approach. The department provides intensive life coaching and other services to people at the highest risk of shooting someone or being shot. The work is not in opposition to the police; rather, it views the problem of violence differently, looking far “upstream” at the root causes of crime, tangled as they are in systemic racism, segregation, trauma, poverty, and other social forces.
What Oakland and a few dozen similar agencies across the U.S., most of them founded just in the past decade, are trying to do is shift thinking and resources around public safety.
Joshi’s career path, from policing to prevention, reflects this change.
Policing as a pathway to stability
Joshi didn’t set out to become a police officer.
She had her first child in 1999 and became a single mom the following year. In 2001, she was studying criminal justice at Cal State Hayward — now Cal State East Bay — and planned to go to law school to become a lawyer.
Police departments throughout the Bay Area were recruiting heavily on college campuses. Joshi was already familiar with policing through her father, Rick Hart, who worked for OPD for 28 years, was esteemed by his colleagues there, and had risen to the level of a commander.
“I didn’t think that would be my pathway, but I remembered the stability that it created, and I thought, ‘Let me just try it,’” she said.
Her original plan was to work in law enforcement for five years and save enough money for law school. Her first choice was the San Francisco Police Department, partly because she didn’t want to be seen as benefiting from her father’s position at OPD.
Her dad persuaded her to come to Oakland instead. The department was smaller, he told her, and had more women of color who could serve as mentors. Plus, she already knew the city.
The five-year plan, she said, became 14 years.
Determined to prove herself after graduating from the police academy, she chose to work in Beat 30, OPD’s largest and busiest patrol area, in deep East Oakland. She spent her first two years there before moving through a series of specialized assignments.
Joshi worked in a crime reduction team focused on gangs, guns, drugs, shootings, and homicides. She became an undercover officer and investigator in the VICE/Child Exploitation Unit, which she eventually supervised. She was the public information officer in the chief’s office, and later in internal affairs. By 2013, she rose to chief of staff, becoming the first — and, so far, only woman — to hold that position in OPD’s history.
She learned discipline and organization and developed relationships across the city. But she was also a Black woman in a roughly 200-year-old institution she described as “very white, very male, very not from Oakland” and “very militarized.” (Today, the department is 78% male, with Latino and white officers the two largest racial groups, according to the city.) The department, when she joined it, was just being placed under federal court oversight as the result of a class-action civil rights lawsuit alleging squads of officers had beaten up and planted drugs on over 100 Black men.
Her male colleagues, she said, would often make sexist and racist jokes and microaggressions toward her.
“I was trying to be a police officer in an environment that wasn’t necessarily created for people who looked like me,” Joshi said.
While the job gave her a more intimate view of policing, she also began to see its limitations.
A key insight
Some of Joshi’s most meaningful experiences at OPD centered on combating sex trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children.
Many of the survivors she encountered were Black, Southeast Asian, and Latina girls from Oakland’s flatlands, where poverty and crime had been deeply entrenched for generations. Most were between 11 and 19 years old. The average age of entry into sex trafficking in Oakland was 13, Joshi said.
California law and law enforcement practices at the time treated underage girls being exploited as offenders, not victims. The law had already recognized that a child could not legally consent to sex with an adult, but once money changed hands, that same child could be labeled a “prostitute” and sent to juvenile hall.
Joshi worked to change that, including advocating for legislation that would better recognize the victimization of children and working with nonprofits and survivors of sexual exploitation.
“Through that, I started to see my strengths and passions differently,” she said.
Joshi recalled a turning point during her time as an investigator, when she interviewed a young pimp right after interviewing his teenage victim. The girl, who had been trafficked on International Boulevard, had a history of sexual and physical abuse, neglect, and involvement with the foster care system. When she interviewed the 19-year-old exploiter, Joshi noticed his childhood hardships were very similar to the girl’s.
“In that moment, it hit me that the victim’s story and the suspect’s story are often the same,” Joshi said. “I realized this is a gendered response to trauma.”
Whenever she donned her badge and uniform, Joshi’s goals were to seek justice for victims and improve public safety. But she began to question whether she needed to pursue those goals from inside a system whose primary tools were punitive and applied after the fact.
“By the time I’m working with people, whether they’re a victim or they’ve committed a crime, every other system has already failed them,” she said.
She decided it was time for her to pivot out of policing and move upstream. That meant she’d work with the same population — low-income communities, people struggling with mental health issues, and people lacking access to support systems — but would use a different, more proactive approach.
“The police only have a couple of tools, which are investigation and arrest. But for the vast majority of people I was coming in contact with, me showing up on the scene in my arrest capacity was usually the least of their needs,” she said.
While still working at OPD, she returned to school for a master’s degree in leadership for social justice from Saint Mary’s College. In 2015, three months before her graduation, she left the force.
Building what she wished existed
Joshi moved on to community-based organizations focusing on violence prevention and the systems surrounding people most at risk. She became the executive director of MISSSEY, an Oakland nonprofit primarily serving girls and women of color impacted by commercial sexual exploitation. She also worked for Bright Research Group, where she was a research consultant on criminal justice systems, gender-based violence prevention, and other issues. She eventually earned a doctorate in educational leadership from Saint Mary’s in 2022.
She viewed these experiences as an extension of the work she’d been doing as a police officer, with her ultimate goal being to build a career that allowed her to give back to the community.
“Oakland, in the trajectory of my family’s story, represents the promised land because we were fleeing racial terror,” she said. “My grandma used to always say, ‘Public service is the rent you need to pay for being alive.’”
