On a balmy summer evening in upscale Rockridge, as the postwork crowd fills café tables on College Avenue, about 75 people pack the public library, sweating a little below the oscillating fans. Young and old, tattooed and tie-dyed, a mix of races—all have come to discuss crime in their neighborhood. They listen to presentations on home security systems, forming citizens’ walking patrols, and organizing neighborhood watch groups. At one point, there’s a collective gasp when a teenager in baggy jeans and a bright red cap dashes into the room, snatches a leather satchel from the back counter, and disappears down the steps. Could that really just have happened? But soon it dawns on everyone that it was only a test—to see how well they could describe the “thief.”

Neighborhood crime meetings have been going on here for years, but these days, they have new urgency: violent crime in Rockridge has almost doubled this year. Criminals have robbed people on their way to BART, broken into their homes, held guns to their heads, and mugged them in broad daylight.

Of course, the terror doesn’t remotely compare to what’s been taking place—and always has—in West and East Oakland, where all but a smattering of last year’s near-record 148 murders occurred. The flatlands might well be one of the most dangerous places in America to be a young black man: 70 percent of last year’s murder victims were African American; and nearly half of all victims were age 24 or under. Here in the city’s traditional killing fields, the violence grinds on in its awful, inexorable way, seemingly immune to any triage measures the city’s leaders throw at it.

But what hasn’t grabbed headlines until recently is that many of Oakland’s more affluent neighborhoods are also suffering. Residents don’t live in daily fear of a stray bullet, but their sense of safety—for themselves and their kids—has been threatened. By the end of July of this year, the number of violent robberies and assaults in Glenview had gone to 26 from 16 in the same seven-month stretch of ’06; sleepy Montclair, way up in the hills, had almost as many burglaries (33) in one 90-day period this year as it had during all of last year. After a surge in armed robberies and assaults in the Grand Lake district, residents even invited the Guardian Angels to town. You could see them patrolling Lakeshore Avenue this summer in their red berets. Blink hard: if you didn’t know better, you’d think it was the early 1990s, when the crack epidemic raged.

No one really knows why crime is up this year in Oakland—or in the rest of the country either—but it’s easy to see why the city can’t cope. For one, it just doesn’t have enough cops: proportionally, Oakland has half as many officers as New York City, and a third less than Washington, D.C. To make up for the deficit, police have been swarming “hot spots”—in East Oakland, for example—and, in the process, leaving lower-crime areas virtually unprotected. It amounts to a citywide game of Whack-a-Mole and helps explain why a place like Rockridge feels vulnerable. Susan Montauk, who chairs the area’s neighborhood crime prevention council, explains, “As the cops put it to me, ‘You think the criminals don’t talk to each other? They know where to find the easier targets.’”

Police Chief Wayne Tucker and Mayor Ron Dellums are scrambling to get more officers on the streets and have a plan to divide the city into three districts, each with a captain who will know a defined area intimately. And, true to his lefty roots, Dellums is committed to tackling the underlying causes of crime: the lack of jobs, the poor public schools. He is looking to hire a crime czar, a first-ever position in Oakland that would oversee the city’s often fractured crime prevention efforts. And he wants to fully implement community policing: instead of riding around in patrol cars waiting for the next call, cops would be integrated into the neighborhoods they serve, walking beats and talking to residents, working with them to deter crime.

Most of these efforts will take years to show results. In the meantime, citizens from Ghost Town to Grand Lake are stepping into the breach with neighborhood crime-watch groups. Toward the end of a recent meeting in upper Fruitvale, a shaggy-haired man in shorts and a T-shirt stands up to talk. He lives in a nearby East Oakland neighborhood plagued by drug dealing, graffiti, and theft, but he has a hopeful story. He and other locals got together, he says, and took back his neighborhood’s main drag from the drug posses and stick-up kids that had ruled it for years. Some watched the streets and noted license plates, some called the cops every time they spotted something suspicious, and some took surreptitious photos of the perps. “We kicked butt, and we’re winning,” he says, beaming. “And there’s no way we’re giving it back.”

Every summer, the city holds National Night Out, in which citizens throw similar anticrime block parties aimed at building neighborhood cohesion. Just a few years ago, there were 35 gatherings; this year, there were 315. As Don Link, chairman of the city’s Community Policing Advisory Board, puts it: once an effective neighborhood group gets up and running, “you can watch the crime rates go down.”