Smart piece today in the Bay Citizen by Trey Bundy on how the YouTube videos of the shooting of Kenneth Harding in the Bayview on July 16 have created trauma of their own.

“They are upset that it was the police, but for a lot of kids what came up is that people are dying a lot, and not just from police officers,” said Dr. Aliya Sheriff, a psychologist at the 3rd Street Youth Center and Clinic in the Bayview. “It’s retriggering and retraumatizing a lot of youth who have lost family members before. There’s a feeling of hopelessness.”

The impact of retriggering and retraumatizing young residents is increasingly thought to be at the root of many physical conditions.

Earlier this year, the New Yorker did a fascinating piece on how early trauma can create learning disabilities and disease, focused on Dr. Nadine Burke’s research and the Bayview Child Health Center. Increasingly, research is showing that the trauma of violence can cause long-lasting changes in both brain and body.

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Founder/Executive Editor. I’ve been a Mission resident since 1998 and a professor emeritus at Berkeley’s J-school since 2019 when I retired. I got my start in newspapers at the Albuquerque Tribune in the city where I was born and raised. Like many local news outlets, The Tribune no longer exists. I left daily newspapers after working at The New York Times for the business, foreign and city desks. Lucky for all of us, it is still there.

As an old friend once pointed out, local has long been in my bones. My Master’s Project at Columbia, later published in New York Magazine, was on New York City’s experiment in community boards.

Right now I'm trying to figure out how you make that long-held interest in local news sustainable. The answer continues to elude me.

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