In late 2023, Joshi was appointed head of the city’s Department of Violence Prevention. During its first year of existence, Oakland’s DVP had just a few staff and a budget of $246,000. But city leaders had already embraced a goal of slowly but profoundly changing Oakland’s approach to public safety. By 2023, the DVP’s budget had grown to $28 million.
As part of its flagship Ceasefire-Lifeline strategy, the DVP receives intel each week from OPD identifying the community members at the highest risk of being involved in gun violence. (At any given time in the city, around 350 people are most at risk of being a victim or a suspect in a shooting, according to Joshi.) The DVP then directly reaches out to those individuals and works with community-based organizations to offer them services to quit the cycle of violence. That support could look like relocation, employment, therapy, substance abuse treatment, or intensive case management.
Community members call violence interrupters — often people with lived experiences in gangs and the criminal legal system — before a tense situation escalates into a potentially deadly one. These credible messengers respond after shootings and homicides to try to prevent retaliation. Violent interrupters also proactively mediate conflicts through their relationships across Oakland.
The DVP’s intensive case managers, also called “life coaches,” meet with clients multiple times a week, accompany them to court, help them navigate probation and parole, connect them with jobs and housing, and provide mentorship and therapeutic support. The department currently has 15 life coaches, who can collectively serve up to 150 people.
Public safety, Joshi said, cannot belong to the police alone. It requires a web of city departments and community groups, each with a different role. She believes police, prosecutors, and courts still have a role in the public safety ecosystem. But so do violence interrupters, street outreach workers, life coaches, workforce development programs, and organizations that can help people secure housing, employment, and mental health support.
Joshi said that’s not a rejection of policing but rather an expansion of the public safety toolbox.
“We know the credible messenger model works,” she said.
Studies of Oakland’s changing public safety system lend support to the view that recent reductions in violent crime are due in part to the city’s Ceasefire strategy. One study from 2019 found Ceasefire was responsible for a 31.5% decline in gun homicides in Oakland.
Separately, some studies of community-based violence prevention services have found mixed results. A recent study found adults participating in life coaching sessions through community organizations were less likely to be arrested, but the same was not true for youth in the same program. (Participants in those life coaching programs were not identified through the city’s Ceasefire-Lifeline strategy, according to Joshi.)
The Oakland she wants to see
Joshi does not think Oakland has solved its problems. Community violence intervention, the type of work the DVP does, is still a relatively young field. And some of the programs Oakland is developing are still pilots. The city needs to evaluate them, adjust them, and figure out what works best.
One example is a workforce development program the DVP is piloting with the Oakland Private Industry Council.
The program, Joshi said, is designed for people who may still be involved in gangs or groups. Simply sending them into an existing workforce program can fail, as the locations may be in a current or former gang member’s enemy territory. Participants may encounter people with whom they have unresolved conflicts. And they may not feel prepared for the expectations of a traditional workplace.
As part of the pilot, about 15 participants and their life coaches meet in a neutral location in downtown Oakland for 16 weeks. Transportation is provided when necessary, and participants receive meals and $1,000 a month.
The curriculum covers practical skills many people take for granted — resumes, workplace interactions, and professional expectations — and asks participants to think about who they are and what they want their lives to look like.
“By the end of 16 weeks, we want them to be ready and have made a decision on what they want to do,” Joshi said. “Do you want to go to truck driving school? Do you want to learn how to paint? Do you want to learn how to do construction at Cypress Mandela?”
The goal isn’t necessarily to get them into their dream career immediately, but to help them envision a path toward it, while giving them enough stability to steer clear of the survival strategies that may have sustained them up to that point.
“Prison and the streets are all about survival,” Joshi said. “A lot of our participants don’t see themselves as working professionals. No one’s ever told them they could be one, and they’ve never imagined it for themselves.”
The next step, Joshi believes, is scaling those approaches. In addition to city funding, the DVP also relies on grants and philanthropic support, including from Kaiser Permanente, Congresswoman Lateefah Simon’s office, and Alameda County.
While the DVP’s funding is “piecemeal,” Joshi said, the resources it offers better align with what she believes will lead to better public safety outcomes.
“The DVP feels more expansive in terms of the creativity we can apply to support people on their journey to safety and health,” she said.
A public safety system without silos
Throughout her life, Joshi has witnessed the evolution of Oakland’s approach to public safety.
Growing up with a mother who struggled with addiction and incarceration, she saw how police and the criminal legal system prioritized accountability over support. She’d wondered what a comprehensive approach to public safety would look like but hadn’t heard of community violence intervention work or life coaching.
“I gravitated towards the Oakland Police Department trying to create safety in the community, and I thought that was the only option in Oakland,” she said.
The city’s public safety infrastructure now includes OPD, the DVP, the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office, the non-police crisis team MACRO, and an extensive network of community-based organizations. Joshi said Oakland’s current public safety planning also intentionally brings agencies together around violence reduction rather than treating each department as an isolated entity. She sees Mayor Barbara Lee’s office as part of that change, saying Lee has helped break down some of the traditional silos between departments.
“It has absolutely transformed Oakland’s public safety outcomes, and it shows through the numbers,” she said.
OPD’s latest weekly crime data shows violent crime — including homicides, assaults, rapes, and robberies — is down 18% year-to-date compared with the same time last year. Shootings are also down 39% citywide.
Since the start of the year, 189 people in Oakland have received life coaching services from the DVP, according to the DVP’s focused deterrence data dashboard.
Joshi acknowledged that there’s still work to be done. The city has lost 40 people to homicide this year, and many residents still don’t feel safe.
“We’re not winning yet,” she said, “but it’s been a game-changer to apply the public safety tools appropriately and to have leadership that understands everybody’s role.”
Source: oaklandside.org
